<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<p>We reflect on a multi-year study of practice areas within professional service firms that has resulted in impact in various ways, including research publications, class teaching, and industry dissemination. We describe the challenges in conducting academic research at the practice area level, rather than the firm level. These challenges are grouped into two camps: fieldwork challenges and conceptual challenges. While we navigated these during our project in order to achieve our goals, we believe more work needs to be done at the practice area level within the consultancy industry, especially as this unit of analysis is affected by trends in AI and ESG that were not so prominent 20 years ago. We suggest one way forward will be to utilize collaborative systems approaches through a holistic stance, rather than focus on narrow sets of variables in a reductionist stance.</p>
</abstract>

We reflect on a multi-year study of practice areas within professional service firms that has resulted in impact in various ways, including research publications, class teaching, and industry dissemination. We describe the challenges in conducting academic research at the practice area level, rather than the firm level. These challenges are grouped into two camps: fieldwork challenges and conceptual challenges. While we navigated these during our project in order to achieve our goals, we believe more work needs to be done at the practice area level within the consultancy industry, especially as this unit of analysis is affected by trends in AI and ESG that were not so prominent 20 years ago. We suggest one way forward will be to utilize collaborative systems approaches through a holistic stance, rather than focus on narrow sets of variables in a reductionist stance.

Researching Practice Areas of Consultancy Firms

Management Consulting Journal

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

{"article-title":"Researching Practice Areas of Consultancy Firms"}

We reflect on a multi-year study of practice areas within professional service firms that has resulted in impact in various ways, including research...

Researching Practice Areas of Consultancy Firms

Online veröffentlicht: 24. Mai 2023

Seitenbereich: 104 - 110

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/mcj-2023-0012

© 2023 Christopher Williams et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.