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HEIDI MOLLER — KATRIN OELLERICH — DENISE HINN — SILJA KOTTE
scientific reflection but with the marketing of their own person or company””.
These depictions sometimes call to mind faith healing but make up the lion’s
share of the publications about organisational consulting. Scherf contends that,
in this way, consultants retain sovereignty over consulting literature. The self¬
explanatory logic of those advisors who are self-marketing and thereby have to
emphasise their success naturally produces a very specialised form of literature,
which nonetheless is also bought en masse.
The second group of consulting literature is the representation of a specific
consulting approach or a consulting theory: literature showing specific
methods and theoretical traditions. It describes how disciplinary knowledge
from sociology or psychology influences organisational consulting. The attempt
to transfer disciplinary knowledge into consulting works equally with a clear
interest in legitimation and application whose immediacy must at the least be
scrutinised.
In the third category he describes texts which aim at closing the gaps between
theory-driven consulting research and practice. Consulting is described from
the perspective of consultants or clients and the consultant-client relationship
is addressed, the laws of motion in the consultation market are sounded out,
the internal and/or external placing of consultants is described, and so on.
Finally, the fourth category of consulting publications is that of empirical
examinations of consulting processes. This category contains the fewest
example and therefore provides the least data'*. There are compelling structural
reasons for this phenomenon. On the one hand, this circumstance might be
due to the fact that consulting research is in its early days. We find a great deal
of individual research but there are few networks or research groups which
work together in a coordinated manner. This state of affairs is particularly
astonishing considering that we consultants are always talking about the
transformative functions of group-work. In our own research however we seem
to have a tendency towards going it alone.
On the one hand we find consultation concepts which are models of
unambiguous clarity; on the other hand there is a significant lack of empirical
2 Ibid., 32.
8H. Moller — S. Kotte, Die Zukunft der Coachingforschung, Organisationsberatung,
Supervision, Coaching, 4 (2011) 445-456.; S. Kotte - K. Oellerich — D. Schubert — H. Möl¬
ler, Das ambivalente Verhältnis von Coachingforschung und -praxis: Dezentes Ignorieren,
kritisches Beäugen oder kooperatives Miteinander? in A. Schreyögg — Ch. Schmidt-Lellek
(eds.), Die Professionalisierung von Coaching, Ein Lesebuch für den professionellen Coach,
Wiesbaden, VS Verlag, 2015, 23-45.
+ 46 +