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The U.S. Influence on the Evolution of Management Consultancies in Britain, France, and Germany Since 1945

In Europe today U.S. management consultancies occupy a dominant position among the largest service providers. In a "league table," published in the Financial Times of September 12, 1995, almost all of the top ten and more than half of the top forty European consultancies were of American origin. Over the past few years, many formerly independent national consultancies have been taken over by foreign, mainly U.S., firms [17]. Concerning the historical evolution of the profession, a large part of the relevant literature also highlights the American predominance. The work of Frederick W. Taylor and his followers is very often seen as the origin of consultancy activities [29, 39]. Concerning today's market leaders, Christopher McKenna has recently shown that what he calls "modern" management consultants, i.e. those individuals and firms offering "CEO-level studies of organization, strategy and operations," were not linked to Taylorism. He asserts, on the other hand, the leading role of the U.S. consultancies world-wide. In his view, the growth of firms such as McKinsey during the 1930s in the United States "was the necessary precursor to the predominance of American management consultants throughout the world" [27]. By making this assertion, McKenna perpetuates a long tradition in the popular and academic management literature. In 1967, Jean-Jacques Servan Schreiber already highlighted the role of U.S. consultancies in spreading an "American-style management that is, in its own special way, unifying Europe" [37, pp. 38-39], More detailed studies conducted by management researchers in the early 1970s concluded that American consultancies, and especially McKinsey, had contributed significantly to the adoption of the decentralised multidivisional structure in British, French, and German firms during the preceding decade [7, 10]. And in a recent account of the evolution of manage