Abstract
Hiring management consultants has become a strategically important and recurring event in private and public organizations. So far, extant literature has provided insights into how the purchasing of management consulting services is executed, but less is known how the need to hire consultants is constructed in the pre-purchase phase. Yet, this is important to understand, as it has direct bearings on the subsequent purchasing activities. Building on an explorative interview study with 47 CEOs, senior managers, purchasing professionals and HR professionals in 25 organizations, the current paper makes two contributions to the theorizing on the need construction in the pre-purchase phase. First, it identifies four strategies for constructing the need to hire management consultants, and shows how the strategies build on the actors’ qualitatively different conceptions. Second, it highlights how the strategies are part of the jurisdictional work performed by actors seeking to define their roles in the fuzzy organizational terrain of hiring management consultants. Lastly, it discusses implications for theory and practice.