Consultocracy and its discontents: A critical typology and a call for a research agenda

ORIGINAL ARTICLE Consultocracy and its discontents: A critical typology and a call for a research agenda Matti Ylönen 1 | Hanna Kuusela 2 1 University of Helsinki 2 University of Tampere Funding information Ella ja Georg Ehrnroothin Säätiö; Koneen Säätiö In the past few decades, many sector-specific case studies have been conducted on the use of consultants in the public sector. However, the overall picture of the qualitative changes facilitated by consultants remains fragmented, and a comprehensive framework on how “consultocracy”affects governance is lacking. This article shows how the increased use of consultants has impacted the operational logics of public administration and governance at large. Drawing from a large multisectoral case study from Finland as well as existing studies, a fourfold typology of how consultocracy shapes public administration is introduced. We argue that increased reliance on consultants contributes to the monopolization and privatization of public knowledge and ensuing dependencies, erosion of tacit knowledge, weakening of accountability, and strengthening of instrumental rationality. This research emphasizes the importance of understanding the links between these developments and the need to implement a comprehensive research agenda on consultocracy. 1|INTRODUCTION The growing use of consultants in the private and public sectors has drawn much scholarly interest in the past few decades. Reliance on consultants in government and public sector institutions has grown globally to such an extent that several scholars have pointed to the emergence of a phenomenon called consultocracy. The term was coined in the early 1990s by Hood and Jackson (1991), and it has since been defined as a process “whereby non-elected consultants are replacing political debate conducted by publicly accountable politicians”(Craig & Brooks, 2006). Especially since the publication of the 1998 article, “The New Managerialism and the Policy Influence of Consultants in Government,”by Saint-Martin (1998a, 1998b), several studies have described how consultants shape politics and public administration practices. This increased scholarly Received: 23 November 2017 Revised: 21 June 2018 Accepted: 2 August 2018 DOI: 10.1111/gove.12369 This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. © 2018 The Authors. Governance Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Governance. 2019;32:241–258. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/gove 241 interest is hardly a surprise, given that in 2005, The Economist estimated that public sector consulting accounted for some 30% of the global consulting market (The Economist, 2005). The growing interest in the use of consultants in the public sector has resulted in many sectorspecific studies. However, the overall picture of the qualitative changes brought to public administration and democratic governance by increasing reliance on consultants remains fragmented. Our article addresses this problem with a critical typology for investigating the discontents and the qualitative impact of consultocracy on the public sector and administration in general. Although certain challenges and problems associated with the use of consultants are widespread and cognizable across different fields, a systematic framework for analyzing the impact of these developments for public administration is lacking. Much of the previous critical debate on consultants and the public sector has focused on policy consultancies that offer advice about political decisions and policies (Boston, 1994; Eichbaum & Shaw, 2008; Greer, 1994; Gunter, Hall, & Mills, 2015; Martin, 1998; Pollitt, 2001; Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2011; Raudla, 2013; Saint-Martin, 1998a, 1998b). However, we argue that the impact of the increased use of consultants is not restricted to their influence on policies. Instead, it has had a significant qualitative impact on the ways in which public administration and governance are conducted in various fields, such as auditing, organizational restructuring, human resources, and information and communications technology (ICT). To capture these multiple qualitative effects of consultocracy, an expansion of the definition of consultocracy is needed from the policy-centered view advocated, for example, by Craig and Brooks (2006) and Saint-Martin (1998a, 1998b). Therefore, we define consultocracy as a phenomenon in which often short-term, outsourced expert knowledge production is increasingly replacing the long-term work of civil servants and even politicians. This results in an increased power of consultants over politics, public governance, and public sector practices. It is important to distinguish consultocracy from other forms of public sector outsourcing. Whereas public sector outsourcings have a long history, the one characteristic feature of consultocracy is its close relationship to the different forms of expert-driven knowledge production that go deep into the heart of how societies are ruled and governed. In other words, the consultocratic forms of knowledge-production are related to fields that are essential to the proper functioning of the democratic forms of government practices. The spread of such consultocracy can be explained by different factors. Scholars have found a number of diverse and context-specific rationales for governments to purchase policy advice and hire external knowledge providers (see, e.g., Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000; Gunter et al., 2015, p. 527; Lapsley & Oldfield, 2001; Momani, 2013; Rehfuss, 1989; Roodhooft & Van den Abbeele, 2006; Savas, 2000; Sturdy, 1997). However, as Raudla (2013) has noted, understanding the diverse realities of public sector consulting is not enough; attention must be paid to the potential recurring pitfalls in contracting expert knowledge and to analyze whether these problems outweigh the potential benefits. In this article, certain key areas where such risks and disadvantages may typically occur are identified. Drawing from a large grounded theory-oriented study on the use of consultants by Finnish government agencies as well as from the existing body of sectoral studies, a typology of the problematic impacts of consultocracy is proposed, with the aim of facilitating research on its qualitative effects for public administrations and democratic governance. In alignment with the tradition of grounded theory, the typology has, thus, been generated and inducted from a mixed-methods study, so that the theory building and the emerging typology have been grounded in the case study. Specifically, this typology contributes to an understanding of how the emergence and growth of consultocracy shape democratic systems of governance and administration. The main impacts identified are the monopolization and privatization of knowledge, and the ensuing dependencies between public contractors and private service providers, the erosion of tacit knowledge within government agencies, the 242 YLÖNEN AND KUUSELA weakening of accountability, and the strengthening of instrumental rationality. We argue that these four impacts constitute the main qualitatively problematic consequences of consultocracy. Consequently, the government, the systems of democratic governance, and the public sector (more generally) are increasingly guided by private sector models and interests, rather than the parliamentary system, democratic consensus, and bureaucratic accountability. Political systems, which have in the past relied on bureaucratic forms of policy work as well as negotiations between different interest groups, are increasingly being replaced by a culture that facilitates rapid and radical reforms based on short-term goals, with models derived from the private sector and implemented by consultants. This new culture erodes the role of traditional government functions, while also potentially serving the political agendas of some actors. 2|OVERVIEW OF THE EXISTING RESEARCH ON PUBLIC SECTOR CONSULTANTS The existing critical research understands consultants broadly as contract-based actors who sell expert knowledge and influence organizations that hire them. For example, Gunter et al. (2015, p. 519) portrayed consultants as “external knowledge actors who trade knowledge, expertise and experience, and through consultancy as a relational transfer process they impact on structures, systems and organisational goals.”The global growth in the use of such consultants in the past decades, alongside the broader managerialist shift, has generated new research on the topic. Social scientists have examined the growth, role, and contribution of consultants and consultancy (see Armbrüster, 2006; Lapsley, Miller, & Pollock, 2013; Saint-Martin, 2004; Sturdy, Handley, Clark, & Fincham, 2009), and public management scholars have pointed to the increasing involvement of private consultants in the public sector and its reforms (see, e.g., Craig & Brooks, 2006; Fryson, 2009; Lapsley & Oldfield, 2001; Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2011). Armbrüster (2006) has divided the existing research on consulting into functionalist and critical approaches. Although he focused on research on consultancy work in general, these categories provide a useful starting point for categorizing research on public sector consultants. According to Armbrüster, functionalistic research “presents useful lists or outlines of the economic role of consulting firms, but it lacks an analytical grounding”(p. 6), whereas critical studies either focus “on management fashions that clients supposedly fall for, which represents an oversocialized conception of the consulting market ... or [portray] consultants as opportunistic agents who exploit clients' lack of quality certainty”(see also Lapsley et al., 2013). Both approaches typically draw on sociological neoinstitutionalism, based on a “belief in the efficiency of particular practices or solutions, rather than any proven efficiency,”in determining or influencing economic action (Armbrüster, 2006, p. 7). As the aim of this research is to understand how consultocracy shapes democratic governance, its approach is more closely aligned with critical than functionalistic literature. However, instead of focusing on the seemingly “opportunistic”practices or the methods of socialization in consulting fashions (see Armbrüster, 2006; Granovetter, 1985, p. 483), the focus is on how consultocracy affects the ways and mechanisms of democratic governance in contemporary society. Thus far, most critical studies on the qualitative impact of the growing use of consultants in the public sector have focused either on sector-specific cases and perspectives, such as the use of consultants in nation branding, education, privatization, public broadcasting, deliberative democracy or deliberative technologies, and the distribution of management trends (Aronczyk, 2008; Beveridge, 2012; Gunter et al., 2015; Gunter & Mills, 2017; Hendriks & Carson, 2008; Kantola & Seeck, 2011; Moor, 2008; Schwak, 2016), or on specific problems connected to consultants, such as transaction YLÖNEN AND KUUSELA 243 costs or the question of trust (e.g., Boston, 1994; Raudla, 2013). Other scholars have discussed democratic problems associated with the proliferation of government consultants (Hendriks & Carson, 2008; Saint-Martin, 1998a, 1998b). Further, recent contributions to the research on public sector consultants have included studying the cultural assemblages of consultancies (Prince, 2015), selfperceptions and ideational backgrounds of consultants (Momani, 2013), and analyses of consultants as “a new advocacy group”(Hodge & Bowman, 2006, p. 111). Pollitt (2007, p. 536) has emphasized the normalization of rapid, radical, and often incoherent change in public administration and increasing links to a “management reform community.”In this process, consultancy businesses have been identified as playing a large role in driving the reform efforts (Meek, 2011). The key concern discussed in these studies is whether consultocratic tendencies have reduced the openness, participation, and accountability of governance, so that consultocracy “parallel[s] a decline in democracy for the citizenry”(Hodge & Bowman, 2006, p. 110). Despite this outpouring of sector-specific studies on consultants, broad-ranging, synthesizing analyses of the impact of consulting on public administration and democratic governance in general are hard to find. This article addresses this gap by offering a holistic view on the problematic impact and discontents of consultocracy in the form of a fourfold typology. The previously published sectoral studies, however, are highly useful for drafting such a critical typology, and in the following, this study draws on and further introduces relevant literature when discussing the proposed typology. Before proceeding in that direction, however, a cross-sectoral case study on Finland is introduced. 2.1 |Case Finland The typology introduced in this article is grounded in a case study on the use of consultants in the Finnish public sector conducted in 2011–2013. The rapid growth in the use of consultants makes Finland a highly interesting case study for analyzing consultocracy and its effects. Given the past strength of the corporatist, government-driven development model and trilateral bargaining in Finland, the recent increase in consultocratic tendencies has been particularly pronounced. Finland is traditionally understood as a Nordic welfare state with a strong public sector. In line with several European countries, Finland, however, went through a series of major New Public Management reforms in the late 1980s and 1990s, which decentralized, restructured, and commercialized its public sector (Kananen, 2014, p. 140). Scholars have described this as a shift from a planned economy to a competition economy, or from a Nordic welfare state to a neoliberal competition state (Alasuutari, 2004; Heiskala & Luhtakallio, 2006; Kantola & Kananen, 2013; Moisio & Leppänen, 2007). The reforms also included the commercialization of government services; thus, many government agencies were gradually transformed into state enterprises and finally privately owned companies (Julkunen, 2001). This paved the way for the triumph of market-oriented logic, and finally to the increased use of consultants in the public sector. After these reforms, the rise of public sector consultants has been as pronounced in Finland as in many other European countries. The use of contract-based expert services grew markedly in Finnish ministries between 1998 and 2016. The money spent on contract-based expert services increased by more than 80% from less than €0.4 billion a year to more than €0.7 billion a year during 1998–2009. Although the growth stabilized somewhat during and after the recession that followed the 2007–2009 global financial crisis, the annual purchases were still more than 50% higher in 2016 than they were in 1998. These changes are illustrated in Figure 1, which depicts the inflation-corrected growth in the use of private consultants by Finnish ministries and the prime minister's office. The figure is not comprehensive, as the data is derived from a specific account for outsourced expert services in the 244 YLÖNEN AND KUUSELA government's accounting system, and it may be possible that some procurement contracts have been booked in other accounts for various reasons. This caveat notwithstanding, this is the main account where these kinds of expenses are booked. In other words, the sums and the growth are substantial, even though these statistics do not include all work that Finnish government agencies have purchased from consultants. The increase in the use of consultants has taken place simultaneously with the decrease in the number of employees employed by the Finnish government, reflecting a general “shift from appointed and salaried, to contracted and ‘billable’knowledge actors”(Gunter et al., 2015, p. 518). Between 1990 and 2016, the number of Finland's government employees declined from 195,800 to 72,984, removing more than 120,000 employees from the government's payroll (Kuusela & Ylönen, 2013; State Treasury, 2016). Organizational changes explain part of the decrease. Most notably, in the early 1990s, municipalities gained a number of new responsibilities from the government, which contributed to an increase of 45,000–56,000 employees in the municipal sector between 1990 and 2010 (Kuusela & Ylönen, 2013). Several government institutions were also transformed into publicly owned companies. Moreover, in 2009, the legal status of universities changed from public to private entities, removing almost 30,000 employees from the government's payroll (even if universities are still almost entirely funded by the government). However, a New Public Management policy program started in 2003 also aimed at reducing the number of government employees, to bring economic efficiency by reducing the work performed by government employees. Much of the expert work was consequently replaced with consultants (National Audit Office of Finland, 2010). Between 2006 and 2010, the government's payroll expenses decreased by €216 million, while the purchases of outsourced services increased by more than €500 million (National Audit Office of Finland, 2010). FIGURE 1 The use of outsourced expert services by Finnish ministries and the government, 1998–2017, €(adjusted for inflation using 2017 euros) YLÖNEN AND KUUSELA 245 This rapid shift that has resulted in increased reliance on contract-based consultant services is also visible in the government's use of ICT services. While ICT has been understood primarily as a technical field, it has become an important factor in determining the infrastructure of many critical governance, public administration, and democratic processes. Reflecting the wider consultocratic tendencies, the government has gradually diminished its role in the ICT sector and increasingly contracted services at the expense of the government's own employees. In 2015, of the government's overall ICT expenses of €848.3 million, €610.4 consisted of outsourced procurements (Ministry of Finance, 2016). 3|RESEARCH SETTING This research on the use of consultants in the Finnish public sector was based on the grounded theory approach. This means that the theoretical observations and the typology presented in this article have been generated and inducted from the empirical data on the Finnish case, by discovering emerging patterns in creating and identifying new analytical categories (Walsh et al., 2015), such as the elements of the typology. The study drew particularly on research that combines case study research and grounded theory, so that the emerging theory building is grounded in a specific case study (Eisenhardt, 1989; Fernandez & Lehmann, 2011; Taber, 2000). This means that the analytic codes and categories in this research were constructed from the data, not from preconceived logically deduced hypotheses. More precisely, a mixed-methods approach was employed that combined extensive archival and statistical material with interviews. The main data sets collected in 2011–2012 were: (a) financial accounts on transactions between government institutions and consultants, (b) contracts and procurement documents between public contractors and consultants, and (c) 52 semistructured, in-depth interviews with consultants, civil servants, politicians, and other relevant parties. We began by requesting detailed, transaction-level accounts from all ministries on expert services procured in 1998–2011. These accounts included all individual transactions that the ministries had invoiced from the aforementioned account number dedicated for procured expert services. Typically, the information included the date, the sum, the name of the service provider, and a very short explanatory text about the nature of the transaction. These accounts were then screened to find recurrent patterns and suitable case studies for further analysis. Following the principles of grounded theory, theory development was advanced during each step of data collection and the identification of specific cases on which to focus. Thus, the data collection was also guided by the emerging analytical categories. After the initial screening, several recurrent patterns were noticed. Among these patterns were repeated transactions involving a single provider and the same government institution, which were just below the public procurement threshold for direct purchasing with a competitive tender process (these were typically slightly over €29,000, as the main threshold was €30,000 during the years covered). Efforts were also made to find purchases that had particular policy relevance, in addition to case studies that would mirror the recurring and most relevant types of consultant services used by the government. The relevance was specified in and during the constant process of theory building. After this, the procurement documents (where available) and contract agreements related to the selected cases were requested. These documents not only included contracts for policy briefings or new governance initiatives, but also policy evaluations, which are important because of their potential role in shaping future policies. Moreover, it was acknowledged that many policy-related options are today “locked in”by seemingly technical decisions related to organizational and ICT structures. To 246 YLÖNEN AND KUUSELA understand this area, consulting contracts related to workplace coaching and remuneration systems were also researched. Finally, these strands of research were complemented by interviews with a wide variety of relevant actors, ranging from consultants to parliamentarians, researchers, and influential current and past civil servants. The archival data were collected simultaneously with the construction of the emerging analytical categories, and the selection of interviewees was conducted in tandem with the analytical work and theory building. In other words, the interviewees had knowledge of the chosen cases or the patterns that were identified as recurrent. The interviewees were selected iteratively, and new interview requests were sent based on what the researchers learned while reviewing the textual material and the first interviews. The interviewees held different institutional positions. An approximate breakdown of the interviewees is as follows: 19 civil servants, 14 politicians or political party employees, 13 consultants, 3 researchers, 2 employees from public sector trade unions, and 1 journalist. Some interviewees held several institutional positions; for example, some worked as consultants while holding a position in a city council, which is why the breakdown is only approximate. Of all the interviews, 46 were face-to-face, while 8 were telephone interviews. All interviews were recorded and lasted between 26 and 111 minutes, with a typical interview lasting about an hour. In line with the grounded theory approach, the interview questions drew on the insights both from the preceding interviews as well as from our other research, with the interview guide evolving over time. In most of the interviews, we sought both new information about the decisions to hire consultants in various agencies and the reasons behind these outsourcing decisions. Our interviews with consultants and the civil servants who contracted them also aimed at gaining an understanding of the personal and organizational motivation of these actors within the broader context of consultocracy. The interview guide thus included questions on the opinions the interviewees had on the use of consultants, as well as on the practices they had encountered while contracting or interacting with consultants, or alternatively, when acting as consultants. The data were analyzed according to the basic principles of grounded theory so that the analysis focused on emerging patterns in creating and identifying analytical categories that interpret, rather than simply label, instances of consultocracy or its qualitative impact on public administration (Chermaz, 2005). These analytical categories that emerged in the analysis of the empirical data were then compared with the existing research literature (Glaser, 1992, p. 33) to create a more comprehensive typology of the problematic impacts of consultocracy and a research agenda. Thus, the typology presented in this article is built on the categories that emerged in the analysis and developed further with the help of the existing research. As the article focuses on the pitfalls and discontents of consultocracy, it gives specific weight to patterns that were seen as problematic by the interviewees or found troublesome in our analysis of the documents. It needs to be emphasized that interviewees (particularly the consultants that were interviewed) held also positive views on the growing use of consultants, but these self-proclaimed justifications of the practice are not the object of this article. Altogether, this research material enabled the researchers to conduct a unique, comprehensive study on consultocracy in Finland, facilitated by the relatively nonhierarchical structure of Finnish society (e.g., it is relatively easy to arrange interviews with parliamentarians) and the Finnish Act on the Openness of Government Activities (Ministry of Justice, 2015). The results highlighted some of the issues discovered in previous studies, but also enabled proposing a more thorough typology of consultocracy than previous studies. Thus, following the traditions of grounded theory, the case study was aimed toward theory construction, rather than representativeness. YLÖNEN AND KUUSELA 247 3.1 |The typology of consultocracy's problematic impact on public administration Although a number of analyses of the policy consequences of consultocracy in management studies and related disciplines exist, the overall picture of the qualitative impact of consultocracy on public administration has remained fragmented. To address this gap, an overview of the key risks of consultocracy is provided. As noted in the Introduction, the key feature that differentiates the problematic impacts of consultocratic outsourcing from other outsourcing of services is the importance of these services to the proper functioning of democracy and the government. Besides facilitating future research, this overview helps to understand some of the key differences between public and private sector consulting. The types of effects covered here are monopolization and privatization of knowledge and ensuing dependencies, erosion of tacit knowledge, weakening of accountability, and strengthening of instrumental rationality. Perhaps slightly unexpected, the results were similar in consultancy contracts and companies regardless of the size or market position of the consultancy firm. This is particularly interesting given that the existing scholarship on management consultancies has emphasized the benefits brought by large size or market dominance (e.g., Kipping, 1999). While market dominance can certainly be a defining factor in some respects, this case study calls for more nuanced analyses on this topic. 3.2 |Monopolization and privatization of knowledge and ensuing dependencies As private providers of knowledge and expert services, consultants have brought fundamental changes to the ways in which public administrations handle information and knowledge. When contracting out expert services, publicly owned and available information (or information that could, in principle, be publicly owned) is transformed into a private commodity. Therefore, information that is frequently used by public administrations (such as computer programs, algorithms, benchmarking data, and indicators) becomes an asset for private consulting firms. This ownership may result in information advantages for consultants that may lead to various dependencies and rent-seeking behavior by consultants. This phenomenon has been discussed most notably within the new institutional economics and management literature, both of which have explored the economic problems associated with the “contractualization”of governance and policy making, and the problems associated with the use of competitive tendering for providing government services. Specifically, various scholars have shown how difficult it is to define the cost, quality, and quantity parameters of outsourced services for complex products (Bajari & Tadelis, 2001; Boston, 1994; Brown, Potoski, & Van Slyke, 2006; Dixit, 1996; Donahue, 2009; Raudla, 2013). It is challenging to specify procurement criteria and establish unambiguous exchange terms. Consequently, as Raudla (2013) has noted, such incomplete contracts and information asymmetries may cause various problems, including risks of opportunism by suppliers. Similarly, Boston (1994, p. 21) emphasized how advisers can exploit their quasi-monopoly position and informational advantages. This can happen, for example, by failing to produce advice of the desired standard, by providing selective or distorted information, by charging excessive prices, or by advocating policies deliberately designed to increase the demand for the consultants' services. This research revealed numerous instances where consultants used and benefited from their information advantages to achieve a quasi-monopoly. One case was related to the Ministry of Finance's use of a remuneration consultant in an environment where a single company dominates more than half of the market (Kostiander, 2011). The Ministry of Finance also used this consultancy when it attempted to streamline its remuneration practices. During the 7 years (2004–2010) investigated, yearly purchases from this single company increased from €750 to €219,174. Ultimately, the ministry 248 YLÖNEN AND KUUSELA even ended up advertising the company's services on its website. One particular year, the ministry paid the consultants a total of €140,000 without issuing a procurement tender. This was possible because the ministry signed several separate contracts with the same company for the same project, with individual payments remaining under the €30,000 threshold. This kind of “chaining”of contracts was common in the accounts we studied. The law prohibits this practice, but it was evident in all ministries whose transaction-level accounts were investigated. This highlighted the ability of private sector consultants to establish long-term relationships with the ministries, and the failure of the legislation governing public procurement to prevent these dependencies. Although illustrative, the steadily growing dependence between the remuneration consultancy and the Ministry of Finance was only one example of the monopolization tendencies and dependencies generated by the government's increasing reliance on consultants. Several interviewees described attempts to avoid issuing timeand resource-consuming procurement tenders and confirmed the allure of the practice. “Even though the guidelines prohibit issuing contracts for €29,900, it is extremely tempting to resort to the practice in order to save two months of work [that the tender process may have required],”stated an interviewee (Interview, 2012f). A director at the Ministry of Finance also confirmed this practice in our interview: “It is indeed common to see a procurement contract where the price has been set at €29,900”(Interview, 2012a). The practice was also confirmed by a consultant who explained how sometimes chaining smaller contracts starts innocuously: “Quite often, consultants enter an organization with a modest project proposal. After this, the process continues with a series of new contracts”(Interview, 2012c). Another interviewee from academia recalled how (s)he “issued a call for proposals for an organizational development project while expecting that the project would take just a few days. I received a proposal from a consultant who had come up with a month-long project that cost €29,000” (Interview, 2012f). This echoes the paradox described by Gunter et al. (2015, p. 529), according to whom consultants are usually hired to solve a specific problem, “but capitalism requires the production of problems the client did not realise it had”(see also Béland & Howlett, 2016). As exchange relationships and claims between service providers and contractors are asymmetrical and are not fixed, governments can be powerful and powerless at the same time in their procurement work (Gunter et al., 2015, p. 534). Over time, the exploitation of quasi-monopoly positions can erode the organization's ability to perform the outsourced task in-house. According to Boston (1994, p. 8), government departments and agencies that contract out policy analysis face the risk of “losing their specialist, in-house advisory capacity,”turning them into mere “contract managers and processors of the policy advice supplied by contractors.”The evolution of the ICT service provision within the Finnish government illustrates this phenomenon, as the diminishing role of in-house services has led to a situation in which the government has increasingly become a contract manager that spends the majority of its ICT budget on outsourced services. The majority of the government's ICT work is essentially already in the hands of private service providers (Ministry of Finance, 2016). 3.3 |Erosion of tacit knowledge The growing dependency on consultants can also have a long-lasting and profound impact on the structures of knowledge within public sector organizations. 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Review of Research in Education,34(1), 1–24. How to cite this article: Ylönen M, Kuusela H. Consultocracy and its discontents: A critical typology and a call for a research agenda. Governance. 2019;32:241–258. https://doi.org/10. 1111/gove.12369 258 YLÖNEN AND KUUSELA