THE CONSULTANT'S INFLUENCE ON GROUP VALUES

Abstract

In this essay, we define the consultant as a valuable resource for groups, so long as the value she adds strikes a just balance among the interests of the group and its members. It focuses on the relationship between consultants and groups, which is as important in voluntary organizations as it is in the conventional consultant's field of industrial organizations. Managerial and professional groups contract for consultancy as part of the serious business of maintaining, but also of renegotiating, the values that are so important to members. The essay explores one way in which the consultant can play an influential part in helping a group to renegotiate its values. This essay explores the issue of the effective appropriation of consultancy by groups. By the "consultant," we mean someone whose services are bought by groups and organizations for such purposes as lending weight to their policies, adding a new skill that is lacking, identifying the real problem, or offering a mechanism by which a strategy or change may be brokered. Different terms are used, and the categories differ, but it appears that, based on such accounts at least, and bearing in mind more sophisticated attempts to legitimize the role of the industrial consultant in particular, a certain degree of congruence can be established among the descriptions. If that is so, then we are confronted with a largely generalized model of consultancy that can be discussed in respect of some significant categories: consultants' roles, the interests served, and their techniques of persuasion. In the essay, we provide a set of operational definitions. What is the profession of "consultancy"?