Helping Clients to Help Themselves

Kykyri, Virpi-Liisa Helping Clients to Help Themselves. A Discursive Perspective to Process Consulting Practices in Multi-party Settings Jyväskylä, University of Jyväskylä, 2008, 76 p. (Jyväskylä Studies in Education, Psychology and Social Research ISSN 0075-4625; 330) ISBN 978-951-39-3082-0 (PDF), 978-951-39-3071-4 (nid.) Finnish Summary Diss. This study approaches process consulting work as conversation. The commonly shared ideal of process consulting is to help clients to help themselves. To follow this ideal, active client participation and collaborative work between the consultant and the clients in handling the client’s problems are needed. The aim of this thesis is to find out how this is done through talk: what kind of talk is used in process consulting interaction and how is this achieved during multi-party consulting conversations. More specifically, it is asked what kind of discursive activity was used in multi-party settings to bring about active client participation, to facilitate learning and change by bringing about and handling criticism and blame, and to make preferred outcomes noticed within the participating group. Using the perspectives and methods of Discursive Psychology and Conversational Analysis, it is asked how this is done in an authentic process consultation case. This thesis consists of three articles in which situated discursive practices of process consulting are analyzed in detail. Findings of this case study show the rich variety of discursive means that were utilized in multi-party consulting settings to bring about talk, which is needed to put into practice the process consultation ideal of helping clients to help themselves. These are: conversational structures requiring participant’s turn-by-turn responses with which some talk was marked as preferred and this preferred talk was invited; and conversational means like “fishing” or “factualising devices”, which were used e.g. to strengthen the reliability of speakers and to construct the factuality of descriptions about witnessed change and outcomes of the consulting process. This thesis focuses on multi-party settings of process consulting practices and as such, it highlights the significance of client-consultant collaboration and the role of the audience. I claim that, the interactive audience of this case was used as a method in implementing the process consulting ideals and bringing about the needed talk. In doing this, it is suggested that there is a need to construct and establish conversational norms that deviate from more mundane multiparty conversational settings. In this thesis it is shown how the norm of displaying ownership and the norm of not avoiding face-issues were constructed and utilized for consulting purposes of this case. This study describes in detail the actual discursive practices of process consulting in a way that has not been done before. The findings about what was done in this case are situated and case-specific, but, the findings about how what was done was done can have transportability across other consulting and organization development settings. They can be used in developing the practices and procedures of process consulting work. In addition to that, the findings of this thesis are of interest in depicting the picture of process consulting work as a professional institution and, in conceptualizations of client-consultant role in general.