The work of the beneficiary first focused on generating the data needed to get to this understanding. This included to exploit all existing reports and litterature on the matter, to attempt to access new data, and to run rounds of interviews. Generating new data was a constant and exigent task undertaken all along the project. This was the done thanks to more than 100 interviews with executives of professional service firms and their clients encountered in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Johannesburg and Cape Town, but also in London, Oxford and Paris. The research has allowed to collect new documents, reports, and to constitute a corpus of productions, along with thousands of press articles. As planned, the beneficiary also made the most of thousands of pages of investigation and documentary evidence in Brazil and South Africa that had been left out research and were systematically analyzed. New data will pave the way for more research and generate original questions, contributing to a significant leap.
Second, to achieve the objective of the action the beneficiary reviewed and engaged with different literatures of political economy, economic sociology, but also anthropology, history and business and management sciences. The ambition of the work was to understand how the consulting and audit firms work, how they organize, how they generate contracts. The beneficiary tried to identify if and what makes these firms special. This theoretical enquiry and re reading of the literature lay the foundation of the book and particularly of its first part that focuses on the history of the services provided and their role in the XXth century. This aimed to reshuffle the literature on the topic of consultancies, their political economy and their role and function in financialised economies.
Third, the action set an ambitious program of writing and outputs with the publication of articles and of one book. Each output served as a proof of concept and was presented in seminars, conferences, workshops and panels, including those organized by the beneficiary. Events, seminar presentation, conference panels, and workshops, as well as journal articles created a constant engagement with various academic communities and served to organise a nascent community of interest on the project and around the international political economy of professional services firms.
