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Dear Colleagues,

It is a real pleasure for me to welcome you to the Management Consulting division (MCD). We had our second Annual conference last August 2021 in an online format; this Conference was a success, as usual, with high-quality papers and PDWs, as well as all the other contributions of the division. I want to congratulate Joanne Preston, from our MCD, for her 2021 AoM Distinguished Scholar-Practitioner Award, which acknowledges an impressive contribution in the field and a significant career achievement. Thank you to Joanne and to all the other awardees who demonstrate continuously the quality and the vitality of our division. As a nonprofit organization, we face many of the challenges that nonprofits experience, the first of them being always improving the quality of our contribution to our audiences, to our clients, as a professional association which goal is to promote knowledge and practice related to the consulting world. This concern is always present in the mind of the Leadership team, and also in the Board members agenda.
In 2019 MCD started a comprehensive work of strategic reflection to analyze the strategic position of the division, and to identify areas of progress. A Strategic Plan 2021-2023 was designed in early 2021. We have started after August 2021 the implementation of some of these actions deemed desirable for the MCD.
We want to grow our membership; we want to serve our audiences better; we want to expand our contributions outside the Annual conference time, and to communicate more intensively with our members. We want to improve the management of the difference between academia and the corporate consulting world to extract more richness from this difference. We want to increase the volume and quality of the material that MCD delivers via the various channels of information, including AoM-Connect.
I would like to end this introduction by a call for volunteers and professionals, academics or practitioners, or people with a mix of these roles, to contribute more to the division. There is a lot to do, in terms of ideas, action in groups or committees, or in terms of knowledge production. If you are interested in the consulting field, there is a place for you and your contribution, in our MCD.
Thank you all for the work we have accomplished, and welcome to the challenges of the future.

Daniel Degravel, PhD. MCD Chair 2021-2022.

The purpose of the Management Consulting Division is to (1) advance knowledge and understanding of management consulting and (2) aid in the development of consultants from the perspectives of research, practice and teaching. The Division has a dual focus on both the process of consulting and the consulting industry, with an underlying goal of creating a bridge that integrates scholarship and practice.

Our members are concerned with interdisciplinary and integrative approaches related to established and major practice areas of consulting, ranging from strategy and human resource management to information technology. Major topics include: the consulting process, client-consultant relationships, ethical issues in consulting, the roles and responsibilities of academics in the field, the role of consultants in change initiatives, the management of consulting firms, the marketing of consulting, and the expanding role of consultants in organizations and society.