Whether Management Consulting Can Be Successfully Conducted Online?

This book contributes to the emerging area of online consulting services. There have not been many research studies conducted in this sphere. It appears that the widespread view in literature, that trust based on face-to-face communication is a great obstacle for online provision of the management consultancy, discourages researchers from studying this issue. Nevertheless, the online provision of such professional advice might be an essential option for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). This book focuses on the nature of trust based on face-to-face communication in different stages of projects and studied Personalised and Codified approaches in consulting services to find the possibility of overcoming the obstacle in that study. In this way, the probable characteristics of e-consulting services are derived from theory and tested in practice through the interviews with 5 consultants and analysis of web-sites which provide online consulting services. Based on the research findings, this thesis argues that codified type of consulting services and the certain stages of the personalised projects can be realised via the Internet. Three online models are proposed in the last chapter.