U.S. plan sponsors managing over $13 trillion rely on investment consultants for advice about which funds to invest in. Using survey data, we analyze what drives consultants’ recommendations of institutional funds, what impact these recommendations have on flows, and how much value they add to plan sponsors. We examine the aggregate recommendations of consultants with a share of over 90% of the...

Consultants are deemed critical to the success of an ERP implementation because of the breadth and complexity of the system, the management of multiple modules, and the one-time nature of the project that limits desire to increase investment in a permanent workforce. However, consultants often fail to effectively coordinate their activities, making integration of the ERP problematic. Coordinati...

CONTEXT   Consultants in charge of postgraduate medical education (PGME) in hospital departments ('lead consultants') are responsible for the implementation of educational change. Although difficulties in innovating in medical education are described in the literature, little is known about how lead consultants approach educational change. OBJECTIVES   This study was conducted to explore lead...

We have evaluated the available medical care to sports divers by a postal questionnaire sent to consultants and senior registrars in Accident and Emergency medicine in the UK, assessing their training in underwater medicine. Replies were received from 60 of 96 consultants (63%) and 32 of 58 (55%) senior registrars. Thirty-two per cent of consultants and 50% of senior registrars had previous per...

External IT consultants are specialists who bring in skills that may be lacking within a firm. However, a lack of firm specific knowledge, low legitimacy, and a host of other factors may limit the effectiveness of IT consultants. From a resource-based perspective, consultants can represent a rich source of short term, valuable capabilities. These capabilities, however, may be at odds with exiti...

As experts and fashion setters of the business community, management consultants have a strong position in modern society. We argue that the basis of this position is the size of the rhetorical space of legitimate arguments open to consultants. In legitimating their activities, consultants produce a great array of arguments based on two contradictory myths or master-ideas recurrent in the busin...

Using the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model, this cross-sectional study tests whether the direct effects and interaction effects of job demand and motivators affect the level of perceived stress among information technology (IT) consultants. A web-based questionnaire survey was conducted among 380 IT consultants at ten IT consultancy companies in Sweden. The results showed that job demands, au...