ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the conundrum of whether and how management consultants who may at times be quite ignorant about a topic can write expensive and sometimes highly influential plans for top management. It argues that management consultants are not first and foremost "knowledge workers". The chapter shows that in the resulting social and epistemic ambiguity that marks corporate settings, power operates via strategic attachment to and detachment from the socio-epistemic boundaries of corporations. It establishes that being both insiders and outsiders was not a static affair but that moved back and forth between the two states, thereby occupying a "liminal position" on the socio-epistemic boundaries of the client corporation. The chapter shows that consultants are frequently hired to legitimate the intra-corporate rule of top management. Only as long as these performances were efficacious could they reap the benefits that came with their ambiguous position of socio-epistemic liminality.
