Councils, Managers. . . and Consultants? Management Consulting and Complementarity in Municipal Strategy Implementation

• Author: David Mitchell
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00953997221110174
• Published date: 01 January 2023
• Date: 01 January 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00953997221110174

Administration & Society

2023, Vol. 55(1) 64 –92

© The Author(s) 2022

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/00953997221110174

journals.sagepub.com/home/aas

Article

Councils, Managers. . .

and Consultants?

Management Consulting

and Complementarity

in Municipal Strategy

Implementation

David Mitchell1

Abstract

American governments spend $6 billion annually on management

consulting, with steady growth. However, public-sector consulting receives

little scholarly and public attention—especially for local governments. For

which municipal projects are management consultants best suited? Svara

asserts that complementarity promotes effective governance between

city councils and their managers; sometimes, however, neither has the

capability to lead the other. This study explores whether consultants

can effectively fill this complementarity void by examining 205 strategic

initiatives from 43 US municipalities. The analysis confirms that consultants

are helpful when strategic and political-administrative contexts conflict,

but only when key stakeholders are supportive.

Keywords

council manager, strategic management, implementation, consultant,

stakeholder

1University of Central Florida, Orlando, USA

Corresponding Author:

David Mitchell, University of Central Florida, School of Public Administration,

528 W. Livingston St., Orlando, FL 32801, USA.

Email: david.mitchell@ucf.edu

1110174AAS0010.1177/00953997221110174Administration & SocietyMitchell

research-article2022

Mitchell 65

Introduction

Management consultants are an oft-maligned group: “A consultant takes your

watch and tells you what time it is.” “I don’t pay consultants for advice; I pay

them to leave.” “A consultant is an ordinary person with a briefcase from

over 50 miles away.”1 Yet, American governments increasingly retain their

services, now spending over $6 billion per year on these services with steady

growth (Momani, 2013). Despite these substantial outlays, public-sector

management consulting receives little scholarly and public attention—espe-

cially their interactions with state and local governments (Denvir, 2012).

Most assume that management consultants are hired purely for expertise

but they play numerous roles in government, serving as: (1) a substitute or

supplement for existing staff that are under-performing, inexperienced, unaf-

fordable, and/or unavailable (Pemer et al., 2014); (2) a capacity builder,

developing the structural and administrative prerequisites associated with an

effective strategic management system (Wiseman, 1993); (3) an intervention-

alist attempting to instill new organizational norms within an existing process

or system (Nutt, 1989); or (4) a validator of the client’s existing plans or

agenda (Nutt, 1989; Pemer et al., 2014). Therefore, this paper forgoes the

caricature of the one-dimensional management consultant, instead exploring

a more nuanced perspective articulated by prominent web designer and lead-

ership coach Jesse James Garrett: “I’m not sure that you can say definitively

that some roles are better filled by consultants, but I would say that some

projects are better handled by consultants.”

But for which public projects are management consultants best suited? In

American municipalities, the consulting contexts are seemingly endless.

Local governments provide a tremendous array of public services—some

better suited for management consulting than others. The projects themselves

differ in terms of priority, complexity, scope, cost, and time; requiring con-

sultants to engage with countless combinations of administrative systems,

stakeholders, operations, budgets, etc. For municipal strategy, management

consultants enter each organization facing a hyper-contingent challenge to

design an implementation approach appropriate for the prevailing project

context, with some elements proving more adaptable than others. Project

management practices can be easily deployed to fit context, leading to better

implementation outcomes. Stakeholder management is more constrained but

also necessary as context defines which stakeholders must be engaged for

implementation to be successful.

Likewise, Svara’s (2001) conception of complementarity, where a city

council and its manager work in both the policy and administrative realms as

needs dictate, appears to lend itself to a contingent approach for strategy