HUB RESEARCH PAPER - Hogeschool-Universiteit Brussel

Process consultation revisited 27
processes attention should be given to how relational practices, with a certain quality, are
assembled. High quality relational practices that aren’t assembled constructively are not
sufficient to bring about sustainable organizational and social change. Simultaneous attention to
the quality of separate relational practices, the relational embeddedness of practices, and the way
practices are assembled is necessary. This seems especially relevant in all settings of
organizational and change and development in which relational practices have to be (re)created
and assembled (also with stabilized ‘daily’ relational practices) to bring about new
interdependencies, new knowledge, new tasks and roles, new memberships, new communities of
practice, new structural arrangements, etc.
A focus on relational practices for sustainable organizational and social change processes
can be considered as a recent actualization of the inspiration of the founders of organizational
psychology. In the sixties, organizational psychology developed from the theoretically and
practically strongly developed domain of group dynamics (Schein, 1965). The training group
tradition generated the process consultation practices and principles, and developed further into
the organizational development methods (cf. Addison-Wesley series on Organizational
Development, edited by Edgar Schein and Richard Beckard). The seventies saw a worldwide
spread of these organizational approaches, but from the eighties on, what was called the value-
laden basis of organizational development (Neilsen, 1984) became a hindrance for consulting
and research practices, looking mainly for even more global forms of competitive advantage.
The functional restructuring turn in the nineties could not preserve so well the process
consultation orientation, and the crucial role of values and vision on organizational change
theorizing became even polarized (Beer & Nohria, 2000).