Dramaturgical awareness of consultants through the rhetoric and rituals of cooperation
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine how rhetoric of cooperation is expressed and constructed during rituals of consultation and how this rhetoric is integrated into the consultant’s dramaturgical awareness that incorporates both impression management and the expression of self. Design/methodology/approach – This paper uses a discursive approach and semi-structured interviews with directors and consultants working in the healthcare sector, a sector that routinely employs consultants to accompany directors in organizational change management. Rhetoric is constructed around four narrative lines that also constitute the four ritualized phases of the consulting process. Findings – The mantra of “respect rituals of passage and avoid breaking frames” is an integral part of the consultant’s dramaturgical awareness throughout the process, so as not to infringe upon the order of the interaction established with the directors. Moreover, the development of cooperative relations with other members of the organization is based largely on a rather vast repertoire of action resources that the consultant will have to deploy to face four areas of uncertainty in the rites of interaction; namely, anticipation, interpretation, delegation and adherence. Furthermore, this cooperation is far from definitively acquired and must be reflected upon along the way to maintain control over the definition of the situation. This study expands upon the interrelations between the strategic actor and the reflective practitioner in a consultant’s dramaturgical awareness. Practical implications – Practical implications are highlighted using the notion of reflective contract (Schön, 1983) for managers as clients, the transcendental precepts of authenticity put forward by Coghland (2008) for consultants as practitioners, and progressive forms of critical theory performativity as suggested by Spicer et al. (2009) and Wickert and Schaefer (2015) for researchers. Originality/value – The concept underlying this study is dramaturgical awareness. It is a concept but sparingly explored in the literature, yet nonetheless present among advocates who promote organizational dramaturgy based on the work of Goffman. This concept is linked to Crozier and Friedberg’s theory of the strategic actor and Schön’s theory of the reflective practitioner.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it