Pyramid schemes and programmatic management: Critical reflections on the ‘guru industry’

This paper offers a critical review of the ‘guru industry’. Analysing its orientations and its related attempts to engage practitioners in a programme of re‐education designed to off‐set the excesses of guru theorising, this papers argues that the educational agenda so produced is simultaneously elitist, depoliticised and out of step with recent analytical developments. Reviewing accounts of consulting which highlight the interpretative flexibility of guru theorising, we will suggest that calls for practitioner re‐education remain deadlocked in a paradigm, which fails to acknowledge the local editing and translation of consulting products. In an attempt to break out of this limiting framework the paper suggests the need for an account of consultancy at work designed to acknowledge: a) workplace politics, b) the complexities of consumption, and c) the externalities associated with the production of a management education designed to reflect the orientations of an élite organizational cadre.