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Management consultants are often hidden and therefore understudied actors in public administration. Building on institutional and social identity theory, we investigate consultants’ identity work in search of legitimacy as knowledge providers in the public sector. We substantiate our theoretical reasoning with 43 semi-structured interviews with consultants and clients and extract four social identities of consultants, only one of which complies with what the literature commonly considers a management consultant in the public sector. Our study extracts new patterns of identity work and shows how they help actors in need of legitimacy to cope with the institutional complexity of public administration.

In search of legitimacy: conflicting logics and identities of management consultants in public administration