Professional Service Firms confronted with management challenges: can democracy be an organizational solution? A case-study in a democratic consulting firm

Sébastien Gand (), Philippe Lefebvre () and Jean-Claude Sardas ()
Additional contact information
Sébastien Gand: CGS i3 - Centre de Gestion Scientifique i3 - Mines Paris - PSL (École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris) - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - I3 - Institut interdisciplinaire de l’innovation - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Philippe Lefebvre: CGS i3 - Centre de Gestion Scientifique i3 - Mines Paris - PSL (École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris) - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - I3 - Institut interdisciplinaire de l’innovation - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Jean-Claude Sardas: CGS i3 - Centre de Gestion Scientifique i3 - Mines Paris - PSL (École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris) - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - I3 - Institut interdisciplinaire de l’innovation - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: Due to the nature of their inputs, outputs and processes, professional service firms (PSFs) face three generic management challenges, namely strategic management, knowledge management and human-resource management. These three management issues are closely interrelated. They need to be managed in consistent whole patterns in relation to kinds of business activities. Following the typology of Lowendahl (2005 [1997]), 'client relation' and 'adapting solutions' kinds of PSF have consistent overall approaches to the three management issues. But, concerning 'creative problem-solving' ('CPS') PSFs, there is a lack of a consistent overall management approach, This latter can be neither hierarchical management nor self-management. We propose to investigate the democratic management approach as a potential consistent solution for 'CPS' PSFs. To this aim, we draw on a longitudinal in-depth case study in a French democratic consulting firm confronted with the need for managing differentiation between individuals and collective integration. In the last section we discuss the contributions of such a management perspective for PSFs, as well as the difficulties and the contingencies of the case-study.

Keywords: Professional service firm; democratic firm (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-04-05
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://minesparis-psl.hal.science/hal-00818099v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in EGOS, Apr 2007, Vienne, Austria

Downloads: (external link)
https://minesparis-psl.hal.science/hal-00818099v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-00818099

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().