Lucy van Eck
The consultant will see you now: Exploring the role of consultant knowledge practices in Dutch healthcare
Health Care Governance, Erasmus School of Health, Policy and Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. I. Wallenburg, Dr. MJC Aspria, Dr. RLE Wehrens
Background
Lucy van Eck has a background in critical sociology and public administration. Since 2025, she is working as a PhD researcher at the Erasmus School of Health, Policy and Management, conducting ethnographic research on how consultants shape and legitimize values of ‘good care,’ with a particular focus on the epistemic dimensions of their work. Her research explores the role of knowledge in societal practices and how it influences different articulations of public issues. Her work brings a creative and critical lens to the role of knowledge in society, with an eye for how it affects diverse social groups and the imaginaries that guide public sector transformation.
Content
Consultants have become key actors in the infrastructures of healthcare reform, yet their influence often remains opaque and unquestioned. This project explores the epistemic and performative practices of healthcare consultants in the Netherlands: how they construct and enact their professional identities, and how they make their knowledge appear legitimate and indispensable. The project investigates how healthcare consultants’ activities contribute in shaping what counts as “good care.”
The project departs from on the one hand functionalist and on the other system-level critiques of consultancy that view consultants either as neutral experts or as ritualistic performers. Instead, it adopts an ethnographic, practice-oriented lens to examine the micro-level work through which consultants produce value and visions of healthcare futures. The research conceptualizes consultancy as both identity work and knowledge work; as a site where expertise is actively staged, negotiated, and materialized in interaction.
By tracing how consultants navigate tensions between neutrality and normativity, standardization and flexibility, or stability and fluidity of knowledge and identity, the project sheds light on the contingent, situated practices through which healthcare consultancy shapes organizational change. It asks: What do consultants actually do in practice? How do their actions and knowledge claims come to be seen as valuable in healthcare reform? And what normative visions of care are stabilized, and which are excluded in the process?
Methodologically, the research combines document analysis, interviews and observation into an engaged ethnography to study consultancy across diverse healthcare contexts. In doing so, it contributes to STS scholarship on expertise and knowledge-making in high-stakes, value-laden domains. It also opens space to reflect on the often taken-for-granted role of external advice in defining what healthcare is and ought to be.
