| dc.description.abstract | What usually goes unaddressed in the consultancy literature is an exploration of how
consultants make sense of their contributions in particular when they come to work in
politically laden contexts. Resulting conflictual debates with clients and colleagues
severely influence how their advice is responded to. Against this background, consultants’
ability to determine and predict future outcomes of their work is hardly problematized.
Additionally, consultants are mutually dependent on both colleagues and clients. This
dependency underpins power differentials and the struggle which arises when these are
contested can often take violent forms, such as misrecognition, humiliation or public
shaming. The central argument put forward in this thesis is that tolerating (the potential
for) misrecognition and/or for violence when goals are not met or when power fluctuates
is an important, yet rarely mentioned, aspect for being recognized as a consultant.
These aspects deserve as much attention as the often ideal-typical forms
management consulting is said to take in the mainstream management literature because
they speak to the irremediably incomplete and rather probabilistic nature of consultants’
advice, and the multiplicity of (often not anticipated or undesired) meanings their work
evokes.
In order to make sense of the flux and flow of organizational activity, the plethora
of responses such activity calls out and its attendant ambiguities are considered and
critically reflected upon. The theory of complex responsive processes of relating (Stacey, 2007, 2010; Griffin, 2002; Shaw, 2002), theories of recognition, (Honneth, 1994, 2008;
Kearney, 2003; Ricoeur, 2005), Hegelian dialectics and neo-pragmatist thought
(Bernstein, 1983, 1991) are provided as non-orthodox views on human organizing. A
perspective is proffered which pays attention to the inchoate, ambivalent and
indeterminate dimensions of organizing as a way to make sense of how these
simultaneously and paradoxically order, regularize, and normalize human activity.
Particular attention will be paid to negotiations which take place in microinteractions
to exemplify that it is not pre-planned human cooperation but the
intermingling of intentions of people who are mutually dependent on one another which
paradoxically gives rise to regular population-wide patterns and spontaneous change. To
make sense of what these insights mean for a practising consultant a view is offered
where our reflections (thought) on our interactions (practice) at once form and are being
formed by one another. An attempt is made to move beyond the practice/theory dualism
by taking a pragmatist view which claims that thought and action only ever arise together,
thus rendering an understanding of consultative intervention in which thought comes
before action idealized and rather dubious. It will be argued that the most important
contribution consultants can make is to try to stay radically open, and to try to keep on
exploring as long as possible the multiplicity of narratives which constitute the differing
perspectives of organizational reality. | en_US |
