Why management consultants? : Between functionalist and critical perspectives

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

This work aims at answering the question posed by Peter Drucker in 1981: “Why Management Consultants?” In order to achieve this, the work, which will take the form of a literature review, will present a number of theories that are literature’s master pillars and that will help explain the fracture between critics and supporters of management consulting. The conclusions of the work seem to point to the insolvability of the critical-functionalist dichotomy, notwithstanding the possibility of making improvements on it.