D. Saint-Martin (2000). Building The New Man-agerialist State, Denis Saint-Martin OxfordUniversity Press, 0-19-924037-X. pp. 247.Internationally, there has been a wave of publicsector ‘reforming’ over the last twenty or so yearswith the rise of a new managerialism inside manypublic sectors. The growing role of managementconsultants in such public-sector reform is animportant phenomenon but one which has not sofar been subjected to sustained scholarly exam-ination. Saint-Martin refers in his recent book tothe rise of the ‘consultocracy’ in providing adviceto modern government. The consulting sector hasgrown considerably over this period out of itsoriginal base in accounting and audit services,and has developed a much stronger market andpresence within the public sector. Such consul-tants have more widely been an important vehiclefor importing ideas and techniques derived fromprivate-sector settings into the state, of courseunder political direction which indeed wantedpublic services to become more business like andoften mistrusted the advice of civil servants.Management consultants not only play a techni-cal function, but (Saint-Martin argues) animportant political function in supporting andstrengthening the hands of reforming Ministersagainst internal opposition.Saint-Martin (himself a Canadian academic)examines the increasingly close relationship be-tween an expanding consulting sector and govern-ment in this monograph. He examines thecomparative history and impact of managementconsultancy ideas in three jurisdictions: the UK;Canada and France. The UK is the high-impactcase (as it has been for wider managerialist ideas,Hood, 1995; Ferlie et al., 1996); Canada middleimpact and France the low-impact case. It is thefirst major empirical study in the role of consultantsin the marketization of State bureaucracies. It alsoadds usefully to the comparative literature which isemerging on international variation in publicmanagement reform (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2000).His thesis is that the impact of managementconsulting ideas in any one country depends on (i)the organizational development of the consultingindustry itself and (ii) the legacies of past policies ofbureaucratic reform which facilitated (or impeded)the access of consultants to political power centres.Cycles of managerializing reform can be tracedback to the 1960s (e.g. the Fulton Report in theUK), although they became more intense in themid-1980s. So the book examines the interactionbetween the supply side (the nature of the manage-ment consulting industry itself which shows a laterand slower growth curve in France than in Canadaand the UK) and the demand side (the willingnessand ability of governmental reformers to useconsultants as a source of advice). This is adifferent interpretation of the rise of consultingthan that which has stressed the key role played byNew Right governments–(the Mulhoney govern-ment in Canada was New Rightist but distrustful ofmanagerialism which it found politically dangerousas managerial ideas were here aligned with keypower centres in the legislature rather than theexecutive, notably the Office of the Auditor Generalwhich reported directly to their House of Com-mons); the crisis of the 1980s or the economicincentives facing consulting firms.Saint-Martin draws on political science con-cepts, applying them to a historical and com-parative study of three states. The book presentsthree comparative case studies where the unit ofanalysis is the interaction between governmentand consulting, followed by cross-case compara-tive analysis. One key conclusion is the rejectionof the globalization thesis of international public-sector convergence on a dominant Anglo-Americanmodel: ‘there is, in reality, not only no one domi-nant or ‘global’ pattern of adaptation but differentreform trajectories’ (p. 165). France is an inter-esting low-impact outlier. ‘in France, managerialistBritish Journal of Management, Vol. 14, S85–S87 (2003)