HUB RESEARCH PAPER - Hogeschool-Universiteit Brussel

Process consultation revisited 13
various authors have theorized the importance of relational context, but their main focus almost
exclusively stays on high quality interactions as necessary constitutive elements of a change
process. What relational context can mean and, especially, ‘do’ to emerging relational practices
that bring about organizational and social change is hardly elaborated in literature and is scarcely
studied empirically. Hence, more attention to relational context is needed.
Summarizing, a ‘relational practice’ perspective focuses mainly on four aspects of
organizational and social change processes: (i) on the ongoing interaction of actors involved, (ii)
on the way of interacting or quality of interacting, (iii) on the relational context in which the
ongoing interaction is continuously embedded, (iv) and on how, by interacting, actors involved
bring about change. In the next part this perspective is illustrated and extended on the basis of
vignettes (short illustrations) concerning social interaction and intervention cases, from
experiences in a variety of settings, illustrating how relational practices work.
Illustrations of different forms of relational practices
We distinguish between illustrations from (a) social interaction settings in which the
functioning of relational practices is highly visible but in which ‘process consultation’ remains
implicitly present, in the background, and (b) intervention settings in which process consultation
is explicitly present as (inter)action and intervention perspective.
Social interaction settings: relational practices in which process consultation remains implicit
Organizing of differences. One of the authors has been experimenting with the metaphor
of polyphonic music to set up an international conference on multi-voiced organizing, the
organizing of differences. The polyphonic singing and the attunement of the choir were
introduced as a metaphor for collaboration and dialoguing. The most exciting session of that
conference was a public rehearsal session of this group of singers. Standing around one standard,