It's a lot more than that. It's about further enabling power structures at the client organization while diminishing employee and other "lower classes" negotiat

It's a lot more than that. It's about further enabling power structures at the client organization while diminishing employee and other "lower classes" negotiation and influence possibilities. In essence, it's a turbo-charged manager service, where you pay a flat fee to someone to represent your interest. The fee is high, but for it you buy more loyalty, a deadline to the relationship and avoid labor disputes, employee rights lawsuits, etc. "Your interest" as in whoever pays the check. This service is immensely valuable to stakeholders, otherwise they would not continuously pay for it. A career manager at a company will have much more complexity in interests and loyalties as opposed to a consultant hired by a single, at the end of it, actor (whoever controls the signing and payment process). Let's take a typical employee manager loyalty conundrum, pick one: loyal to the CEO, your boss, the shareholders at large, a specific shareholder group, the board? They often have different interests, and recruit or are looking to recruit agents for them. For the consultant? Whoever pays! I found the book "Confronting managerialism: How the business elite and their schools threw our lives out of balance" by Locke and Spencer quite useful to understand some of the realities at play (not specifically consulting, but the broader managerial and by application consulting manager roles). If leaders keep hiring consultants, there is value for them. This does not mean value for the organization. Most certainly, not for society at large, as the parent article can demonstrate.