Business Ethics and Critical Consultant Jokes

Onno Bouwmeester is an Associate Professor in management and consulting at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Till 2001 he was a Consultant at KPMG. He is has been Head of the Management Consulting Research Group at the Department Management and Organization, of the School of Business and Economics for ten years. Currently, he is director of the Center for Consulting and Professional Service Firms and he leads a M.Sc. program on Management Consulting. He published a monograph with Elgar (2010) on Economic Advice and Rhetoric and with (Routledge (2017) on The Social Construction of Rationality. He has published in the Journal of Organizational Change Management (2011), International Studies of Management & Organization (2013), Management Decision (2015), Human Relations (2016), and International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (2018), German Journal of Human Resource Management (2021) and International Journal of Management Reviews (2022) on consultants’ legitimizerroles, their uncertainty management, expert images, stress experiences, the demanding leadership style, dirty work experiences, and their intermediary role in the relevance gap debate. In the Journal of Business Venturing (2015), International Small Business Journal (2019) and British Journal of Management (2022), he has published on the rhetoric of entrepreneurs. In the Journal of Business Ethics (2021), he has published on moral disengagement. Next to that he writes for professional journals on similar topics.

• Ch.1 Introduction.- Jokes and cartoon as illustration: how they address common ethical transgressions in consulting.- Ch.2 Jokes and cartoons used as prompts in interviews: how they help reflecting on dirty leadership Cartoons used a statements in enquiries: how they claim consultants’ lack of expertise.- Content analysis of jokes and cartoons: how they articulate uncertainty issues in depth.- Discussion.