McKinseyfication of government

Matti Ylönen and Hanna Kuusela

Chapter 8 in Research Handbook on Privatisation, 2025, pp 158-172 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Decades of outsourcing of public sector work has left its mark on how public administrations produce, operationalise and assess knowledge. Since the 1980s, consultants have become a powerful group in advising governments and changing the logic of public sector globally. The term “consultocracy” has been used to denote this insinuation of consultants within the public administration, even as far as to become essential to the functioning of public sectors and democratic governance. This chapter reviews and analyses recent literature on consultocracy with an emphasis on what can be called the McKinseyfication of government. With this concept we refer to the growing uniformisation of consultancy products within the public sector and how this reflects the changes in the private consultancy business. The chapter introduces the idea of the McKinseyfication of government, situates the growth of consultancy in the long-standing decline in the status of civil servants, and maps further factors that have fed the phenomenon.

Keywords: Consultocracy; Consultants; Public sector; Public administration; Governance; McKinseyfication; Privatisation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035309979
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