In search of legitimacy: conflicting logics and identities of management consultants in public administration
基于43个半结构化访谈，研究了公共行政中管理顾问的身份工作，发现四种社会身份，其中仅一种符合文献中对公共部门管理顾问的常见描述。
Management consultants are often hidden and therefore understudied actors in public administration. Building on institutional and social identity theory, we investigate consultants’ identity work in search of legitimacy as knowledge providers in the public sector. We substantiate our theoretical reasoning with 43 semi-structured interviews with consultants and clients and extract four social identities of consultants, only one of which complies with what the literature commonly considers a management consultant in the public sector. Our study extracts new patterns of identity work and shows how they help actors in need of legitimacy to cope with the institutional complexity of public administration.