Seizing Opportunity in Emerging Fields: How Institutional Entrepreneurs Legitimated the Professional Form of Management Consulting
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We draw on the early history of the management consulting field to build theory about how institutional entrepreneurs legitimate new kinds of organizations in emerging fields. We study the professional form of management consulting organization, which came to dominate other alternatives. Pioneers of this organizational form seized opportunities arising from broad institutional change to discredit the status quo and legitimate their model of how to advise organizations on strategic and operational issues. Similar to institutional entrepreneurs seeking to change mature fields, those in this emerging field engaged in theorization, undertook collective action, and established affiliations with recognized authorities and elites. But unlike institutional entrepreneurs in mature fields, the actors we studied could not leverage logics, positions, or collectivities within their emerging field; instead, they drew on logics from outside their field, sought affiliations with external authorities and elites, and emphasized the benefits of their activities for society at large. Our analysis thus suggests important differences in how actors legitimate novel organizational forms in emerging versus mature fields and underscores the need for theories of institutional entrepreneurship that explicitly account for field context.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it