This paper responds to the call for conducting more research within business schools to develop a better understanding of consultants. We explore the ‘manufacture’ of management consultants identities in this specific setting, focusing on micro-level processes of identity work. By conducting a 21-month ethnographic observation of management consultants' interventions in a Business School program, we provide an empirical case study on identity work and show how consultants draw on various interactions to construct, reinforce and reproduce consultants’ identities for and with students and teachers. We highlight three mechanisms by which consultants and the collective of actors create a professional, an expert and a ‘great people’ identity. Taken together, these mechanisms progressively reduce, from career generalities to individual values, the other possibilities of identification for students : we refer to this phenomenon as identity funneling. This paper contributes to a better understanding of how micro-processes of identity work are a key to understand consultants identity creation prior to entering consulting firms.
