Researching Practice Areas of Consultancy Firms

We reflect on a multi-year study of practice areas within professional service firms thathas resulted in impact in various ways, including research publications, class teaching,and industry dissemination. We describe the challenges in conducting academicresearch at the practice area level, rather than the firm level. These challenges aregrouped into two camps: fieldwork challenges and conceptual challenges. While wenavigated these during our project in order to achieve our goals, we believe more workneeds to be done at the practice area level within the consultancy industry, especiallyas this unit of analysis is affected by trends in AI and ESG that were not so prominent20 years ago. We suggest one way forward will be to utilize collaborative systemsapproaches through a holistic stance, rather than focus on narrow sets of variables in areductionist stance.