A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Hertfordshire for the degree of MA by Research. The programme of research was carried out with the Business School’s Complexity and Management Centre, University of Hertfordshire.
By Claus Have, Dacapo Teatret
A question about what it may mean to be a ‘responsible’ consultant is the central point of this thesis.
Traditional perceptions of responsibility in consultancy as well as in other professional fields have been individually situated. The autonomous consultant, whose agency is entirely a subjective matter, has after due deliberation undertaken a task and set the course of action, and is in the end the one to be blamed or praised in light of success or failure. We have been either ‘responsible’ or ‘irresponsible’.
This idea of individual responsibility has recently been countered by a perspective of relational responsibility, which focuses attention on the intelligibility of human agency in terms of movement and dialogue. Activities take place within interrelationships and have meaning or purpose only within that context. ‘Responsibility’ here is not a static concept, but rather fluid, its meaning arising in social interaction. However, agency is not easily identifiable in this paradigm, which doesn’t seem to take into account power differentials and conflict.
My emerging research focus is coming to challenge those two traditions. Instead of seeing responsibility as something reified – something we can take, give or have; and then act upon – in different time and space, I have in the course of research come to see responsibility as essentially emergent patterning processes of social interaction. Intrinsic to social interaction is interdependence and tension – understood as power relations and conflict – both as social aspect and as conceptual aspects.
I argue that the consultant is constantly at risk of ‘sacrificing’ or ‘betraying’ interlocutors in the struggle to be morally responsible in a broader sense. Whenever we try to be responsible, we are potentially acting in an irresponsible way. We can’t always accommodate all conflicting responsibilities at the same time, so eventually we have to choose. Choice relates to how we incorporate attitudes of the particular and the generalized other to our self-consciousness. And choice reflects how we are being responsible.
The complete thesis is to be read here
