"The client is always right" - How PR consultants respond to institutional pluralism

Sammanfattning: This thesis advances the fairly nascent literature on how individuals respond to institutional pluralism by studying how Public Relations (PR) consultants relate to their clients. Consultants in general - and PR consultants in particular - act in a unique institutional context, where they must act in consideration of each client's institutional logic, as well as their own. Despite this fact, and the ubiquity of consultants in organizational life and the broader academic literature, they have received strikingly little attention within the institutional logics literature. To address this gap, we conduct a qualitative study of PR consultants in Sweden. We find that PR consultants actively strive to understand client logics, while remaining at an arm's length distance. This intermediary closeness enables them to combine their own logic with the client's logic through surface-level adaptation practices, and thereby steer the client to action.