Think Tanks and Management Consultants: An Emergent Nexus? Matthias Kipping, Schulich School of Business, York University, Toronto, Canada (
[email protected]) Paper submitted to Panel T08P05: “Corporations and Think Tanks: Knowledge Utilization Beyond Political Technocracy” at the International Conference on Public Policy in Singapore, 28- 30 June 2017 Introduction The burgeoning literature on think thanks has largely centered around an examination of their influence on public policy formation, often with a focus on foreign policy (e.g. Abelson 2016). As noted in the Call for Papers for this session, only recently has the nexus between think tanks and business found more interest, namely around the ways corporations seem to have made an increasingly systematic use of think tanks to influence policy debates and decisions around topics that affect them, including for instance climate change (Plehwe 2014; see the CfP for more examples) or on creating a generally more favourable climate for “free markets” as part of what looks like a coordinated effort by neoliberal think tanks and think tank networks (e.g. Djelic 2014). These studies provide evidence for an emerging nexus between think tanks, corporations and governments. But, and this is the main argument of the paper, these phenomena need to be put into a broader context – a context marked since the late 19th century by an increasing managerialization of organized activity, reaching well beyond business into many other domains, including organized religion, and driven to a significant extent by what Engwall et al. (2016) have referred to as “authorities on management”, i.e. business schools, consultants, media.