Chapter 2 - Situating the Inquiry
2.1 The terrain of the argument
This chapter establishes the institutional, domain, and methodological terrain on which the rest of the thesis operates. Three moves are made: I anchor the definition of consulting in the Chartered Management Consultant (ChMC) framework, which provides the institutional architecture against which the analytical chapters operate; I characterise European infrastructure advisory as a distinctive domain with a public-interest inheritance that distinguishes it from generic management consulting; and I introduce the third box - the publics who bear the consequences of infrastructure decisions without holding the contracts under which they are produced - as the constituency to which the framework’s normative argument always returns. The chapter closes with the methodological position of reflexive practitioner research, which the thesis adopts and which carries both epistemic privilege and methodological burden.
Fourteen years advising on regulatory and strategic questions across European infrastructure - initially transport (rail privatisation sequencing in Central Europe, airport price control reviews in the UK and Netherlands), then energy (electricity distribution and gas transmission regulatory resets, primarily in France and Germany), and later water and environmental infrastructure. Work commissioned both by clients seeking strategic positioning and by European regulatory bodies assessing market structure. Practice conducted in English and French, with project-specific engagement in German, Dutch, and Polish regulatory contexts.
I write as a practising consultant in the European infrastructure space, with engagements across multiple subdomains in the family Chapter 4 will describe in detail. The reflexive position the thesis takes is not theoretical posture; it is the position from which the puzzle of contemporary advisory transformation became visible to me, and the position from which the analytical chapters develop their content. The methodological commitments this position carries are developed in §2.5.
The chapter is shorter than the analytical chapters because its work is institutional and methodological scaffolding, not analytical argument. The argument begins in Chapter 3, where the philosophical framework is assembled. The descriptive groundwork on which the framework is then deployed begins in Chapter 4. What this chapter does is establish the conditions under which the analytical work that follows can operate: the institutional anchor in the ChMC framework, the distinctiveness of the European infrastructure domain, the normative constituency of the third box, and the methodological position of reflexive practitioner research.
2.2 What I mean by consulting: the ChMC framework
The thesis is about management consulting in a specific institutional sense. To make this precise, I anchor the definition in the Chartered Management Consultant (ChMC) framework, the chartered-status framework launched in 2021 by the Chartered Management Institute and now operative in the United Kingdom and adopted in modified forms in adjacent jurisdictions. The framework provides what the existing literature on AI in consulting has not deployed: a chartered-status competency architecture against which professional progression can be analysed.
The ChMC framework has two components that matter for the thesis. The first is its four competency components. Ethics and professional standards covers the ethical commitments the consultant brings to engagements, the institutional norms of professional conduct, and the relationship between professional commitments and client expectations. Leadership and management covers leading engagements, managing teams, and exercising the institutional weight that senior practice carries. Client operating environment covers the understanding of the client’s institutional context, the political and regulatory environment within which the engagement operates, and the relational intelligence required to advise effectively in complex contexts. Personal and professional development covers how a consultant becomes a consultant: the formation pathway through which contributory expertise is developed, the institutional architectures that support continued development across a career, and the reflexive engagement with one’s own professional becoming.
The second component is the three-stage architecture of progression: Foundation, Applied, and Chartered. Foundation covers the first stage of professional progression, where consultants in their early career develop the basic competencies through engagement with formative tasks under supervision. Applied covers the mid-career stage, where consultants exercise autonomy on engagements, lead project teams, manage client relationships at working level, and produce the analytical outputs that have historically demonstrated the firm’s distinctive value. Chartered covers the senior stage, where consultants exercise professional judgment as their primary contribution, carry institutional weight in their firms, and engage clients at the level where strategic and consequential decisions are made.
The framework is institutionally available in a way that supports systematic analytical work. It defines what consulting is for the chartered-status sense the thesis uses, it provides the stage-by-stage architecture against which Chapter 7’s analysis operates, and it supports the comparison with adjacent professions in Chapter 6, which have their own chartered-status frameworks (the legal profession’s bar admission and seniority architecture, the engineering profession’s chartership architecture). Annex C develops the framework for readers who require detailed engagement with its institutional content.
Two limits of the framework as analytical scaffold need acknowledging. First, the ChMC framework launched in 2021 is relatively young; its institutional weight is developing, not yet fully established. Second, it works at a level of generality that requires elaboration for the European infrastructure context specifically. The thesis treats it as the institutional anchor it needs without claiming that its mapping is the only possible one; what it provides is a structured architecture that supports the analytical work the thesis undertakes.
2.3 European infrastructure advisory as a distinctive domain
The thesis is not about consulting in general. It is about advisory work in a specific family of subdomains within the European infrastructure space - transport, energy (including the particular case of nuclear), water, defence, environmental, social, built-environment, and urban. The family is treated as a coherent domain bound by shared features, while subdomain variation in regulatory weight, time horizon, stakeholder shape, and public-interest exposure is recognised throughout.
Amsterdam, 2022. An advisory team has produced a tightly argued recommendation on tariff efficiency for a Dutch drinking water utility. The DCF analysis is robust, the benchmarking rigorous, the recommended price trajectory defensible by any standard regulatory toolkit. Then the regulator’s legal team invokes the drinkwaterbesluit - the statutory requirement that drinking water be provided as a public service regardless of cost recovery. The recommendation is not wrong. It has been framed as if the firm is optimising a private service, when the regulator must account for universal access obligations that do not appear anywhere in the analytical model. The senior partner calls a pause. She does not say the analysis is wrong. She says: we have been advising as if the client’s constraint set is commercial. It is not. Let’s start again from what the statutory obligation actually requires. The recommendation survives the reframe. The framing does not.
The distinctiveness of European infrastructure advisory has three components that the thesis treats as constitutive of the domain.
The first is the public-purpose engineering tradition. European infrastructure has been shaped by an institutional tradition that treats infrastructure as serving public purposes - the provision of essential services to populations, the maintenance of social and economic infrastructure across decades, and what infrastructure is for as a matter of public policy rather than market provision alone. The tradition has institutional roots in the post-war reconstruction era, in the institutional architectures of European public utilities, in European urban and regional planning traditions, and in the wider continental tradition of public-purpose engineering that distinguishes European practice from markets where infrastructure is more thoroughly commercialised. The tradition is not uniform across European countries - French service public, German Daseinsvorsorge, Dutch publieke voorzieningen, the various national traditions of the Nordic and Mediterranean countries - but it shares content that I treat as constitutive of European infrastructure practice.
The second is the regulatory architecture for utilities. European infrastructure advisory operates within institutional architectures of utility regulation that recognise the public-interest character of the work. Energy and water are the most heavily regulated subdomains, with extensive institutional architectures of price regulation, service standards, and public-interest obligations. Transport is moderately regulated, with subdomain variation between rail (heavily regulated, often publicly owned or substantially state-supported) and road (less regulated, more market-based). Defence is institutionally distinctive, with regulatory architecture that operates through procurement, security clearances, and strategic-autonomy concerns. Environmental, social, and urban subdomains have variable regulatory architectures depending on the specific institutional context. Nuclear is a particular case of layered governance: heavily regulated at multiple levels (national safety regulators, international bodies, EU institutions), with content that is technical, political, and intergenerational simultaneously.
The third is the intensifying EU governance frame around climate transition and strategic autonomy. The European Green Deal, the EU’s strategic-autonomy initiatives, the AI Act, and adjacent EU policy frameworks have created an institutional architecture in which European infrastructure advisory operates within explicit commitments - to climate transition timetables, to strategic-autonomy considerations, to AI governance, to social-fairness requirements in transition planning. The architecture is not stable; it is developing under contemporary political pressure. But its content is part of what distinguishes European infrastructure advisory from advisory work in markets where these institutional commitments are weaker or absent.
These three components together produce a domain whose content is oriented toward public-interest practice in a register that generic management consulting framings do not reach. The advisory work is not only about analytical sophistication; it is about engagement with the institutional architectures of European public-interest practice. The framework the thesis develops is suited to this content, and the analytical chapters operate against it. The epistemological content of these features - what they mean for the character of practitioner knowledge and how that knowledge is reproduced - is examined in Chapter 4.
2.4 The third box
The thesis introduces the third box as a normative constituency that the framework’s analytical apparatus engages. The two boxes already operative in standard advisory framings are the consulting firm (the entity that produces the work) and the infrastructure client (the entity that procures and pays for the work). The third box is the constituency that bears the consequences of the work without being party to the contract under which it is produced - the publics whose lives are shaped by infrastructure decisions, including the future generations whose conditions of life are being shaped by decisions made now.
Berlin, 2021. A Deutsche Bahn station modernisation prioritisation engagement - a standard cost-benefit matrix, weighted by passenger volume and network criticality. The public consultation runs for eight weeks. Two hundred and fourteen responses arrive from disabled passengers in rural eastern Germany, most of them involving small stations the matrix has ranked low. They will not change the ranking: the numbers do not support it. But the regulator signals informally, in a conversation the senior consultant has with a mid-level official after a working group, that accessibility commitments in low-density areas carry political weight with the current Federal Government that has not been quantified in any document the team has been given. The stakeholder map had identified operators, regulators, and passenger advocacy groups. It had included BahnCard holders and business travellers as demand segments. It had not included mobility-impaired passengers in Saxony as a distinct constituency with political salience the analysis needed to account for. They had arrived uninvited, and they had changed the conversation, and they had not been in the model.
The third box has normative grounding in two philosophical sources the framework engages. The first is Dewey’s account of publics as constituted through shared consequences. For Dewey, a public is not a pre-existing political constituency but a group of people who come into political existence through their shared exposure to the consequences of decisions made by others. The grid interconnection commissioned by an energy regulator brings into being the public of those whose electricity supply depends on the interconnection. The water tariff reform commissioned by a utility brings into being the public of those whose household budgets depend on the tariff structure. The transport extension brings into being the public of those whose mobility patterns will be shaped by the network configuration. Publics are constituted by the consequences of decisions rather than by prior political organisation, and the institutional architectures of public-interest practice are partly architectures for engaging these constituted publics.
The second source is Jonas’s imperative of responsibility, which the framework engages in Chapter 3. For Jonas, responsibility extends to those whose conditions of life will be shaped by present decisions, including future generations whose interests cannot be represented through contemporary political processes. The infrastructure decisions European advisory work supports bind futures materially: a grid commissioned today, a water system commissioned today, a transport network commissioned today, will shape how people live across decades and in some cases across generations. The Jonasian framing extends the third box to include these future-generation publics whose interests are at stake even though they cannot participate in present decision-making.
The third box is institutionally invisible in standard advisory framings because it does not hold the contract. But I treat it as constitutive of the legitimate practice of European infrastructure advisory. The work the profession does shapes the conditions of life for publics who bear consequences without being party to the work, and the answerability of the profession to those publics is, in the framework’s reading, what distinguishes legitimate advisory practice from practice that has lost its grounding.
The third box is also a motif in the thesis - a recurring element that returns across chapters and accumulates content. It is introduced here, given philosophical grounding in Chapter 3, made operative in the descriptive groundwork of Chapter 4, made structurally consequential in Chapter 5’s political-economic argument, threaded through Chapter 7’s stage-by-stage analysis, examined across all four scenarios in Chapter 8, and engaged in Chapter 9’s recommendations. The recurring presence is intentional: the third box is the constituency the framework’s normative argument always returns to, and its visibility across the chapters is part of what I treat as important about European infrastructure advisory.
Annex B develops the third box, including its philosophical grounding in Dewey and Jonas, its operational consequences for advisory practice, and the distinction between the third box (the constituency) and third-box thinking (the analytical disposition the framework deploys throughout the thesis).
2.5 Methodology: reflexive practitioner research
The thesis adopts a reflexive practitioner research methodology. The methodology requires explicit declaration because the work is conducted from inside the profession it examines, and the epistemic claims it makes depend on what the position permits and what it constrains.
The methodological position rests on Schön’s account of reflective practice, which argued that competent practitioners do not merely apply theory to practice but reflect in action, generating and revising knowledge through engagement with the situations they confront. Schön’s framework remains foundational, but it has been criticised - particularly by phenomenologists who argue that it remains too cognitivist, treating professional knowledge as a matter of explicit reflection rather than embodied engagement with the world. For the thesis I draw on Schön for the basic methodological move (the practitioner has epistemic access that the external observer does not) while taking the phenomenological critique seriously enough to be cautious about what reflection alone can yield.
The methodological position carries both epistemic privilege and methodological burden. The privilege is access to material that external observers cannot reach: the texture of bids, the practical weight of deliverables, the political feel of client relationships, the quiet ways in which judgment is formed or foreclosed in daily practice. The burden is the obvious one - vested interest, motivated reasoning, the temptation to mistake one’s own situation for the situation of the field. Both are named, and the methodology is designed to honour the privilege while disciplining the burden.
Three methodological commitments follow from the position.
The first is honest naming of the position. I write as a practising consultant in European infrastructure advisory; the puzzle that drives the thesis is one I have lived; the lived material the analytical chapters draw on comes from my own practice, observation of colleagues, and the broader professional discourse I am part of. Where the analytical chapters draw on this material, I mark it. The marking is the methodological discipline that distinguishes reflexive practice from autobiographical assertion.
The second is engagement with the wider literature. The reflexive position does not exempt the work from engagement with the wider analytical conversation about AI in consulting, in adjacent professions, and in the philosophical literature on technics, individuation, responsibility, and tacit knowledge. The framework the thesis develops is suited to that wider literature, and the analytical chapters cite it. The reflexive position grounds the analytical work; it does not replace the engagement with the wider conversation.
The third is acknowledgment of limits. The thesis is reflexive and conceptual rather than systematically empirical. It does not include an interview programme, a survey of consulting practitioners, or a longitudinal study of AI adoption in firms. Its central claims are conceptual and normative, not empirical, and they should be read as such. The empirical validation of the framework’s predictions in the European infrastructure context specifically is one of the residual questions Chapter 9 identifies. The methodological position is sufficient for the analytical work the thesis undertakes; it is not the philosophically complete methodological framework the thesis points toward, and the limits are acknowledged, not concealed.
The methodology section here works at a working register. The deeper philosophical engagement - Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception and embodied skill, Dreyfus’s account of skill acquisition, the phenomenological grounding of reflexive practice in vocabulary that survives the cognitivist critique of Schön - is one of the components of the Chapter 3 bis the conclusion identifies as residual work. What is established here is sufficient for the analytical chapters that follow; the philosophical depth that would ground the methodology more is deferred to the residual work the thesis’s limits acknowledge.
2.6 The domain situated
European infrastructure advisory is a distinctive domain - not a general case of knowledge-work transformation. Its distinctiveness turns on three features: a public-interest inheritance in which the third box is a standing constituency, not an afterthought; the ChMC framework through which formation and professional progression are institutionally structured; and a European regulatory tradition whose content is at stake in ways the productivity framings of the AI-in-consulting literature cannot engage.
The methodological position follows from the domain’s character. Reflexive practitioner research is the position from which the puzzle became visible and from which its consequences can be specified. The inside carries both epistemic privilege and burden - access to what cannot be observed from outside, alongside obligations of transparency about where the inside cannot see.
Chapter 3 asks what philosophical apparatus this domain and this puzzle require - what conceptual resources make AI mediation’s effects on European infrastructure advisory visible in terms that address the third box, the sovereignty argument, and the formation question directly.