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RESEARCH ON CONSULTING — WITH, FOR OR AGAINST PRACTICE?
consulting research". This also follows a system. If we go by Baecker", research
and consulting are first and foremost closed autonomous systems and entirely
different from each other. Taking a look at the aims and underlying values of
these two systems clarifies this all too well. The aim of consulting is to make a
system capable of acting or to keep it in that state. Science on the other hand
is allowed (for a certain period of time) to remain in a state of ignorance, of
distraction, of unpleasantness and of criticism. As consultants in a system it
is our task and duty to uphold the system’s capability to act — even if in the
meantime we unsettle and confuse the organisation, which is a principle of
systemic consulting. Lastly it is a matter of absorbing this uncertainty and to
this end, consultants fall back on somewhat simple models.
Even if we as scientists allow ourselves to continually raise the level of
complexity, as consultants we must keep within the following limits: the
capacity of the organisation members (and consultants) to make sense of it.
While we in the consulting business make our money with double-dealing
(absorbing uncertainty and replacing it with new models), the comparatively
sparse research funds flow much more by means of increased complexity
and further differentiation, at least when it is not commissioned research.
This makes for communication barriers between the practitioners and the
scientists because scientists pursue different aims, for instance boosting their
own reputation, and naturally the best way to achieve this is by increasing
complexity, not by reducing it.
There are two inherently different fields of knowledge which cannot simply
be integrated into each other: expert knowledge and scientific knowledge. The
generation of knowledge is not independent of the construction of reality via
the consultants’ day-to-day lives and their training institutions on the one
hand and the universities as research facilities on the other. A recourse to
research-generated knowledge by consultants is in no way a given, since: “The
probability of any kind of knowledge being rejected can be explained by the
fact that both the view of reality of the social system in which the knowledge
is being communicated, as well as the system itself which constructs this
reality and not another, is at stake.”’*. The knowledge which consultants use in
practice and which they consciously or unconsciously ignore would itself be
another demanding though rewarding research question. “Experts know and
4 H. Moller — S. Kotte — K. Oellerich, Wissenschaft und Praxis — ein unauflösliches
Spannungsverhältnis? Coaching Magazin, 1 (2013) 35-39.
15 D. Baecker, Zum Problem des Wissens in Organisationen, Organisationsentwicklung, 3 (1998)
4-21.
16 Ibid., 15.
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