Abstract
The consulting industry enjoys an increasingly close relationship with the state, including criminal justice institutions. However, this development, previously described as ‘consultocracy’, is empirically unexamined within criminal justice scholarship. Drawing on document analysis of calls for tenders and interviews with consultants working within the criminal justice field in Norway, the article examines what kind of knowledge and expertise is provided by consultants, and how they obtain and exercise their epistemic power. In an increasingly cost-conscious public sector, which is acutely aware of the urgency of digital transformations, the consultancy industry exerts a growing influence on the organizational infrastructure of criminal justice, its evidence base and modes of knowledge production. Consultants are active agents in the proliferation of ideas that are re-shaping how criminal justice agencies understand the social problems they deal with, and the responses to them, as well their role and function in society.
Most scholarly accounts of penal change have ascribed great importance to the influence of political actors, the media and changing popular sentiments, as well as socio-economic and ideological currents and perceptions about offenders, causes of offending and appropriate responses to them. Consequently, the role of seemingly non-political actors (that could be described as quiet ideologists) in shaping contemporary penal landscape has received far less attention. This article focuses on one set of such actors: private consultancies. A growing body of academic research has documented the remarkable growth of the consultancy industry in the 20th and 21st century, and its increasingly close relationship with the state (see, inter alia, Mazzucato and Collington, 2023; Weiss, 2019; Ylönen and Kuusela, 2019). Yet, when it comes to contemporary criminal justice, the nature of this relationship is unexamined and poorly understood.
There are indications that the consulting industry is becoming increasingly prominent in the contemporary criminal justice field. UK Home Office spending on consultants reached almost £230m in the year ending in June 2024, mostly due to increased spending on tackling immigration and border issues. In the past five years, Deloitte alone was awarded £369m in Home Office contracts. 1 During the last major Norwegian police reform, consultants were not only providing management and technical support in rolling out the reform (Smeby and Røyrvik, 2020; Wathne, 2015). McKinsey & Company had a central role in providing the analysis for the White Paper (NOU, 2013), which shaped the premises of the reform work, while a former McKinsey partner served as the Committee's secretary. The company was paid 9.6m crowns (£700.800) for their services and has left an indelible imprint on the current and future organization of the Norwegian police (Wathne, 2015).
Consulting involves a process of procuring, through contracts, a broad range of expertise by private firms. Extensive previous scholarship within criminal justice has shed light on the privatization of various aspects of criminal justice such as prisons, police patrol and probation, 2 which has, in theoretical terms, often been framed as a form of hybridity (Schuilenburg, 2015) and a blurring of public and private domains (White, 2014). This article suggests that the ‘brain functions’ of criminal justice agencies too are being privatized. Consultants are not being used merely as external providers of expertise but have become central to state decision making. Using another body analogy, we suggest that services provided by consultants lie at the heart of criminal justice rather than being situated in its periphery. We will show that their work influences its visions and values and pertains to the sphere that Garland (2013: 495) defines as the ‘penal state’; that is, ‘the penal leadership and its authority’. Consulting as a rule does not include provision of services; a common critique of consultants is that they are not getting their hands dirty (Mazzucato and Collington, 2023). Consulting traditionally provides advice on leadership and economic expertise. However, particularly due to the so-called digital shift, consultants also increasingly exert an influence on the organizational infrastructure of criminal justice, its modes of thinking and communication, in addition to its evidence base, data collection and production of knowledge. We will show that consultants are active agents in the proliferation of ideas and practices that exert an influence on how criminal justice agencies understand themselves and their role in society, as well as the social problems they deal with and the appropriate responses to them.
The consulting industry has been described as a ‘knowledge industry’ (Engwall and Kipping, 2002) since its services involve the provision of knowledge and expertise. Knowledge is also the fuel and the output of state bureaucracies and, following Foucault's (1980) famous maxim, a source of their power. And although criminological scholarship has for a long time nurtured an interest in power/knowledge relations, the power of the consultancy industry has scarcely been addressed within the criminal justice field. Taking Norway as a case study, this article outlines the nature of consulting within criminal justice and aims to understand the sources of consultants’ epistemic power. By examining calls for tenders by Norwegian criminal justice authorities, the article sheds light on the processes of contracting of expertise and the problem and policy formulations inherent in them. Furthermore, drawing on interviews with consultants from the most prominent consultancy firms operating in the justice field, the article discusses what kind of knowledge and expertise is provided by consultants, and how they obtain and exercise epistemic power in an increasingly cost-conscious and risk-averse public sector, which is acutely aware of the urgency of digital transformations.
Context, theory and method: Studying the ‘privatized state’
More than three decades ago, Hood and Jackson (1991) described the growing use of consultants in the public sector as a ‘consultocracy’. The term denotes a process whereby the tasks of running the state are outsourced to consultants, thus replacing internal expertise and political debate about public issues. Consultants have been used for a variety of purposes: from providing advice and legitimation for controversial reforms to serving as substitutes for internal staff and management (Mazzucato and Collington, 2023: 54). According to Ylönen and Kuusela (2019: 241), short-term, outsourced expert knowledge production is increasingly replacing the long-term work of civil servants and even politicians. They argue that ‘increased reliance on consultants contributes to the monopolization and privatization of public knowledge and ensuing dependencies, erosion of tacit knowledge, weakening of accountability, and strengthening of instrumental rationality’.
Although often linked to the rise of the New Managerialism (Saint-Martin, 1998) and, more recently, the rise of the ‘privatized state’ (Cordelli, 2020), consulting has a longer history stretching back to the first half of the 20th century (Weiss, 2019). The use of consultants has nevertheless been particularly pronounced during the past three decades. As Mazzucato and Collington (2023) point out, the consulting industry played an important role in harnessing market dynamics to solve government tasks. It has been central in implementing Osborne and Gaebler's (1993) influential reframing of the state as ‘steering more, rowing less’, which has also had an impact on the criminal justice field (Braithwaite, 2008; Crawford, 2006). In ideological and practical terms, consultants have been vital players in partnering state and non-state actors. Consultants are avid proponents of outsourcing policies and their beneficiaries in terms of contracts. They are also often employed to review and execute such processes. These developments have been particularly pronounced with digitalization and the rolling out of e-government reforms (Mazzucato and Collington, 2023).
The size of the global consulting industry was valued at US$343.47bn in 2022 and is expected to reach US$494.57bn by 2027. 3 Although estimations vary and are often based on Anglo-American markets, they seem to agree on a steady growth of the industry since the 1970s. However, when it comes to criminal justice, we lack reliable data. This is partly due to the lack of research on the subject as well as the opacity of the consulting industry and secrecy surrounding consulting contracts. The Office of the Auditor General of Norway (Riksrevisjonen, 2023) for example established that Norwegian police authorities spent 2bn crowns (approx. 170m EUR) between 2015 and 2019 on consultants, mostly on digitalization projects. 4 The variety of consultancies makes it nevertheless difficult to estimate the industry's size, leading some authors to question ‘whether it is meaningful to speak of a coherent “management consultancy” industry at all’ (Weiss, 2019: 3). While the origins of the industry lie in providing accounting services, which are still an important aspect of the consulting market, later generations of consulting firms have mostly focused on providing strategic management and IT-related services.
Our analysis of calls for tenders within Norwegian criminal justice reveals a typology of consultancies where strategic management and IT consultancies have a central role and the largest share of the contracts. The IT and management aspects of consulting are often not clearly separated, and many consultancies provide a combination of both. An important aspect of the consultancy industry is corporate fraud and forensic investigation services in cases of suspicion of misconduct, violation of rules and corporate crime. These activities did not come up in our calls for tender, yet they deserve further attention as they offer important insights into the public/private relations (Meerts, 2020) and the nature of the growing compliance-industrial complex (Kuldova, 2022). The calls for tenders we examined reveal however a strong presence of research consultancies, which include traditional research institutions that are privately funded and economically dependent on winning contracts. Although much smaller in terms of the size of their contracts, and mostly overlooked in international research on consulting, this market is nevertheless relevant for studies of criminal justice policy. Research consultancies provide knowledge services that are sought after in the contemporary policy-making climate, which is marked by ‘expertization’ (Christensen et al., 2023). It is also important to note that university-based academics take on consultancy work as private individuals or through their own private companies. Although the size of the contracts offers a useful overall picture of the market, it should not be taken uncritically as an indication of influence. Some research consultants can become ideologues who develop close working relationships with criminal justice agencies and thus exert an influence far greater than the size of their contracts might indicate.
We conducted interviews with 13 respondents ranging from employees of large, multi-national consultancy firms to smaller national research consultancies. Interviews were an important element of the empirical analysis, since they provided background and context as well as an insight into the rationalities of consultants working with the criminal justice sector. We were interested in what kind of knowledge and expertise they provided to the sector, their experience with criminal justice contracts and how they compared the criminal justice field with other public and private sectors. Most of the respondents held senior positions within their respective organizations. Three of them had PhDs and several had previous experience working in the public sector as well as at universities. All interviews were recorded, transcribed and anonymized.
Data from the interviews are supplemented by document analysis of calls for tenders, consulting reports and documents pertaining to the aforementioned Norwegian police reform. The calls for tenders were published between 2013 and 2023 in the Doffin database for public procurements in Norway 5 and included contracts offered by the Ministry of Justice and Public Security, the Police Directorate and other government departments and agencies, when relevant. 6 The calls pertain to a variety of tasks and criminal justice institutions (the police, crime prevention services, effectiveness of crime policies, etc.), and offer insights into the nature of services and competences sought after by criminal justice agencies, who competed for and won the contracts, and some information about the terms of their engagement. Not all contracts, however, could be found in the database since the Ministry and the Police Directorate finance a large proportion of their consulting contracts through framework agreements with selected consultancies, usually the largest players in the field. Some insights into these contracts were obtained through the interviews.
The article examines the nature of power and influence exercised by consultants. After all, as Weiss (2019: 2) points out, it may seem a paradox that the expansion of consulting services coincides with the expansion of state bureaucracies: ‘As the postwar state increased in size, why did it not create the internal capability to fulfil the functions and services that consultants undertook?’ Why do state actors look to for profit-seeking non-state actors for help? An answer to these questions demands an understanding of the consultants’ power, not only as providers of knowledge and expertise, but also in terms of the structural power of the industry and its perceived competence compared with state actors. In conceptualizing these forms of influence, we employ the concept of epistemic power, which ‘works through and by affecting the knowledge of actors’ (Leander, 2005: 811). Our interviews gave us a unique insight into the power of private actors to shape shared understandings, their agenda-setting capacity and hence their ability to influence the backstage of decision-making processes (Leander, 2005). Our findings align with Leander's (2005: 824) study of private military companies, which shows their ability to ‘frame security issues as questions of managerial efficiency and technical competence’.
The growing centrality of consultants to decision-making processes stems from the changing nature of contemporary governance, particularly the dynamics of knowledge production. Contemporary societies are undergoing intense processes of digitalization, where the production of information becomes the defining quality of social institutions, which has been an important impetus behind the growth of the consulting industry. The so-called ‘data imperative’, the belief that collection and exploitation of data holds the key to productivity and profitability, is not only the driving force of the contemporary political economy but has also become a normative and cultural ideal on which public sector organizations build their legitimacy (Fourcade and Healy, 2024). Any ‘organization that fails to signal conformity with the rationalized myths in its field exposes itself to being regarded as illegitimate’ (Fourcade and Healy, 2024: 77).
These beliefs are also an important source of the consultancy industry's epistemic power which are transforming the state and infusing it with particular rationalities. They promote a new understanding of knowledge and expertise. Following Alasuutari and Qadir (2014, 2019), we describe this type of governance as epistemic governance. It works by influencing the knowledge of actors, particularly their perceptions of the world and its current challenges (Alasuutari and Qadir, 2014: 67). Although one might argue that any form of modern governance is essentially epistemic and tied to a particular knowledge regime, we suggest that today's data-driven knowledge production is integrated in contemporary governance in unprecedented ways and leads to fundamental changes in organizational, social and cultural norms. The so-called datafication is, as Reutter and Åm (2024: 639) observe, ‘accompanied by widespread beliefs that collecting and analyzing data can generate information and knowledge necessary for optimizing daily practices and for improving decision-making’.
The concepts of epistemic power and epistemic governance draw on Foucault's power/knowledge template but move beyond it, offering a more focused gaze. They are useful for understanding how the consultancy industry can exercise influence on criminal justice institutions that goes beyond the size of their contracts and influences the institutional habitus and self-understanding as well as visions of the future (Leander, 2005). According to Alasuutari and Qadir (2019), epistemic governance is conducted by influencing three aspects of the social world:
ontology of the environment (what is the accurate picture of the situation); actor identifications (actors’ understanding of themselves and their identities); and norms and ideals (what is good or desirable, what is virtuous or acceptable).
This division informs the structure of the remaining part of this article. The article focuses on a particular group of influential actors that are often more invisible yet function as paragons of digital transformations and are essential in translating various technologies and data platforms into practical bureaucratic arrangements. In this way, it differs from the existing sociological and criminological scholarship that studies the digital as a transformative force that creates ‘affordances’ in terms of enabling and constraining certain forms of social action (Hutchby, 2001). Framing digital transformations as an autonomous social force akin to a revolution (Balbi, 2023) implies a certain level of naturalness and inevitability of change. Although digital transformations may be in many respects inevitable, such accounts overlook the structural, ideological and political importance of certain actors in shaping them. In contrast, we do not see the digital shift as inevitable but as a result of political choices and shaped by knowledge, ideals and practices of specific actors that are to a large extent private and profit oriented. 7
The ‘new’ ontology of criminal justice
There seemed to be a broad agreement among the management and IT consultants we interviewed that there was an acute need for change in the Norwegian criminal justice sector when it comes to digitalization. This was also the conclusion of the aforementioned report by the Office of the Auditor General of Norway (Riksrevisjonen, 2023), which established that digitalization of the police was marked by inefficiency. In the report, the necessity of change is discursively framed as a ‘technical debt’. The term, which is commonly used by the consultancy industry,
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has been increasingly adopted by the Norwegian police authorities.
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However, the solution to the technical debt is by no means framed simply as technical and material. As one senior interviewee from a large IT and management consultancy pointed out: People quite often think that digitalization is about technology, but it is not. It is about culture. And it is about change, which is about 80 to 90% of a digitalization project, at least when it comes to large projects. And it is about leadership. The technical part is actually quite simple. It can be expensive, but it does not take time and it is not particularly difficult in that regard. (consultant 6)
The consultancy industry frames its role as addressing pressing social problems and providing competencies that criminal justice agencies direly lack and need help with. However, several of our interviewees described criminal justice agents not only as needing assistance with addressing certain tasks and problems, but also as needing assistance with formulating ‘the right problem’. One senior consultant thus said: ‘I don’t think they quite know how to ask the question’ (consultant 5). It was mainly the largest management consultancies that saw their role as helping their clients to (re)formulate their problems and helping them see issues that were ‘on the horizon’. One senior interviewee working for a large global consultancy described how they use their own in-house analytical capacities to tell clients ‘what kind of problems will most likely be relevant in the year to come’ (consultant 3). As we will show later, these problems are mostly generic problems pertaining to the public sector and businesses, rather than the criminal justice field more specifically.
The social problems that consultancies are hired to formulate and address in the contemporary public sector are by no means new and resonate with Weberian understanding of punishment as a rationalized, professionalized and expert-driven process (Garland, 1990). In that respect, one can hardly talk of a new ontology. Rather it is a perennial issue framed in a new language, yet no less pressing than in previous epochs. However, while faced with classic bureaucratic concerns with efficiency, technology and modernization, criminal justice actors are no longer seen as capable of addressing them adequately on their own. Our interviewees, particularly those from large IT and management consultancies, saw criminal justice actors as lacking in capacities and unable to change and modernize without substantial involvement (even leadership) of external actors. While the belief that ‘the management consultants’ methods for understanding the organization were superior to anything that existed internally’ may be a standard element of consultants’ self-presentation (Mazzucato and Collington, 2023: 105), it has important implications for how they approach the criminal justice system and its employees. Several described them as ‘bounded by rules’ and ‘not thinking about the results they are trying to achieve’ (consultant 1) and were critical of their ‘belief in their own abilities’ (consultant 6).
However, the epistemic power of the consultancy industry lies not only in their IT and managerial competencies, but also in their positioning outside the organization in question, which frees them from internal social and cultural constraints that usually impede reform processes. One of our interviewees recalled suggesting a substantial downsizing of the courts, a proposition that was deeply controversial within the organization, but which enabled the client to argue politically for providing more resources to the field. Consultants’ external status enables them to propose (internally) unpopular decisions, as well as endowing them with an air of objectivity and competence that actors they are working with often lack. They can be used to provide legitimacy for controversial decisions or external legitimation in internal conflicts (Mazzucato and Collington, 2023).
The procurement of IT infrastructure reveals a mode of influence that is in some respects more profound than introducing budget cuts, as well as more mundane and invisible. It impacts the very architecture of criminal justice institutions, their spatial organization and modes of communication and data collection. Several of our interviewees expressed preference for coming in early in the project to be able to influence the project design and the questions addressed. They often reflected on the changing nature of crime (e.g. operational definitions of ‘what is cybercrime’ or the nature of the police/public interface) and how the design of criminal justice institutions should reflect that. These issues could be described as ideological and thinking elements (or ‘the brains’) of criminal justice policy, asking what crime is and how it should be approached by the authorities. This was also the case with contracts given to research consultancies. These contracts are often directly aimed at obtaining scientific and policy-relevant knowledge, for example, developing a programme against intimate partner violence, violence against children and mapping of cybercrime. For example, Oslo Economics, a research consultancy, is currently assisting the justice department to assess competence needs and various administrative solutions for the new national centre against radicalization and violent extremism.
The centrality of the business model
The analysis of calls for tenders also reveals a demand for research expertise with a strong economic profile. Although several of the calls were on themes that might indicate a demand for criminological and sociological expertise, and some were won by publicly funded research institutions, alone or in cooperation with private consultancies, economic competencies and rationalities were nevertheless strongly sought after and often preferred. Menon Economics, a consultancy that won a tender on intimate partner violence, for example, describe themselves as a ‘consultancy operating at the interface of economics, politics and the market’. In their self-presentation they specify: Menon offers advisory services based on deep insight into public management policy and the organization of public sector in combination with strong methodological expertise and up-to-date research. We help organizations within the public sector to understand the need for change, set the level of ambition and direction and design governance models that ensure both efficient resource utilization and innovation.
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The difference between us and them [the competitors] was that they had a more conservative approach and said: ‘There is a lot of uncertainty here and since it is uncertain, we chose not to give an estimate on this.’ We, on the other hand, said that we must be clear about the uncertainty, but given the available information, we chose to make an estimate based on that. (consultant 7)
Most of our interviewees that had won tenders for research projects had economic backgrounds with little prior experience in criminal justice. They applied their economic models to a variety of topics. As one research consultant explained their methodological approach, it involved ‘looking at the socio-economic costs of a social problem. And that societal problem could be eating disorders or heart failure, or it could be violence in intimate relationships, or it could be organized crime or various types of crime’ (consultant 7). Moving quickly from one project to another is not only essential to their business model but has also profound implications for their understanding of criminal justice issues and institutions. Consultants are outsiders to state agencies that contract their services. Their professional identity is not primarily in the criminal justice sector. Hence, they may view the police and the courts like any other organization or business. Most of our interviewees, although working on large reform projects within criminal justice institutions, did not see the field as their area of specialization nor as carrying an identity that would distinguish it from other fields.
Several pointed out the expertise they offered is based on universal templates developed elsewhere. One interviewee recalled how he took his clients from a large public sector institution on a field visit to a grocery warehouse that had been previously efficiently digitalized. Rather than drawing on sector-specific knowledge and experience, consultancies tend to import operating models used in other industries (Mazzucato and Collington, 2023: 12). Consequently, they do not see a need for experience and in-depth knowledge of the field. The daily work of consulting is often performed by junior consultants and one of our more experienced interviewees was quite critical of this: You have armies of youngsters who have no experience and no practical knowledge of the areas in which they are working. They serve all sectors of the economy, so they jump from water utilities to administration to whatnot. They apply the same things. That is the only way it can work economically. If you need to learn about the sector, to talk to all the people, to develop that competence, you are going to use an awful lot of time, you are not going to be really profitable. (consultant 2)
Although critics have pointed out that having business organizations as an ideal may not be the best fit for criminal justice agencies (Smeby and Røyrvik, 2020), this transferability of insights across organizations and sectors lies at the heart of consulting and is considered one of its main strengths. Linked to the ideas of New Public Management (NPM), the promise of the consulting industry has been precisely ‘to make public sector practices more “business-like”’ (Mazzucato and Collington, 2023: 53). Their identity is connected to promoting a vision of progress and efficiency from the business sector to public institutions. One of our interviewees from a large global consultancy explained: ‘When we have helped one client for example in the United States or in Denmark, or perhaps in Switzerland, then we have frames of reference that can create synergies for our clients in the public sector in Norway’ (consultant 3).
Large global consultancies such as McKinsey & Company, for example, promote the idea of ‘beacon organizations’ across geography, size and industry.
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The advice McKinsey offered during the Norwegian police reform, which proposed substantial cuts in the number of police districts, was based on generic calculations about the use of resources within other organizations. The aforementioned White Paper states that: In the analysis of the use of administrative resources we additionally obtained information from the consultancy McKinsey's database; «McKinsey Overhead Benchmarking Initiative». This database provides information about the staffing of administrative functions in a number of organizations across sectors/ businesses, nationally and internationally. (NOU, 2013: 247)
Consultancies are commercial actors that offer criminal justice agencies specific products. While the nature of the products may vary, they are premised on the understanding of criminal justice as clients in need of provision of services. Also, research consultancies engage with criminal justice agencies by selling their insights as products. Concise reports with colourful charts, professionally designed PowerPoints and policy briefs offer knowledge as an accessible, prepackaged and aesthetic product. The transfer of expertise from consultants to the state is first and foremost a commercial activity. However, in this framework, knowledge and expertise are conceptualized as products to be bought and sold on the market, and criminal justice functions are understood as ‘services’ within a business framework. McKinsey's Policing Vision 2025, for example, states: ‘Policing will be agile and outward focused. Police forces and their partners will work together in a consistent manner to enable joined up business delivery around policing support services and community safety’.
The epistemic power of certain actors lies, as Alasuutari and Qadir (2014, 2019) point out, in their ability to influence other actors’ understanding of themselves and their identities. The epistemic influence of consultants on criminal justice identities does not lie primarily in the explicit promotion of particular ideologies and views of crime, offenders, justice and punishment, but rather in the assumption that the field has no distinctiveness. Asked about how the field can be distinguished from other fields, our interviewees often could not name any distinctive traits. Some mentioned that it was distinguishable by the fact that it lagged behind in terms of digitalization. Particularly the focus on legal rules and lawyers’ strong professional identity was seen as incremental to digitalization. Lawyers were described as ‘very rulebound in their approach’ (consultant 1 and 6), a hindrance to information sharing and costly to reform work. As one interviewee observed: ‘Lawyers are a bit of a drag. It is not helpful, but it is what they are here for—to make sure that one follows the rules’ (consultant 1). Legal rules are thus framed as an impediment to change rather than an essential trait of the criminal justice field.
Moreover, the ideological aspects of consultants’ world view are characterized by an acute awareness of the commercial value of their knowledge and expertise and the commercial value of (criminal justice) data. As one interviewee put it, ‘data is the new gold’ (consultant 6). Criminal justice employees are seen as employees in other organizations who are trying to adjust to the emerging data imperative (Fourcade and Healy, 2024). Their identities are first and foremost framed as data providers, managers and analysts delivering ‘products’ (invariably described as ‘strategic products’ and ‘intelligence products’), which promise systematic foresight, efficiency and the possibility of exchange across organizational and sectoral boundaries. Digitalization reforms within criminal justice, and elsewhere, are therefore not only about organizational change and efficiency in terms of workflow, data storage capabilities and data sharing but are, as pointed out above, about cultural change. Digitalization has implications for the nature of knowledge and communication, and is radically re-shaping the meeting between citizens and criminal justice agencies. In these transformative processes epistemic power is vested in some actors who are, as Ugwudike (2020: 488) points out, empowered to dominate knowledge production, and are not required to explain the normative values informing the creation of technologies.
Our findings raise a question about the consequences of the fact that these (empowered) actors are private entities whose relationship with criminal justice institutions is a purely commercial one. This relationship is based on the assumption that criminal justice agencies are incapable of developing digital competencies and other forms of expertise in-house or lack the capacity to do so. The privatization of the digital infrastructure of the state is a global trend (Cordelli, 2020). Critics have pointed out that by outsourcing their digital competence, states are being deskilled and are losing a valuable dimension of their capacity (Mazzucato and Collington, 2023; Seabrooke and Sending, 2022). The question of what is bought and sold through contractual obligations between criminal justice institutions and consultancies merits further attention but exceeds the scope of this article. Contracts with public institutions give access to data that can produce profits beyond the individual project at hand. The critical issue of ownership of criminal justice products and platforms that are being developed by companies such as Google and Palantir has raised controversy in several jurisdictions (Brayne, 2021). After signing a contract with three IT and management consultancies worth 340m EUR, Norwegian police authorities therefore clearly specified in a press release that they ‘will have the long-term ownership of the products development’. 15 As we shall see in the next section, the ownership issue was a point of contention for several of our interviewees.
The primacy of the contract
The consultancy industry appeals to the general ideal of progress and modernization. Its epistemic power is visibly at work as the imperatives of digitalization and economic frugality pave the way for the necessity of change. McKinsey, for example, promotes an ‘agile operating model’ as ideal, with ‘the ability to quickly and efficiently reconfigure strategy, structure, processes, people, and technology’. 16 Through these normative orientations, the consultancy industry has become the bearer of neoliberal values and market thinking (Mazzucato and Collington, 2023). The value of competition is also embedded in the calls for tender that we analysed, where criminal justice agencies, in their role as clients, can chose among a variety of knowledge offers on the market. However, like other markets, the consultancy market we analysed also shows a tendency towards monopolization where large actors manage to obtain competitive advantages. What may look like an open competition reveals at a closer look that preference is given to certain actors. A large proportion of consultancy work in Norway is namely commissioned through framework agreements and therefore less transparent than calls for tenders, which are open. Smaller research consultancies in our sample were critical and some tried to take part in these processes by engaging in cooperation with larger actors who are signatories of framework agreements.
A point of concern here is not only the lack of competition but the lack of transparency. Processes of procurement of expertise should, as Christensen et al. (2023) point out, be democratic. Much of consultancy work, within criminal justice and elsewhere, is however marked by opacity, which represents a challenge for democracy simply because most people do not know that they are there, yet they are delivering core state functions (Mazzucato and Collington, 2023: 206). The lack of transparency is connected to the centrality of the contract. The relationship between a consultant and her client is a private contractual relation and belongs to the sphere of private rather than public law. This has important implications. There is a danger of conflict of interest since knowledge about the consultant's other clients is not open. Moreover, the lack of transparency in the consultancy industry runs contrary to the norms and ideals of open science, which have, albeit incompletely, strongly influenced the field of academic production in the past two decades.
Some of the reports produced by consultancies we talked to were difficult to obtain. Our interviewees expressed awareness of the ownership issue and the power that their clients held over the products they delivered. While consultants working in traditional consultancies seemed less concerned about this, those with academic research ambitions tried strategically to protect themselves by signing so-called research contracts. Some recalled uncomfortable experiences of censure when their clients did not approve of their findings. One interviewee recalled a client's interference in an evaluation process despite contractual provisions to the contrary: It said that they were not allowed to interfere. So, I had to bring it up all the time that you had promised not to interfere. But they believed that it was not interference, it was … Yeah, so there were such stupid discussions. (consultant 9)
This dynamic may hold a key to why public sector agencies are drawn to consulting. Consultants offer knowledge and expertise over which their clients exert a considerable level of influence and control, and which may be used to legitimate and further their clients’ objectives (Mazzucato and Collington, 2023: 131). This is something of which one of our interviewees with previous experience in academia was acutely aware: Consultancy, to the opposite [of academic research], has clients and it is an obligation to please the client. […] So basically, as a consultant, unless I had really very strong ground and no worries, nor a partner pushing me ‘you cannot say this because they’re never going to use us again’, I would tend to say things that do not make people too unhappy. (consultant 2)
According to Micklethwait and Woolbridge (1997) consultants appeal to the authority of science and nurture an image that can be described as ‘quasi-academic’. Although their deliverables usually consist of reports and PowerPoints rather than academic articles and books, the consultancy industry consciously promotes its academic credentials. Large actors such as Deloitte run training academies called universities. 17 McKinsey Global Institute proudly presents among its members several prominent researchers and Nobel laureates. Its chairman and director states that: ‘We occupy this interesting space between business research and academic research, and we take the best of both worlds.’ 18 Proximity to science strengthens consultants’ legitimacy as experts and several of our interviewees talked about their cooperation with academic researchers. Some pointed out that such cooperations could be quite strategic where academic researchers were used as icing on the cake ‘to raise the profile and secure credibility without necessarily contributing much to the product’ (consultant 7).
These dynamics reveal not only the sources of epistemic power of consultants, but also the close alignment between consultants’ and their clients’ interests where both parties seem to be profiting from a particular economy of knowledge production. While consultants establish lucrative and often long-standing relationships with state authorities, the latter tap into a source of policy-friendly knowledge and expertise over which they exert a considerable level of control and influence.
Conclusion
There are national divergencies in the use of consultancies and in the extent of their influence. And although the use of consulting services may be more widespread in neoliberal market economies, such as the UK and the USA, few countries have been untouched by the growth of the industry (Mazzucato and Collington, 2023). Our findings show that consultancies are widely used and exert a considerable influence even in affluent Scandinavian welfare states (see also Seabrooke and Sending, 2022). The influence of business actors on political decision-making processes has been influentially described as ‘quiet politics’ where business firms achieve political objectives through low-key advocacy, informal backroom deals and membership in elite networks (Culpepper, 2011).
The influence of consultancies lacks the levels of transparency and openness characterizing traditional channels of democratic deliberation. Several of our informants were involved in decision-making processes that are of central importance for the organization and quality of criminal justice institutions, yet there is little public awareness about the nature of their work and their presence in the process. The digital infrastructure of the public sector is by and large built on private contracts and much of consultants’ epistemic power stems from their expertise in digital transformations (and the perceived lack of such competence within state bureaucracy). Although this type of influence has distinct normative dimensions, it is not based on an explicit criminal justice ideology. In fact, the ideological footprint of the consultancy industry lies in the lack of acknowledgement of distinctiveness of the criminal justice field and the perception of its resemblance to other sectors. Like the influence of other private actors (Leander, 2005), the ideological aspects of consulting lie in de-politicizing certain issues and moving them out of the public realm.
Through their embeddedness in public institutions, and their centrality to their everyday running, consultancies are intensifying the erosion of the public–private distinction. The blurring lines between public and private have been described in scholarly literature as the ‘hybrid state’ where agents from public and private sectors ‘act in tandem in the delivery of public services’ (Weiss, 2019: 15). At a first glance, our findings seem to corroborate previous studies of privatization within criminal justice that suggest that the presence of commercial actors results in hybridity (Schuilenburg, 2015) and public/private blurring, where the logic of the market and the logic of the public good become increasingly difficult to distinguish (White, 2014). However, the notion of blurring suggests a process where public and private rationalities are somehow equally diluted and assimilated by the other. This would be misleading when it comes to the findings of this article.
Although Norwegian criminal justice policies show a growing influence of NPM and economic rationalities (Gundhus et al., 2022), empirical studies of on-the-ground provision of security have also discovered the distinction between public and private actors continues to be important in their self-perception and understanding of their tasks (Nøkleberg, 2019). We found little evidence that ideals of collective good are shaping the thinking of commercial actors. Our interviewees mostly reflected on their clients’ need to change, while the awareness of public ethos that they should adjust to was far less present in their reflections. Although aware of the importance of privacy regulations, their critical comments about legal rules and lawyers show a lack of awareness of public law and its centrality to the running of government and criminal justice institutions. One interviewee was, for example, exasperated by the Justice Department's inability to direct the Court Administration agency due the separation of powers and independence of the courts.
Therefore, while the public ethos has shown to be increasingly malleable to the infusion of commercial logic, we found little evidence of the importance of the values of the public ethos such as ‘legality, neutrality, equity, and loyalty’ (Galwa and Vogel, 2023: 407) in the narratives of private actors. There was clearly a tendency to give preference to managerial, NPM-oriented logic over the legalistic-bureaucratic logic. Wathne (2020: 14), following Weber, points out that when ‘the image of the organization is business, the social action tends to be more goal-rational than value-rational’. This lack of sensitivity about the distinctiveness of criminal justice institutions is nevertheless surprising since several of our interviewees, in their personal careers, seemed to move through a revolving-door and traversed the public and private domains (see also Tyllström, 2021). However, it can also indicate that the meaning of public good has been redefined and has become synonymous with cost awareness, effectiveness and technological and managerial expertise.
The perceived need to change the client was more present among larger IT and management consultants than among research consultants, who were generally more passive and attentive to their clients’ dictates. These smaller actors appeared weaker in terms of their epistemic power, which larger actors derive from the perceived importance of economic thinking and the urgency of the data imperative. Some of our interviewees from large consultancies expressed awareness that public agencies needed them without being able to provide an answer to how they, in the long run, will be able to cope without them. Critical observers have pointed out that the outsourcing of tasks to consultants depletes state's in-house capacities and creates a form of dependency. Drawing on Osborne and Gaebler's (1993) analogy, Mazzucato and Collington (2023) argue that, in the long run, a government needs to row to be able to steer successfully. The self-perception of IT and management consultants as indispensable to the running of public institutions was also evident in public documents. Police annual reports, for example, reveal determination to cut down on the use of consultants as well as the inability to do so. 19
What then brings state actors in one of the strongest welfare states in the world into a seemingly dependent relationship with profit-seeking non-state actors? We have shown that the consultant–client relationship carries several advantages for criminal justice agencies such as the promise of control, self-confidence and greater external legitimacy of political decisions and reform processes. Consultants are delivering advice conforming to the demands of economic efficiency and are the main protagonists of ‘governance by data’ (Johns, 2021). Their expertise has a natural affinity not only with metrics, financial and economic rationalities, but also with the prevailing trends towards datafication, prediction and the use of algorithms and AI (Brayne, 2021). The expert knowledge provided by consultants is also closely embedded in their clients’ interests. A further source of proximity between state authorities and consultants is the density of personal networks (Tyllström, 2021). We observed a considerable crossover between employees of public agencies and consultancies, although this aspect demands further systematic examination. Several of our interviewees with leading positions in consultancies had previously worked in the top tiers of government departments. Similarly, Mary Calam, the author of McKinsey's Policing Vision 2025, is currently non-executive director of the UK National Crime Agency as well as consultant at McKinsey & Company. 20
Owing to their epistemic power and the density of personal networks consultancies have the potential to influence vital aspects of the criminal justice system: designing its architecture, shaping its visions and defining success and failure, as well as its evidence base. They are influential in shaping the values of leadership, the visions of a ‘good system’ and the ethos of the bureaucracy; in short, the ‘brain functions’ of the penal state. However, this growing influence is also fraught with paradox. In our findings, it is the large consultancies, with least sector-specific knowledge, that exert most influence and greatest ability to shape the future directions of the field. While several of the smaller research consultancies have considerable experience working on criminal justice issues, and high levels of academic competence, these actors mostly obtain small contracts and seldom shape the agenda. And although the consultancy industry stresses the virtues of ‘agility’, preparedness for change and reform, it also nurtures the tendency towards reproduction by inhibiting risk taking and learning through mistakes (Mazzucato and Collington, 2023).
By relating to a relatively limited market for expertise, Norwegian criminal justice authorities are also limiting external sources of critical thinking, including academic criminological scholarship. The consulting industry offers criminal justice agencies alternative sources of expertise and creates a growing distance between academia and the practical field. Consequently, academic scholarship is losing its policy relevance, and important sources of data. Criminal justice agencies, on the other hand, are losing sources of independent oversight and becoming more closed and self-referential and dependent on actors with limited knowledge of criminal justice, its history and role in society.
Consultancies are namely not only outcompeting academic expertise but also internal expertise within criminal justice agencies (Weiss, 2019). This internal expertise is essential in guarding institutional distinctiveness and institutional memory of ideas and values (such as the rule of law, privacy, independence of the judiciary, accountability and transparency), which have historically informed the ethos of modern criminal justice. Although having an affinity with the trend towards knowledge-based policy, consultancies offer knowledge in the form of well-presented, pre-packaged, off-the-shelf ‘products’, which show few signs of distinctiveness and historic and ideological awareness. This raises a broader question about the nature of knowledge and expertise in contemporary data-driven societies.
Owing to the current lack of scholarship on consulting in criminal justice, this article only scratches the surface and opens several questions for future research. The global scope of the consulting industry and its conscious reliance on transferring insights and solutions from one country and sector to another has obvious implications for our understanding of crime policy transfers. The influence of consultants on cross-national crime policy transfers has been noted (Jones and Newburn, 2021), particularly when it comes to the UN context (Blaustein et al., 2018). However, we still lack studies on the spread of global templates offered by large Global North consultancies and their national appropriation and local impact.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Norges Forskningsråd (grant number 334953).
