Client–Consultant Interaction The Client-Consultant Interaction in Professional Business Service Firms: Outline of the Interpretive Model and Implications for Consulting

In this paper, we analyse and seek to understand the complex relations that occur between clients and consultants during consulting projects. The paper uses ideas from Schön’s model of the “reflective practitioner” to propose a new model conceptualising the client-consultant team as a community of interpretive communities. We show that client and consultant belong to different interpretive communities, and have, thus, difficulties to understand each other and share knowledge. An effective knowledge transfer and creation between client and consultant presupposes that the involved actors reflect on their own interpretations and perspectives on topics and share them with others. This is a process of translation between different interpretive communities that often enables new worldviews and simultaneously creates power positions within the client-consultant team. Thus, we extend Schön’s model and embed it into a broader theoretical framework, proposing a more sophisticated picture of the client-consultant interaction.