Call for Professional Development Workshop Proposals: Management Consulting Division

PDW Chair: Daniel Degravel, California State University, Northridge, degravelmcd@gmail.com

First, a warm welcome to our future August 2020 Vancouver conference to all our readers …

Second, please look at the following call for great and rich Professional Development Workshop proposals for the Vancouver conference.

PDWs at the conference are designed to provide attendees with experience that can help them to develop their professional skills in the areas of research, teaching, and professional practice. The PDW format is different than the classic paper presentation since PDW focus on professional development and offer opportunities for creativity, inter-DIG collaboration, methodological, and geographical diversity.

This year 2020 theme calls for a “20/20: Broadening our Sight” and an effort to eliminate / overcome dichotomies that characterize our methodologies, approaches, target audiences, and activities. These dichotomies are de facto reducing our vision of how organizations function and narrow our contribution in research, teaching, and practitioners’ activities.

The MC Division has been a proponent of this exhortation for a long time and aims at bridging these dichotomies.  Our Division exists to increase the knowledge related to both the consulting field and the consulting industry, to work toward the development of consultants, and to bridge scholarship and practice in consulting.

We encourage authors to submit a PDW that contributes to these three main goals of our Division, developing the field of consulting or the knowledge of the industry, developing consultants themselves, and explicitly bridging the gap between scholar work and practice of consulting. Naturally, we also encourage authors to focus on the dichotomies developed in the Annual theme of the conference, “20/20: Broadening our Sight”.

Note that PDW are encouraged to connect with the Annual Theme but will be considered even if they not tie in with this theme.

The Consulting field is rich of topics that could constitute the core of a PDW. Some of these topics follow:

1. Understanding the consulting industry and its evolution
2. Relation consultant - client in consulting
3. Consulting specifics related to the various fields of consulting (Organizational behavior; Organizational change; Strategy; Human Resources Management; etc.)
4. Consulting firm management
5. Ethics in consulting
6. Consulting practices in the various fields
7. Consulting tools in the various fields
8. Connection between scholarship production and practitioners’ experience
9. Connection between consulting experience and teaching practice
10. Student-based consulting experience and their value as generator of knowledge
11. The management of consulting networks as a new structure in business
12. Impact of consulting on the critical issues of our society and our planet

The decision of acceptance of the PDW proposals will include the following criteria:

1. Value: To which extent does the PDW provide real value to the attendees? What is its take-away for attendees? What is the “unique value proposition” of the PDW?
2. Creativity: To which extent is the PDW thinking out-of-the box and delivering novelty and originality?
3. Interaction and integration: To which extent does the PDW enables communication, exchanges between participants and does facilitate cross-fertilization across fields and methodologies?
4. Design and formal quality: To which extent does the PDW follow the guideline for the text, the quality of the writing, and the information that is required? How well is the logistical component of the PDW described?
5. Ability to draw an audience: To which extent can the PDW interest a large audience?

The Value criterion will be weighted heavily.

PDW document must include:

1. Title
2. Duration
3. Complete description of the content and format
4. Unique value proposition of the PDW and its take-away
5. Submitter and presenters
6. DIG solicited and reasons for this choice
7. Suggested DIG co-sponsors (co-sponsoring is encouraged since it enables to include more PDW in each DIG)

We hope to see a proposal from you and to see you in Vancouver for the conference (7-11 August 2020).

Good preparation …