Process Consultation Revisited: Taking a 'relational practice' perspective

Process consultation as conceived and reformulated several times by Edgar Schein constitutes a seminal contribution to the process of organization development in general and to the definition of the helping role of the consultant in particular. Under the pressure of a pragmatic turn in organizational change work, the practice of process consultation was fading away during the eighties and nineties. In some particular training and organizational consulting contexts nevertheless, the foundational principles and practices of process consultation are experienced to be more relevant than ever before. A relational constructionist theoretical lens, an emphasis on joint consultant–client practices, and a proper contextual embedding constitute a relational practice perspective that embodies in a new form and language those foundational ideas.status: publishe

Learning to help through humble inquiry and implications for management research, practice and education: an interview with Edgar H. Schein

For more than 50 years, Edgar H. Schein, the Sloan Fellows Professor of Management Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, has creatively shaped management and organizational scholarship and practice. He is the author of 15 books, including Process Consultation Revisited, Organizational Culture and Leadership, Career Anchors, Organizational Psychology, Career Dynamics, and Helping, as well as numerous articles in academic and professional journals. Novelty, clarity, and relevance have always been the guiding principles of his work. In this interview, Schein moves on from his key formative learning experiences to focusing on humble inquiry as the key to building and maintaining the helping relationship. Comprised of both a helper's attitude and behavior, humble inquiry embodies 'accessing one's ignorance' and becoming open to what the helper and the helped may learn from each other through observation, genuine empathic questioning, careful listening, and suspension of judgment. Schein not only identifies several challenges within management research, practice, and education, but also offers provocative recommendations to those involved.status: publishe

Inquiring Into Appreciative Inquiry: A Conversation With David Cooperrider and Ronald Fry

David cooperrider and ronald fry are professors of organizational behavior at the weatherhead school of management, case western reserve university (cwru). Cwru’s department of organizational behavior is consistently acknowledged as one of the best in the world by the financial times. Together with their mentor, suresh srivastva, they created appreciative inquiry (ai) over 30 years ago. Since then, ai has been extensively applied worldwide, and many exciting results have been achieved and published. This article is grounded in an in-depth conversation with david and ron at the world appreciative inquiry conference 2012, and subsequent discussions between 2012 and 2016. It focuses on how ai has been contributing to a generative scholarship and what new possibilities are on the horizon to strengthen these efforts. In the epilogue, we highlight contributions to current debates around generative scholarship, and offer recommendations to heighten the generative potential of ai and our field

Inquiring Into Appreciative Inquiry: A Conversation With David Cooperrider and Ronald Fry

David cooperrider and ronald fry are professors of organizational behavior at the weatherhead school of management, case western reserve university (cwru). Cwru’s department of organizational behavior is consistently acknowledged as one of the best in the world by the financial times. Together with their mentor, suresh srivastva, they created appreciative inquiry (ai) over 30 years ago. Since then, ai has been extensively applied worldwide, and many exciting results have been achieved and published. This article is grounded in an in-depth conversation with david and ron at the world appreciative inquiry conference 2012, and subsequent discussions between 2012 and 2016. It focuses on how ai has been contributing to a generative scholarship and what new possibilities are on the horizon to strengthen these efforts. In the epilogue, we highlight contributions to current debates around generative scholarship, and offer recommendations to heighten the generative potential of ai and our field

Disentangling approaches to framing in conflict and negotiation research: A meta-paradigmatic perspective

Divergent theoretical approaches to the construct of framing have resulted in conceptual confusion in conflict research.We disentangle these approaches by analyzing their assumptions about 1) the nature of frames - that is, cognitive representations or interactional coconstructions, and 2) what is getting framed - that is, issues, identities and relationships, or interaction process. Using a meta-paradigmatic perspective, we delineate the ontological, theoretical and methodological assumptions among six approaches to framing to reduce conceptual confusion and identify research opportunities within and across these approaches