Consulting and liminality

A somewhat consistent refrain in my family life has been "this is David, my [fill in the blank for relationship]--he's a consultant, we have no idea what he does."  I've never been able to help much with this.  My wife has decided she has figured it out, that I get paid to annoy people. That is based on the fact that I sometimes exhibit behaviors that are considered to be "consultanty" and these are annoying.  "Consulting--don't try this at home."

Most writing about organizations talks about people who have what seem like more definable jobs. When the consulting profession, whatever it is, receives notice, it's never good.  So it was appealing to find Czarniawska and Mazza's article "Consulting as a Liminal Space" which treats consulting as a reasonably legitimate activity which actually has interesting characteristics that have implications beyond this peculiar, unexplainable activity.  

Czarniawska and Mazza look at consulting as a ritual activity that creates a liminal space within the organization in which people leave their set roles, enter a space where their roles are "temporarily undefined" and then reconfigure the organization and their roles into a presumably changed new state.  They note that in a lot of cases, the purpose of a consulting project is to get people or an organization back on track. A lot of projects may in fact be rituals not of transformation, but of renewal.  

The consultants themselves are in the liminal space on a more or less continuous base. Czarniawska and Mazza finger some of the characteristics of occupying that space--issues of autonomy (consultants need to reflect the will of clients), an external locus of control, and fragility of self-esteem.  They also capture how it can be energizing for the staff at the client--they get to leave their normal routines, and often find themselves being asked to think more expansively and creatively than is always possible in the course of their normal workday.  From the client side, the time on a consulting project can seem like a sort of holiday, even if it almost always is something that must be done in addition to regular duties. 

People who do consulting on a steady basis--not as an episode between "real jobs"--are choosing to stay in the liminal space, or find themselves stuck there, and that this is becoming a more frequent state for professionals in a world of gig labor.  The decline in stable workplaces has been noted and lamented, but these authors see it more ambivalently. "These studies found the liminal condition both exhilarating and frustrating, as workers were torn between the promise of freedom given by a (liminal) space, and the promise of stability given by a place" (286).  I was writing recently to a colleague, and in the context of an exchange about some current insecurities, I noted that long ago I made a choice for freedom and independence. I hope that on balance this has been to my benefit psychically.  It is very hard to be sure. 

Czarniawaska, B. and C. Mazza. 2003. "Consulting as a liminal space."  Human Relations, 56:3, 267-290.