La consultation en strategie: Du noyau professionnel aux archetypes de pratiqu

The thesis considers the practice of strategy consulting. Management consulting has grown significantly since several years, and it has a significant impact on the business process, especially when it concerns strategy. Despite this, little is known about the practice of consulting in strategy. What is the meaning of making consulting in strategy? How do consultants organize their practice? In short, what is meant by "practice of strategy consulting"?;Some elements of strategy consulting are found in the litterature: strategy as the aim of consultation, the consultant's competencies as well as the role he is called upon to play, the types of consulting organizations, and the intervention in terms of stages or phases, or rather, tasks or steps to be worked out. But, it is these separate components that do not clarify what the practice of strategy consulting really implies.;To put together the individual components and then reach a better understanding of the strategy consulting practice, we propose a new conceptual framework that relies on the strength of three theoretical approaches: (1) The 'strategy as practice' approach allows us to study strategy consulting as a social practice and, to discover that a distinctive discourse as well as having particular rules and routines. (2) The ' practice communities' approach allows us to consider not just the consultant and his intervention, but also the practical nature of communities in the framework of peer relationships.;Using the two approaches we are in a position to identify the "core of practice". However, even if all share a "core of practice", consultants may work differently. The 'configurationnal' approach allows us to analyse the various discourse-rules-routines gestalts of consultants according to their style of organizing their practice, thus identify archetypes of practice. Further, as a practice evolves over time, the transition from one archetype to another may occur.;Our qualitative analysis is based on 49 interviews with strategy consultants in Quebec and we used multiple cases like research strategy.;We defined 'professional core' as discourse (strategic reflection), rules (principle of non-substitution ) and routines (management of time and mandate).;We defined practice archetypes as the three fundamentals modes of organization of a practice: nomadic, club and organisational comunity of practice. A strategy consultant operates in one of these modes and may overtime move from one mode to another as the practice evolves. We particularly note the movement from club to organizational community mode, and on to nomadic mode. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).