'The Big Con' and the value of consultancies with Rosie Collington

The UK in a Changing Europe Podcast

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4.3 • 105 Ratings

🗓️ 28 April 2023

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

In this episode of 'UKICE (I Tell)' - formerly known as 'Brexit and Beyond' - Rosie Collington, PhD student at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) and co-author of 'The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments and Warps Our Economies' talks to Professor Anand Menon about the value created by consultancies and the revolving door between consulting and government. --- Rosie Collington is a PhD candidate at IIPP, under the supervision of Professor Mariana Mazzucato and Dr Kate Roll. Her research explores the political economy of health innovation and the role of the state in value creation. She holds an MSc in Political Science (International Political Economy) from the University of Copenhagen, during which she also received a grant to study on exchange at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Public Health. Alongside her studies, she worked at Copenhagen Business School, and at the Center for Medical Science and Technology Studies at the University of Copenhagen as a Research Assistant. Before joining IIPP in September 2020, she held roles in policy and advocacy at the British Heart Foundation, and most recently as a Researcher for a project led by Professor William Lazonick on pharmaceutical industry financialization, funded by the Institute for New Economic Thinking. She has also worked on a freelance basis with a number of think tanks and advocacy groups, and has written for public audiences in The Guardian, The New Statesman, openDemocracy and elsewhere. She is a Coordinator of the Economics of Innovation Working Group with the Institute for New Economic Thinking’s Young Scholars Initiative.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to this next edition of our Uchis-I-Tel podcast from UK and a changing Europe.
0:12.6	I'm delighted today to be joined by Rosie Collington, who is a PhD candidate at UCL.
0:18.2	She's got an MSC in political science from the University of Copenhagen and has
0:22.9	written for Interalia The Guardian, New Statesman and Open Democracy. And Rosie is here to talk about
0:28.5	her new book, which is written with Mariana Mazukatu, The Big Con. Welcome, Rosie.
0:35.3	Hi, thank you very much for having me. It's an absolute pleasure. It's a fascinating book. I'd recommend it to all our listeners
0:42.3	as a very sort of interesting and easy read. But just to kick us off, do you want to sort of
0:47.3	summarise what you're arguing in the book?
0:49.3	Absolutely. So in the book, we look at the growth of what we term the consulting industry.
0:55.7	We focus in the book on the big three and the big four companies.
0:59.4	These are the terms that are kind of used within the sector and in academia.
1:03.7	So the big three, some of these will be household names in some households.
1:08.5	So the big three is McKinsey, Bain & Company and Boston Consulting Group.
1:13.6	And the big four are companies that historically have had their roots in accounting,
1:17.6	and that's Deloitte, KPMT, PWC and Ernst & Young.
1:21.6	Now, over the past couple decades, globally, the consulting market and the kind of this industry that we
1:31.0	look at in the book has grown massively it's very difficult to estimate exactly how big it is today
1:37.6	but the kind of best guess that we have or the best bets that we have are that it is between
1:43.6	700 and 900 billion dollars globally
1:48.0	in 2021 so it's pretty big I read a stat yesterday in a Danish newspaper in a Danish review on the
1:54.4	book they said that was twice the GDP of Denmark so that is pretty big and in the book we
2:00.3	interrogate why this sector has grown so much and what that can tell us about capitalism and the transformation of the economy over the past couple decades.
	...

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