Modern consulting between messianism, foolism and medialism
Sigrid Duschek, University of Luzern
Ralf Wetzel, Chemnitz University of Technology
Intended organizational change management follows own rules, and it seem to be one of the last ‘resistant’ areas to modern management. If we take the unsilencing ‘noise’ about organizational change seriously, we just could interpret this that the way to manage change is more open and unexplored than ever. That’s even more the case, if consulting is involved, although the illusion is launched steadily, that consulting could cut the Gordian knot of organizational change. As the few empirical research on consulting effects to management shows, the consequences of consulting in organized change are manifold and – not surprisingly – infrequently congruent with the original intentions. That diagnosis is due to the manifold enmeshments.
Consulting faces an extreme demand in treating unsolvable social problems in organizing, managing and trouble-shooting in daily live. That appears not only in the field of psychic (therapy) organizational (OD, organizational consulting) and individual (social work) problems. Consulting seems to bee the one-for-all-solution and one of the last remaining reference points in problem treatment at all. But according to modern social theory - could they be more - or something different - than fallen messiahs?
Perhaps this is linked with the point of reputation and foolism. Actually, there are remarkable indications, that consulting could work as a modern form of fools for and in organizations. In analogy with the medieval forms of fools, they mostly represent and ‘inject’ some form of temporal alternativity, they open up the difference between advice (time injection) and deed (action) for systems to reflect. In that sense, Consulting appears as a ‘foolish technology’ for ‘reflex suppression’. So they slip into a special role and functionality which obviously has survived the transition of different forms of differentiation of society.
In that way, consulting looses its rational and intentional imperative and it could gain, with a specific sensitivity, a medial imperative, which means that consulting could offer themselves as ‘mediums for organizational imprinting’. Introducing alternativity into organizations means to allow organizations to use consulting as vehicle for their own sensemaking efforts, to be sensitive for the actual and latent communicative strains within the organization.
So, could consulting survive that systematic overestimation as much as the perspective of effectlessness? Are they neither messiahs nor fools, but simply losers? The paper illustrates the overestimations, the functional foolishness and medial qualities of consulting in an empirical case, shows instructive theoretical modes of description and gives an outlook to conditions and principles of an appropriate form of consulting.