Mutual construction and reconstruction in client-consultant interaction

Based on preliminary interviews with client representatives and a pilot case study, the pa-per explores collaboration and mutual construction in client-consultant relationships. Both consultants and client actors take part in an active construction and reconstruction of knowledge that involve struggles over position, power and control. In the context of client-consultant interaction, it is thus not only ideas and solutions that are contested but also the power to define. Attention is paid to how ideas are brought into play and negotiated in the interaction between actors. The empirical material presented in the paper illustrates how consultancy projects evolve through processes of negotiation over whose interpretation should count and who should be in control. In the process, client actors with different posi-tions and interests play an active role in creating what become valid and what ideas are appropriated.