Consulting engineering under Europeanization: Denmark-based professional service firms in turbulence

Although large European-based consulting engineering companies adopt different strategies in the emergent global economy, they share an assumption that players can obtain market gain through cross border mergers, acquisitions, or strategic alliances. They aim at synchronising these mergers with their internal organisation. The research has aimed at combining macro-oriented approaches to the professional service firms with grounded studies of the development of professions in consulting engineering companies. Corporate strategies and the role of knowledge management in European consulting engineering companies are discussed. In doing so, it focuses on strategies of large companies. Two Danish cases are presented where knowledge management strategies are intertwined with different responses to globalisation. The first has a multidisciplinary profile, with certain selected core competences. It has expanded internationally, has restructured its services in several countries and business areas and has attempted to support this by IT as a lever for virtualisation and accessibility of company knowledge. The second company operating with two selected core competencies has entered an alliance with a large global player in order to become stronger in its development of local innovative and knowledge intensive solutions. In doing so both companies' professionals experience a number of new dimensions to the development of their work. Knowledge management strategies of their companies urge them to formalise and transfer their knowledge as best practices, which in the first step is an endogenous process strengthening the existing professions, but also threatening them with an iron cage of “templates” preset procedures to be followed in an attempt to transfer knowledge from project to project and obtain cost reduction.