The Consulting Arcade: Walking Through Fetish-Land
Steffen G. Bohm. Tamara : Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Science. Las Cruces: 2003. Vol. 2, Iss. 2; pg. 20, 17 pgs

Abstract
This paper presents autobiographical images of management consulting that are juxta posed with a variety of historical images of modern capitalism. The method employed in this paper, montage[1], has been inspired by Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, which is amaterialist philosophy of the history of modernity that was constructed with ‘utmost concreteness’ out of historical material of the Parisian arcades. In my view Benjamin’s Parisian arcades have transformed into global arcades of world-integrated capitalism and the ‘consulting arcade’ is one empirical example of such. The dialectical juxta positioning exercised here aims to engage with consultancy work by investigating its fetish structure and dream-like existence that nevertheless produces very ‘real’ subjectivities. What follows then is the attempt of ‘I’, a modern subject, to make sense of an experience, as hock. Benjamin once wrote to his friend Scholem: “It’s like me being right in the arcades myself”.