Agency and discourse: Recruiting consultants in a life insurance company

This paper applies the work of Gallon in attempting to explore the relation between discourse and agency in an analysis of the hiring of management consultants by a large life insurance organisation, 'Lifeco': The data focus on the recruitment and deployment of management consultants within Lifeco, and explore the actor network relevant to this process. As well as examining the 'moments' of translation within the network, attention is paid to the degree of longer term 'convergence' (Gallon 1991) around the consultant's work within Lifeco. Whilst acknowledging the advantage of Gallon's work to exploring agency and discourse, the paper remains critical of certain aspects of his theorising, especially the question of access to particular locations in an actor network.