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Virpi-Liisa Kykyri, Risto Puutio, Jarl Wahlstrm
Calling in a witness: Negotiating and factualizing preferred outcomes in management consultation
Keywords: management consulting, Interaction, factualizing, discursive psychology, conversational analysis
This article examines how preferred outcomes are negotiated and factualized during organization development consulting conversations. Paradoxically, organizational performance in itself cannot actually be improved during the consultation conversations. Whatever changes there are to be made, they are to be sought within the conversational situation of consultation. Even the outcomes have to be negotiated and made visible for all participants. Using discursive psychology and conversational analysis, we show how interactional and discursive strategies can be used to achieve this in one consultation process. The consultant constructed what we call the position of a witness for some participants who were invited to talk about change. Such a position was constructed by defining the participant as someone who has knowledge about the issue under consideration, and as someone who can be seen as an independent observer whose words are not restricted in any way in advance. This position of a witness and the role of an audience were discursively utilized in factualizing preferred outcomes of the consulting process as convincing. To our knowledge, this kind of factualizing of preferred outcomes in consultation has not been studied earlier.
Text - Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse, Walter de Gruyter
Print ISSN: 0165-4888
Volume: 27, 03/2007
Pages: 201 - 224