Management Consulting: Towards an Integrative Framework of Knowledge,Identity, and Power

This paper reviews the past 28 years of scholarship on management consulting to synthesize the field and establish more broadly its contribution to management research. Through a systematic review of 219 articles, we identify three core conceptual themes – knowledge, identity, and power – that have dominated the literature to date. Through a thematic inductive analysis of a subsection of articles, we then investigate how these themes have been defined, used, and linked. This allows us to uncover and problematize the relationships between these themes. In making explicit underlying theoretical assumptions and relationships between knowledge, identity, and power, we induce a unique framework that can guide and support future studies, instigate metaparadigmatic dialogue, and thus help consolidate the field.     

Strategyproof single unit award rules

The problem of allocating a single indivisible unit to one of several agents is considered, where monetary compensations are not allowed, and the unit is not necessarily desirable to each agent. In addition to strategyproofness, three properties of social choice functions are considered: Pareto-optimality, nondictatorship, and nonbossiness. It is shown that these three additional criteria cannot be satisfied simultaneously. However, any two of the additional criteria can be satisfied. We give characterizations of the classes of strategyproof social choice functions satisfying these three pairs of properties. Received: 18 February 1998/Accepted: 15 May 2000     

Strategyproof Assignment by Hierarchical Exchange

We give a characterization of the set of group‐strategyproof, Pareto‐optimal, and reallocation‐proof allocation rules for the assignment problem, where individuals are assigned at most one indivisible object, without any medium of exchange. Although there are no property rights in the model, the rules satisfying the above criteria imitate a trading procedure with individual endowments, in which individuals exchange objects from their hierarchically determined endowment sets in an iterative manner. In particular, these assignment rules generalize Gale's top trading cycle procedure, the classical rule for the model in which each individual owns an indivisible good.     

Groves sealed bid auctions of heterogeneous objects with fair prices

We study the allocation of heterogeneous indivisible objects to agents whose valuations of the objects depend on what other objects they are obtained with. We apply the envyfree criterion to Groves sealed bid auctions, which are value maximizing and dominant strategy incentive compatible for this multi-object allocation problem. First we show that if valuations are unrestricted then there is no Groves auction which ensures that the allocation is always envyfree. We obtain a positive result, however, if the valuations of the objects are superadditive, and give a complete characterization of Groves prices that guarantee envyfreeness for superadditive valuations. Received: 25 April 2001/Accepted: 3 April 2002 I would like to thank Kim Border, Tom Palfrey, and especially John Ledyard for their comments. Special thanks are due to Katya Sherstyuk. Support from a Sloan Dissertation Fellowship is gratefully acknowledged.     

Twelve months old infants' evaluation of observed comforting behavior using a choice paradigm: The role of animacy cues and self-distress

Comforting is a prosocial behavior that children start to engage in around their second year of life. There is much less known about their ability to evaluate comforting behavior of others. The current study examined whether 12 months old infants, after having watched animated abstract characters comfort or ignore a third party in distress, would show a preference for the comforting character. Using a manual choice paradigm, we found that infants were more likely to choose the comforting character than the ignoring character (Experiment 1). When the characters however lacked human surface features (eyes) infants did not show a preference (Experiment 2). Furthermore, infants self-distress during the watching of the animations did not prevent infants to evaluate the behavior of the observed characters. These findings support the idea of an early presence of “moral sense” in infancy.