Knowledge Creation in Client-Consultant Interaction: A Case Study

Many organizations cooperate with and spend a substantial amount of money on consultants, among others in knowledge creation projects. However, little seems to be known about consultants' roles in knowledge creation projects. We aim to contribute to knowledge-creation theory and dialogue theory against the background of client-consultant interaction with our work. In addition, we hope to add value to organizations, as increased insight into the dynamics of knowledge creation between clients and consultants might help them to optimize their interaction. This paper describes a case study guided by the research question: How is knowledge created in client-consultant interaction? Based on our findings from literature, we argue that in their knowledge-creation interaction clients and consultants use a dialogical approach. In addition, we are inclined to think that a specific dialogical process is used. Moreover, we think that the interaction itself might be impacted by power dimensions. We explored the above and more in two different exploratory case studies, both of which concerned projects in which corporate strategies for energy companies were created with the help of consultants. We used semi-structured interviews with clients, project participants, and consultants, combined with document analysis. Our findings in these cases indicate that productive dialogues were indeed used, that a particular process can be recognized in the dialogues and that power resources seem to be used, although mainly by other people involved in the knowledge-creation projects. Our main suggestion for further research is to study more and more diverse cases to see if the findings from these two cases match findings from other cases. Moreover, we think an interesting research topic might be to study knowledge-creation interaction between larger groups of clients and consultants, to see if and how the group size impacts the use of dialogue processes, and power resources.