Being a consultant? : Exploring consultants' identity from a partner perspective.

We adopt an interpretive perspective in order to explore how consultants who have reached partnership retrospectively make sense of themselves at the different stages of their careers. To do so, we use a life story method for interviewing 35 partners from 6 global management consulting firms and trace the evolution of the salient common features through which they picture "who they were" and "how they behaved" (Alvesson, 2000) at the different stages of their careers. First, we contribute to the literature about professional service firms and notably the one about consultants. Indeed, by exploring how consultants who have climbed all hierarchical ladders retrospectively picture themselves, we are able to identify the ways of be(hav)ing that are successful at the different stages of a consultant's career. Second, we also contribute to the interpretive literature about identity. On the one hand, we find that partners add new "identity layers" when they picture the evolution of their selves from one hierarchical level to another. On the other hand, we highlight that partners build a self-continuity between how they picture who they were at the different stages of their careers by using three "identity stratagems" (Jenkins, 1996) that we label :"(dis)intensification", "oscillation" and "opposition." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]