Human Relations [0018-7267(200107)54:7] Volume 54(7): 933953: 017840 Copyright 2001 The Tavistock Institute SAGE Publications London,

n, Thousand Oaks CA, New Delhi

Colonizing knowledge: Commodication as a dynamic of jurisdictional expansion in professional service rms

Roy Suddaby and Royston Greenwood

A B S T R AC T

This paper provides a eld level analysis of the process by which management knowledge is produced. Two linked dynamics are identied as important components of this process. The rst is the commodication of management knowledge, or the tendency to reduce knowledge to a routinized and codied product. We argue that the commodication of management knowledge is a cyclical process that has been institutionalized by the interests of distinct categories of social actors. The second dynamic, termed colonization, refers to the migration of Big Five professional service rms into adjacent professional jurisdictions. Colonization is the result of intensication of commodication and has produced intense conict and change in the organizational eld of management knowledge production.

KEYWORDS

knowledge management organizational elds professional service rms (PSFs)

1. Introduction
Increasing attention is being focused on the importance of knowledge within organizations (Brown & Duguid, 1998; Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995). Particular attention is being given to professional service rms (PSFs), such as law, accounting and management consulting rms, which are seen, not only as prototypes of knowledge intensive organizations (Peters, 1992) but, also
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as substantial contributors, in their own right, to our collective store of management knowledge (Furusten, 1995; Guillen, 1994). Although considerable study has been devoted to understanding the internal dynamics of managerial knowledge production within these rms (Moore & Birkinshaw, 1998), scant attention has been paid to the overall system of production of management knowledge in society generally. The absence of theoretical or empirical examination is surprising, given the dramatic growth in consumption and popularity of management knowledge. The global management consulting industry, for example, has been growing more than twice as fast as the world economy for the past decade and, in 2000, will exceed more than US$100 billion in annual revenues (Consultants News, 1999). Large consulting and business advisory rms are among the fastest growing organizations globally (Kennedy Research Group, 1997). These rms also enjoy an unprecedented degree of inuence over other business organizations and have been described as forming a new global elite in political and economic inuence (The Economist, 1997). The production and consumption of management knowledge involves complex interactions between sets or communities of organizational actors. These interactions dene not only what management knowledge is but also how it is produced, legitimated, distributed and, ultimately, consumed. Explicating the roles of actors engaged in the process of management knowledge production is an important step towards answering the questions: What is management knowledge? What are the social processes by which management knowledge is constructed? and Which institutions in society claim the jurisdiction of knowledge production? This article will document the structure of the eld of management knowledge production. It explicitly adopts a broader and more dynamic analytical framework than has been traditionally applied. We use the organizational eld as our primary unit of analysis (Scott, 1995). Dened as communities of organizations that, in the aggregate, constitute a recognized area of institutional life: key suppliers, resource and product consumers, regulatory agencies and other organizations that produce similar services or products (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983: 143), organizational elds occupy a level of analysis that is both broader and more interactive than traditional notions such as industry or market sector. Our analysis of the organizational eld of management knowledge suggests two linked processes by which the social construction of management knowledge occurs. The rst, knowledge commodication, describes the process by which managerial knowledge is abstracted from context and reduced to a transparent and generic format that can be more easily leveraged within PSFs and sold in the market place. Commodication occurs as

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managerial knowledge products move cyclically between communities of actors within the organizational eld. Our observation of the process suggests that the cycle of commodication is intensifying and, increasingly, becoming internalized within the connes of large, conglomerate PSFs such as the Big Five accounting rms. The second process, knowledge colonization, describes the struggle by large conglomerate PSFs to expand the scale and scope of their managerial knowledge products. Inevitably, such expansion requires these organizations to migrate into new knowledge territories. Colonization is a natural consequence of knowledge commodication, which makes proprietary managerial products both transparent and imitable and thus subject to intensifying competition. Colonization involves the legitimation of specic social actors as the appropriate sources of management knowledge and the de-legitimation of others. Colonization generates jurisdictional disputes between professional communities and, although such disputes are not a new phenomenon (Abbott, 1988), colonization efforts appear to emphasize competition at the organizational level rather than the level of the profession and have, consequently, raised the signicance of conglomerate PSFs such as the Big Five in inter-jurisdictional disputes. Describing these two processes aids understanding of a series of issues about the nature of management knowledge production and consumption. First, it provides an analytical framework for understanding the rapid growth of management knowledge products and the rms that produce them. Second, it provides a theoretical basis for the increasing presentation of management knowledge as a reied property in contemporary discourse. Finally, it provides an opportunity for critical reection on the role of specic social actors in the process of production and consumption of management knowledge. We illustrate the processes of commodication and colonization with examples drawn from the eld of professional business services, which includes management consulting rms, Big Five accounting rms, universities, management gurus and consumers. In the following sections we describe the structure of the organizational eld within which management knowledge is socially constructed. We elaborate the concept of commodication and describe the cycle of knowledge production, a recurring pattern of creation, legitimation and consumption of management knowledge. In subsequent sections we argue that the rate of commodication is intensifying, speculate on its cause and discuss implications. In the nal section we describe colonization and discuss the intense institutional conict and change that necessarily accompanies the jurisdictional expansion of select organizations into new knowledge spaces.

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2. The organizational eld of management knowledge production

Following Hirsch (1972), our frame of reference is the organizational eld of management knowledge production, comprising all the organizations engaged in the process of developing and ltering new managerial products as well as the more technical subsystems of application and consumption of those products. Our primary focus is on the knowledge product itself and how the interactions between actors in the eld shape and inuence normative and cognitive perceptions of the managerial practices from production to consumption. The organizational eld of management knowledge production can be depicted as consisting of distinct organizational groups or sets (Evan, 1966; Hirsch, 1972). Micklethwait and Wooldridge (1997) identify three such groups; business schools, management consulting rms and management gurus. To these should be added large conglomerate PSFs and consumers. These organizational groups, although relatively distinct, are not impermeable and overlap between them occurs. Still, the organizational groups form a partial social system of mutual dependence that, collectively, provides an array of resources essential to the production of management knowledge. The traditional role of each category of actor is described in the balance of this section. The roles described are neither exclusive nor static. That is, the descriptions are idealized roles of categories of actors that have changed over time and often become conated.

Business schools
Business schools serve three traditional functions. First, and perhaps most importantly, they provide a quality control function for managerial knowledge currently in use. Academic research follows, rather than leads, the use of managerial practices in the workplace (Barley et al., 1988; Strang, 1997). This may be explained by the reective nature of much academic research that is devoted to testing the validity and reliability of managerial concepts in use. Business schools, in this sense, provide a forum for sober second thought, where managerial knowledge is evaluated and rened. We term this function due diligence. Studies of the validity of practices and ideas inevitably produce suggestions for improvement. The process of trying to understand extant knowledge produces new insights that form the basis for new managerial fads.

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Business schools, therefore, may become important sources of new managerial knowledge. We term this process research-led innovation. These two functions represent an ideal type for academics in the process of management knowledge production, a role that some critics suggest has never been fully achieved because academic research has been overly detached from the business community (Pearce, 1999; Pelton, 1996). Moreover, the assumption that academic research actually leads to improving business practice is highly contested (Pearce, 1999; Porter, 1997). Notwithstanding these concerns, the idealized role of academics has substantial grounding in observed experience. Responding in 1998 to the growing threat of corporate universities, for example, the then President of the Academy of Management afrmed the traditional role of business academics in generating new managerial knowledge: It is the rare manager or rm that creates knowledge about management, and it is even rarer for a consultant to create knowledge (although some most assuredly do). Thus, [business schools] potential value-added contribution over time may well be the creation of knowledge. As a result, effective basic and applied research may be our longterm competitive advantage. (Hitt, 1998: 218) A variety of pressures on academic research threaten business schools. Foremost are signicant commercial pressures on researchers to participate directly in the marketplace by commodifying academic research (Wilmott, 1995). A related form of pressure arises from the diminishing boundaries between business schools and other actors in the organizational eld. Clients (i.e. executives) and consultants are, increasingly, establishing a presence in academia by collaborating with various business schools (Haynes, 1998). The result may well diminish the traditional role of testing, validating and rening extant managerial knowledge. These observed pressures are, in fact, consistent with the themes of this article; that commodication of managerial knowledge is producing colonization of universities by large conglomerate PSFs. Business schools play an important third role in the management knowledge commodication process. By educating and accrediting an ongoing stream of management students, they generate the foundation for consumption of managerial knowledge products. Business education produces a common language, shared analytical tools and unied values or assumptions. Business schools, therefore, provide the cognitive foundation for the legitimacy of extant management knowledge and the ongoing need to continually update it.

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Gurus
Gurus serve the primary function of translating managerial knowledge between communities in the eld (Clark & Salaman, 1998; Huczynski, 1993). They abstract theoretical concepts generated in the academic community and convert them to a generic form. They also draw on, and generalize, the experience and practices of the consulting community and consumers of management consulting services. Gurus, therefore, typically straddle boundaries within the organizational eld, originating in either business schools (Michael Porter, Henry Mintzberg) or consulting (Tom Peters, Robert Waterman, Peter Drucker). Gurus not only make ideas accessible, they serve the important function of legitimation. Legitimation involves gaining normative acceptance. This is achieved by translating specic managerial practices into the popular business press, presenting these ideas in organizations or at conferences and promoting them through their own consulting work. Gurus may be distinguished from pure consultants or academics by their individual reputation, which exceeds that of any organization with which they might be associated.

Consultants
Consultants convert managerial knowledge into useable and saleable form. This is accomplished through a variety of methods, each of which contributes to an overall process of commodication. Commodication involves the conversion of localized, experiential and highly contingent managerial knowledge into a reied, commercially valuable form presented as objective, ahistorical and having universal principles. To accomplish this, management knowledge that originates from academic theory or from industry or consumer experience must be codied, abstracted and translated. Codication requires converting individual experience into something that can be stored, moved and reused. It has been described as a people to documents approach whereby experience is extracted from the person who developed it, made independent of that person, and reused for various purposes (Hansen et al., 1999). The ultimate goal of codication is to convert the project experience of consultants into a form that can benet other consultants. Often this involves storing such information in a computer database that can be accessed by others (Gibbins & Wright, 1999). Abstraction is the process by which the raw information presented by codication is converted into a more portable and universal form. It requires the synthesis of codied experience into relatively simplistic templates or icons that can be easily understood and implemented by junior consultants.

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Converting management knowledge into a routinized checklist or an easily recognizable template, such as the strategic grid of the Boston Consulting Group, the McKinsey 7-S framework or the Five-Forces template of Monitor Consulting Group, makes subsequent re-application of such knowledge by junior consultants more acceptable to clients. It provides a veneer of objectivity and universality to management knowledge, making it generalizable to a variety of local contexts or cultures. Abstract icons are also more saleable because they provide a convenient summary that clients can easily remember and use (McKenna, 1999). Abstracting managerial knowledge to a template or icon also makes it more portable, allowing it to move easily amongst consultants and between a variety of clients. Translation involves the re-application of codied and abstracted knowledge into a variety of different organizational contexts. It implies the physical movement of ideas from a local context to global space (Czarniawska & Joerges, 1996). It also includes an element of semantic movement or subtle shift in meaning as the original knowledge product is disembedded from its original context, abstracted into iconic form and reembedded in another, somewhat different organizational context (Furusten, 1995; Guillen, 1998).

Conglomerate professional service rms (the Big Five):

Very large PSFs, exemplied by the Big Five accounting rms (Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Ernst & Young, Deloitte Touche, Arthur Andersen and KPMG), are an emerging signicant organizational community in the management knowledge industry. Big Five rms are growing rapidly, both in scale and in the scope of professional services they offer. Two decades of merger activity have produced an elite grouping of rms that control nearly 90 percent of the global audit market (CIFAR, 1995) and 20 percent of the global consulting market (Kennedy Research Group, 1997). Their rapid growth and diversication of function serves to distinguish them from other, more specialized or pure consulting rms such as McKinsey or Boston Consulting Group. The Big Five, moreover, appear to be internalizing many of the functions of the eld of management knowledge production inside individual organizations. Each of these observations will be elaborated in sections 5 and 6.

Consumers
Consumers represent a poorly understood component of the organizational eld. There is clearly a strong, and growing demand amongst consumers for

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management knowledge products. Yet there is an obvious scepticism of the validity and quality of the product they consume (Kieser, 1998). A variety of explanations have been offered for the simultaneous growth of consumer demand and consumer scepticism. Perhaps the most popular is the notion that the consumption of managerial consulting services is a consequence of technical or aesthetic fashion (Abrahamson, 1996). Consumption occurs regardless of improvements to technical efciency because actors in the organizational eld (management consultants, gurus, business schools) provide a collective legitimating discourse that makes consumption not only normatively acceptable, but rational and mandatory (Rovik, 1996). Although the notion of fads and fashions provides some conceptual basis for understanding the phenomenal growth of the management consulting industry, it fails to account for the increasing decoupling of consumption and utility. That is, it does not provide a detailed understanding of the mechanics by which the detachment of technical and aesthetic value occurs, nor does it provide a description of the process by which certain actors, and their managerial knowledge products become legitimated. These issues are addressed, in some detail, in the discussion of knowledge commodication which follows.

3. The cycle of management knowledge production and consumption

Each of these communities of actors (business schools, gurus, consultants, the Big Five PSFs and consumers) plays a critical role in the ongoing production and consumption of management knowledge. Their ongoing interactions form a social set through which managerial discourse circulates, and from which ideas are shaped into concrete practices with commercial properties and value. Boundaries between the groups are not nite and individuals often move freely from one group to the other. Management knowledge has a life cycle. As new managerial practices emerge from the eld, they are rened by the academic community, abstracted and legitimated by gurus and commodied by consultants. The act of commodication makes the knowledge product imitable which, in turn, intensies competition and stimulates demand for new management knowledge products. This creates a cycle of knowledge production and consumption that both stimulates and feeds consumer demand (see Figure 1). It is difcult, and perhaps deceptive, to ascribe distinct and sequential stages to the process of management knowledge production. The events most likely occur contemporaneously. For expository purposes, however, it is

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Due Diligence and innovation

primary actors: business schools primary function: testing and refining extant knowledge secondary function: innovation and generation of new managerial knowledge tertiary function: socialization of consumers

Colonization
primary actors: Big Five professional service firms primary function: extending commodified managerial knowledge to new disciplines primary mechanism: professional encroachment through product diversification

Legitimation
primary actors: 'gurus' primary function: abstracting

CONSUMERS

theoretical knowledge for applications and translating it to other communities secondary function: popularizing management knowledge

Commodification
primary actors: large consulting firms primary function: converting abstract knowledge into a salable product primary mechanisms: 1. codification 2. abstraction 3. translation

Figure 1

The cycle of knowledge production and consumption

useful to think of the movement of discourse about a given managerial knowledge product as occurring in four stages, each of which primarily involves the contribution of one of the actor-groups discussed above. Barley et al. (1988) suggest that discourse around new managerial knowledge occurs rst amongst practitioners and, over time, moves into the business schools. Similarly, Strang (1997) observed a distinct sequence of movement, in the diffusion of Quality Circles, from the popular business press, to consultants and nally to business schools: Journalists are especially prominent in 197781, appearing as 9 of the 16 authors located in this period. Consultants appear more frequently in the peak year of 1982. But in both periods, academics are hardly present at all (two in 197781, none in 1982). The situation reverses

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in 1987 and 19923. 32 authors or 72% of the sample during these periods note professorial appointments in colleges and universities. (p. 18) This analysis suggests that an appropriate starting point for the cycle of knowledge production and consumption is when gurus appropriate a new managerial practice or idea and disseminate it through the popular business press. We term this rst stage the legitimation phase. An important aspect of legitimation is the act of converting new ideas or managerial practices into language that can be understood by a wider audience. Gurus disseminate these ideas to a wider audience by virtue of their public prole and through venues designed to access a mass audience, such as popular books, television and other media appearances and through corporate and academic seminars. During the second phase of the cycle of knowledge production and consumption, management knowledge is converted to a product. This occurs through codifying, abstracting and translating managerial practices. This process takes place primarily within consulting rms, particularly large consulting rms where there are economic advantages in the mass-customization of knowledge products. The ultimate goal of this stage is to routinize management knowledge by converting esoteric professional expertise into procedures, manuals or checklists that can be administered by relatively inexperienced junior consultants (Hansen et al., 1999) and sold, with minor modication, to a variety of corporate consumers. Converting managerial knowledge into products provides several competitive advantages to consulting rms. Foremost, it allows such rms to leverage their knowledge product. Leverage refers to the practice of hiring a large number of junior professionals at a lower cost than the revenue they generate (Maister, 1993). Converting managerial knowledge into routines, templates or checklists increases a consulting rms capacity to leverage because the management practice becomes more transparent and more easily understood and implemented by junior professionals who lack signicant client experience. Codifying, abstracting and translating knowledge also makes the managerial practice more portable. A routinized checklist and accompanying template can be readily moved within the organization (Davenport & Prusak, 1997) and across national boundaries (Guillen, 1998). It also provides an element of standardization within the organization. Rather than depending on the individual skills and experience of a broad range of professionals, consulting rms can provide a relatively predictable and uniform management practice to its clients. This helps to make the management knowledge product more saleable in that it provides a degree of branding

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for the rm in the global marketplace wherein the rm becomes closely associated with a particular knowledge product (McKenna, 1999). The third stage of the cycle involves the extension of commodied managerial knowledge products into new professional jurisdictions. This is undertaken primarily by the Big Five PSFs who nd economies of scope in transferring commodied managerial practices from one professional jurisdiction to another. Big Five rms, thus, have successfully adapted traditional audit practices to strategic planning in the form of a strategic audit. They similarly have abstracted other practices, such as activity based costing from the relatively narrow connes of nancial accounting to a wide variety of management consulting contexts, such as human resource planning and organizational design. We term this stage of the cycle colonization. Extending commodied management knowledge products to new professional jurisdictions tends to intensify the cycle of management knowledge production for two reasons. First, commodied knowledge is easily imitable by competitors, which tends to increase competition between consulting rms and intensies the demand for new management knowledge products. Second, colonization of neighbouring professional jurisdictions by Big Five rms generates conict (colonization and its implications will be described in detail in the following sections). The nal stage of the cycle is the analysis and renement of existing products. This occurs primarily at business schools where academics scrutinize and test extant managerial knowledge and practices. It can also occur, however, in other parts of the eld, as when, for example, clients adapt generic managerial products to accommodate unique or local situations (Rovik, 1996) or when consultant-gurus provide best-practice critiques of managerial concepts in use (Peters & Waterman, 1982). In performing this activity, business academics, gurus and clients provide a form of due diligence by ensuring that knowledge claims made by others are accurate. An important outcome is the innovation or creation of new managerial knowledge that, in turn, becomes popularized, legitimated and ultimately commodied. The need for new knowledge products serves as an engine of change: the cycle begins anew.

4. Implications of commodication
Applying the notion of commodication to the eld of management knowledge production yields several useful insights. First, it offers some explanation for the increased decoupling of technical and aesthetic value of management consulting products. Marxs notion of commodity fetishism

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distinguished between producing goods and services for their technical use or producing a commodity, an object which only has exchange value in a market economy (Caplan, 1989; Goldman & Wilson, 1983; Nelsen & Barley, 1997). Marx theorized that the objects of exchange, the commodity, lose their value as technical objects that can be used by the maker, but become more valuable as objects which can be traded or exchanged in the market. Over time, the commodied products technical use becomes detached from its value as a social object. The loose coupling between use and exchange value provides some explanation for Abrahamsons (1996) observation about the increasing distinction between technical and aesthetic value in the consumption of management consulting services. Management knowledge is valued not only for its contribution to achieving organizational efciency, but also for its ability to enhance careers, give status or to consolidate actors positions within the organizational eld. Similarly, the collective acceptance of management knowledge products by other actors in the organizational eld provides a level of taken-for-grantedness of the process and provides the cognitive schema for continued consumption (Greenwood & Hinings, 1993). A second insight offered by applying the notion of commodication to the eld of management knowledge production is in understanding why knowledge, generally, and management knowledge, specically, is increasingly treated as a property in contemporary discourse. A necessary outcome of valuing a good or service more for its exchange value than its use-value is the tendency to reify that good or service. Marx observed that a natural outcome of the tendency of individuals engaged in the process of commodication is to treat their social relations as if they were natural things. Services produced for exchange, thus, become detached from their producers and become objectied. Managerial practices become dis-embedded from their local context and transformed into universal principles of management. As managerial knowledge products become objectied, we become focused on the property characteristics of the outcome of the knowledge production process rather than concerning ourselves with issues about how and why certain types of knowledge are produced. A nal observation is that the process of converting esoteric experience and expertise into routine templates increases the transparency of that knowledge. Commodied knowledge is more easily imitated. Imitability increases competition (Wernerfeldt, 1984). Commodication thus intensies competition (Abbott, 1988). Ultimately, consumers will pay more for a customized knowledge product, administered by professionals, than for an off the rack

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commodity product delivered by inexperienced juniors (Hansen et al., 1999). Commodication, therefore, produces a spiralling need for new ideas and managerial practices that can be commodied and sold.

5. Intensication of the cycle

Commodication leads to hyper-competition. Abbott (1988) illustrates this sequence with reference to the inability of computer programmers to effectively establish control over their knowledge product because of rapid commodication. Within the rst three decades of programming capability, there have been four or ve generations of experts in programming, each one rapidly outmoded by software that made its knowledge a commodity (p. 241). Commodication of the capacity to program intensied competition so much that the cycle-to-market for new programming techniques was reduced from cycles measured in years to cycles measured in weeks. There is considerable evidence that the pace of commodication is quickening (i.e. the contact between players is more frequent) and is becoming more signicant (i.e. more fatal). The time lag between dominant ideas in management consulting is diminishing. Consultants speak about the need to get new consulting strategies to the market quickly, a practice which is viewed as a primary driver of the overall frenzied growth of the management consulting industry (Kennedy Research Group, 1997). The quickening pace of commodication has disturbed the cycle of management knowledge production (as described in Figure 1) in two ways. First, the pressure for new knowledge products has led to jurisdictional migration. In the effort to provide new knowledge products with which to feed the cycle of knowledge production and consumption, and in an effort to extend the commercial utility of existing products, consulting rms, particularly the Big Five, are looking to extend themselves to new professional jurisdictions. We term this process the colonization of knowledge. Second, the same pressure is leading to the internalization of roles previously provided by discrete actors. Thus, firms seek to create, as well as disseminate, managerial knowledge. That is, the Big Five are attempting not only to commodify managerial knowledge products but to commodify the process by which new knowledge is created. Doing so, however, raises the problem of legitimacy: that is, how can these firms legitimate their selfgenerated knowledge? One consequence has been the co-option of university actors and institutions into their domain. We examine each process in turn.

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6. Colonization of knowledge
The ongoing need for new managerial knowledge that results from commodication generates a eld-wide migration of certain actors who seek new intellectual space. The act of commodifying knowledge generates competition for new ideas, new services and new knowledge products, which pushes rms to seek new sources of ideas. It also creates an atmosphere of intense competition in which knowledge producers seek to extend the life cycle of their knowledge products by extending their scope of application. This is the essence of mass customization of services in which well-dened knowledge products form the basis of a product platform that can be used, with minor modications, in new markets (Gilmore & Pine, 1997). Exploiting new markets most often requires an aggressive migration into adjacent professional jurisdictions. Amongst those groups of actors engaged in the cycle of knowledge production, this migration is most apparent with large diversied consulting rms such as the Big Five PSFs. Using the colonization of knowledge as an explicit strategy, these organizations have transformed themselves from accounting rms to consulting rms and, ultimately, to multidisciplinary business service providers. The migration of Big Five rms began with the commodication of audit services. A series of mergers between accounting rms, beginning in the 1960s and culminating in the mid-1990s, produced an elite grouping of the eight (then six and ultimately ve) largest accounting rms in the world (Wooten & Wolk, 1996). The intense concentration of accounting rms produced by these mergers created a mature market for audit services. Competition between rms for audit clients became intense (Stevens, 1991). Audit work became a commodity product (Margheim & Kelly, 1992) with little differentiation between rms or services (Simunic, 1980). The Big Six rms also faced an impending litigation crisis as shareholders of failed corporations sued accounting rms for negligent audits (The Economist, 1992). As audit work became commodied, the Big Six rms turned to other work that offered higher prot and less risk. The most protable was management consultancy and by the end of the 1980s, management consulting had replaced audit and assurance as the most protable source of revenue (Stevens, 1991). Arthur Andersen, a rm that had long recognized the importance of computers and information technology for its future growth, led the move to management advisory services. By 1991, consulting accounted for 43 percent of Andersens total revenue compared with 34 percent for audit (Public Accounting Report, 1992). In 1998 consulting services produced over 70 percent of the rms income (Public Accounting Report, 1999). Collectively, the Big Five dominate the global market for consulting

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services. They occupy the top ve positions in the 50 largest consulting rms and their rate of revenue growth is over twice as fast as established consulting rms such as McKinsey or Booz-Allen & Hamilton (Consultants News, June, 1999). More signicantly, of the total consulting revenue generated by the 50 largest consulting rms, the Big Five (plus Andersen Consulting, which is now split from its parent, Arthur Andersen) earned more than 50 percent. The Big Five are thus dramatically transforming themselves into conglomerate professional services rms, no longer referring to themselves as accountants (Greenwood et al., 1998). They have championed the concept of multidisciplinary practices or MDPs and targeted a broad range of related professional jurisdictions for future colonization. One of the most controversial targets has been the migration of the Big Five into the legal profession. The movement began in Europe several decades ago where rms either acquired existing law rms or developed internal law practices. Today, PricewaterhouseCoopers is the largest law rm in France, Arthur Andersen owns the largest law rm in Spain and each of the Big Five rms has a legal presence in countries whose regulatory regimes permit MDPs (Trebilcock & Csorgo, 1999). In North America the incursion of the Big Five into the legal profession has generated considerable controversy. In Canada, Ernst & Young established a captive law rm in Toronto in 1997 that has, since, grown to house over 200 lawyers (Melnitzer, 1999). Ernst & Young has also established an alliance with a Washington, DC law rm in anticipation of regulatory approval of MDPs by the American Bar Association (Journal of Accountancy, 2000). Other intellectual spaces identied for colonization include advertising, public relations, lobbying and investment banking. The colonization project of the Big Five rms is related to the broader strategy of dominating the eld of management knowledge production. This can only be accomplished by fully internalizing the management knowledge production cycle within the connes of a single organization. As presently constructed, power is diffusely distributed in the organizational eld. That is, no single group or rm has the power or resources to solely determine the success or failure of a given managerial knowledge product. The interdependent nature of structural power in this eld is not surprising, given that management knowledge is a process of social construction and outcomes in the eld are the product of interactions of diverse groups with different and often conicting interests. Internalizing these diverse functions, therefore, can only be accomplished by very large rms, with a global scale of activities. The Big Five rms are characterized by a variety of features consistent with this, including a diffuse internal power structure (Greenwood et al., 1990) and a global scale. But in order to successfully internalize the capacity to validate and

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innovate management knowledge and, perhaps more importantly, to acquire the ability to legitimate that knowledge to consumers and to constituents at the societal level, the Big Five have turned their colonialist efforts to universities.

7. Internalizing the management knowledge industry

The Big Five have been particularly aggressive in their efforts to re-create, inside themselves, the innovation and theorization activities formerly provided by universities. They have employed a variety of strategies to accomplish this internalization. Two of the most prominent are the establishment of knowledge centres and the creation of linked relationships with prominent business schools.

Knowledge centres
Each of the Big Five and nearly all of the largest management-consulting rms have knowledge centres (Moore & Birkinshaw, 1998). These centres consist, primarily, of large databases of experts, consultants with specic industry experience who can be called upon for projects that require their particular experience and skill, or databases of individual experience gained by consultants on assorted projects. The databases can be accessed by other professionals within the rm who can learn indirectly from others prior experience or directly, by contacting an individual with substantial experience in a particular area. Often these knowledge centres mimic aspects of universities, exhibiting a dual commitment to teaching, research and dissemination of results. Arthur D. Little, for example, established its corporate university in 1964. Consultants from the rm teach courses in strategic management, organizational design and change management and graduates of the one year program receive an MSc in Management (Meister, 1998). The program, approved by the American Association of Schools and Colleges of Business (AASCB), has recently formed an alliance with Bostons Babson College and will emphasize its expertise in fostering entrepreneurship in organizations. A similar alliance has been established between PricewaterhouseCoopers and the University of Georgia (King, 1998).

University linkages
Increasingly, knowledge centres draw upon the expertise of prominent academics. Academic gurus, such as Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Jeffery Pfeffer,

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are invited to present current research to an audience of practitioners and partners with a view to giving the rm a strategic jump on the marketplace for current managerial knowledge (Micklethwait & Wooldridge, 1997). Academic/practitioner linkages are further extended by the co-production of management books for the popular business press. Typically these books are co-authored by an academic and a practitioner. The intent is to raise the legitimacy of each rms knowledge product by association with acknowledged experts. It is important to note that academic/practitioner linkages serve mutual self-interests. Academic gurus receive substantial sums for their presentations and their popularized management books. Their host universities similarly benet from the resultant exposure of their academics in the form of free publicity, donations and additional economic rewards. The internalization of stages of the cycle of management knowledge production is a signicant phenomenon on two accounts. First, although it is consistent with the prediction of transaction cost theorists that state that market functions may be brought into hierarchies (Williamson, 1975), it is not apparent that doing so actually reduces transaction costs. These rms incur enormous costs in establishing knowledge centres, knowledge ofcers and knowledge management programs. Booz Allen Hamilton, for example, spent nearly US$5 million to establish its Knowledge Online Project (Kennedy Research Group, 1997). American Management Systems will spend almost 10 percent of its gross revenue on similar knowledge management systems over the next few years. Andersen Consulting, which regularly spends 6.5 percent of its revenue on training, will spend an additional US$220 million on its Knowledge Xchange technology program (Kennedy Research Group, 1997). McKinsey reportedly spends 10 percent of its revenues on knowledge management. The second aspect of this phenomenon is that it makes universities the targets of colonization efforts. The movement of management consulting rms, either directly or indirectly, into the eld of management education and research directly threatens the function of universities in the cycle of knowledge production and consumption. More importantly, it threatens to undermine the due diligence role of universities. Although these internalized knowledge centres seem intent on mimicking aspects of university research faculties, it is not clear that much priority has been spent on empirically testing and rening emerging knowledge products.

8. Conclusion
Jurisdictional conict between professionals is not a new phenomenon (Abbott, 1988). Indeed, claims of expert knowledge to occupy intellectual

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space is one of the dening characteristics of professionalization (Friedson, 1986). The processes that have been described here are, however, fundamentally unique because of the profound role of organizations in all aspects of knowledge commodication and colonization. Whereas issues of jurisdictional conict between professions were usually resolved through the interaction of professional associations or, alternatively, state regulators (Abbott, 1988), commodication and colonization practices appear to be the direct result of the increased tendency of professional services to be delivered by large, complex organizations. The production of managerial knowledge occurs through the complex interaction of a network or eld of organizations. By pursuing individual interests, actors within the eld produce an informal structure that innovates new managerial knowledge and regulates its production and consumption. Increasingly, some organizations seek to internalize the process of knowledge production within their boundaries, which is a marked departure from the historical model where colonization struggles occurred at the level of the profession rather than the rm and was legitimated by arguments of public interest (Friedson, 1986). The contemporary model is an organizational level strategy for commodication and colonization of different forms of knowledge with rm prot as the primary justication. An objective of our analysis has been to provide a framework and vocabulary for understanding this emerging area of organizational activity. The complementary notions of commodication and colonization provide elemental tools for addressing the fundamental paradox of increased scepticism and increased consumption of managerial knowledge products. They also provide a basis for questioning the current trends to treat management knowledge as a property or knowledge object in contemporary discourse (Savary, 1999). The framework, however, raises as many questions as answers. The aggressive role of conglomerate played by the Big Five in reshaping the eld of management knowledge production remains poorly understood. Detailed ethnographic research might offer a more detailed analysis of the mechanisms involved in commodication and colonization at the level of individual rms. Such research might also offer more insight into the motivations of individual actors as well as the power relations between rms and between the Big Five and other powerful social actors. The conguration of actors presented here is also subject to addition and revision. What, for example, is the role of the media (i.e. popular business press, academic business press and other outlets) in legitimating claims to expertise made by various actors engaged in the commodication process? How are the dual actions of commodication and colonization related to

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broader processes of commercialism and appropriation of knowledge at the societal level? Finally, business academics are an integral part of commodication and colonization. The framework presented here provides an opportunity for serious self-reection and the possibility for opening a dialogue about the future role of business schools and academics in the construction of what, ultimately, becomes management knowledge.

Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the nancial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the J. Walter Izaak Killam Foundation.

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Roy Suddaby is an assistant professor of management and organizations at the Henry B. Tippie School of Business at the University of Iowa. He is currently researching the emergence of new organizational forms in the legal profession. [E-mail: roy-suddaby@uiowa.edu] Royston Greenwood is the Associate Dean of research and the Telus Chair of Strategic Management at the University of Alberta. He has published extensively on issues of change management, professional service rms and managing knowledge intensive rms.