ABSTRACT
Consulting engineers or efficiency experts had dominated the early history of the management consulting field in the United States and elsewhere, initially based on an ideological or missionary logic, but turning more commercial as time went by with Bedaux the most successful example. Many of the earlier pioneers some of them related directly to Taylor vanished soon after World War II or even earlier C. Bertrand Thompson, who had contributed to the establishment of a consulting field in France, returned to the US in 1940, but had become disenchanted with the use of scientific management. But apart from the success of MTM, it was the local efficiency- and production-related consulting firms that dominated the national fields in Europe into the 1970s. On the other hand, there was the diverse group of "consulting management engineers", now increasingly referred to as management consultants, who were trying to build their own legitimacy on some form of "professionalism".
