Meeting the Challenge of the Case: the Place of the Consultant

The paper explores the place or position taken up by anyone acting as a consultant. It is not primarily concerned with consultancy techniques, but with the ethical and epistemological assumptions which shape what the consultant does. The main work described is a series of workshops and its underlying assumptions about the nature of the consultant-client conversation. These assumptions underpin the design of the series, and two cases are used to show something of the process which resulted. In the authors view, the challenge of the case is always also a challenge to the consultants practice. They hope that they succeed in sharing something of this challenge with the reader.