Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This chapter traces the management consulting industry’s development from modest origins in the late 19th-century United States to the highly visible position it enjoys today, with wide-ranging impacts on economies, societies, polities, and the lives of individuals around the world, despite increasingly frequent scandals and controversies. Until the 1980s, the industry expanded at a moderate pace throughout the US-dominated ‘free world’. Subsequently, it grew exponentially and now claims a truly global presence. The chapter highlights the shortcomings of the existing academic literature, which (1) has tended to research management consulting as ‘a case of’ rather than a distinctive phenomenon, (2) attributes its recent ‘explosion’ largely to the triumph of neo-liberalism rather than explaining it in terms of contextual and industry-specific factors, and (3) is only beginning to discover its growing role in elite formation. The chapter concludes by discussing how the industry’s rise can be conceptualized.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.002 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".