Consulting as Carework: Decision-Making and Legitimacy in Consulting to Nonprofits.

Scholars of occupations and professions have shown uniform credentialing systems and standardized bodies of abstract knowledge to be normative markers of established professions. By drawing on such objective sources of expertise, professionals are able to make and justify decisions, establish and maintain legitimacy, and defend themselves from competitors. However, many contemporary occupations lack such credentialing systems and bodies of objective knowledge. In such cases, how do practitioners convince themselves and others that their expertise is legitimate? This paper uses the case of consultants to nonprofits to explore how members of occupations make and justify decisions about clients and internal operations in fields that lack codified bodies of knowledge and uniform credentialing systems. Drawing on a Zelizerian relational work framework and building on recent work on the role of values in constructing occupational mandates, the paper finds that consultants to nonprofits use two strategies to make decisions and legitimate their expertise in the absence of uniform standards: the personalization of legitimacy and deferring to standards of the nearest institutional domain. Using these strategies, consultants redefine consulting as carework, shifting the institutional field to which they are oriented from management consulting to nonprofit organizations. Contributing to our understanding of the role of values in constructing occupational mandates, the case of consulting to nonprofits shows that values can be used by occupational groups not only to distinguish themselves from obvious peer occupations, but also to redefine the field in which the occupation should be considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]