Management Consultants and the Employees of Their Client Organizations: Towards a Model of Employee Protection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Organizations increasingly rely on external management consultants to restructure their businesses in an effort to improve performance, competitiveness, and profitability. This article focuses on the ramifications of such arrangements for the client organization’s employees. Management consultants generally wield substantial influence on their clients, and often perform managerial functions, directly interacting with, and exercising significant control over, the client’s employees. As a result, consultants may directly or indirectly contribute to labour and employment law infringements by the client organization. The author argues that while existing laws may provide some mechanisms of enforcement and protection, there is a need for more robust regulation to ensure that management consultants are made directly responsible for their actions where the effect of those actions is to cause a violation of employees’ rights. Accordingly, using “Lean” consulting as an example, specifically the implementation of Lean in the Saskatchewan healthcare system, the paper states the case for recognizing and expanding the liability of management consultants directly to their clients’ employees. Among other proposals, the author advocates a broad interpretation of existing employment and labour laws to capture the activities of management consultants where there exist the requisite elements of influence or control, and raises the possibility of establishing a regulatory scheme for the management consulting profession.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.026 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.087 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.026 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.028 | 0.018 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".