Management Consulting in the Era of the Digital Organization

Edited by:
David Brian Szabla, Western Michigan University

A volume in the series: Research in Management Consulting. Editor(s): David Brian Szabla, Western Michigan University.

Call for Chapters

The transforming world of the 2020s will be marked by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. This new environment will require organizational leaders, more than ever, to explore strategies that enhance their adaptive capacity to respond to events such as COVID-19 and the consequential economic crises that follow. The 4th Industrial Revolution will be well underway. Our lives will be changing at an exponential rate and the result will be a multi-faceted deeply interconnected world that precipitates even more capable technologies. The digital revolution will be integrating multiple technologies that will lead to unprecedented paradigm shifts in the economy, business, and society. Entire systems across countries, industries, and societies will be transformed. With the COVID- 19 pandemic, these logics will be intensified, triggering a transformation that is unlike anything humankind has ever experienced.

Given the confluence of dramatic changes in organizational life and emerging technology breakthroughs such as robotics, the internet of things, biotechnology, materials science, data science and big data, and quantum computing, this volume of the Research in Management Consulting series explores how the research and practice of management consulting unfold in a new era of profound shifts in the way researchers and consultants sense, think, and act.

This volume brings both scholars and practitioners the latest discussion of efforts to understand consulting in organizations amplified by the fusion of technologies across physical, digital, and biological worlds, and a movement from human supervised artificial intelligence systems to fully autonomous artificial intelligence systems that have the potential to demonstrate intelligence beyond human capabilities.

The specific goals of this volume are:

1. To build awareness of the breadth, depth, and velocity of the digital era transformation and its multifaceted impact on the practice of management consulting

2. To explore frameworks and methods for researching management consulting in the digital era that outline core issues and highlights possible responses and implications

3. To provide a platform from which to inspire research and practice partnerships on issues related to re-imagining management consulting

We seek chapters on a wide range of topics that focus on how management consulting concepts, methods, processes, theory, research, and practice are shifting as a result of new ways of human interaction and emerging technologies.

In addition to review papers, practice essays, and theoretical manuscripts, we invite empirical studies, i.e., case studies or other field research, using quantitative or qualitative methods, which offer descriptive and reflective insights on successful or failed consulting projects in the digital era.

In addition to this call, the volume will contain invitational chapters. We welcome thoughtful, clarifying, provocative, or creative proposals for chapters. If you’re interested, please start with a brief proposal including what you have in mind, any key questions you’re addressing, and the ideas, concepts, case, data, or experience-base you will use.

Please send your proposals to David Szabla at david.szabla@wmich.edu.

If you would like to discuss your ideas or have any questions, feel free to contact the editors David Szabla (david.szabla@wmich.edu) or Margaret Gorman (margaretgorman@outlook.com).