The purpose of this paper is to provide my general reaction to Brack, Jones, Smith, White and Brack's (1993) article on consultation processes and theory. This reaction paper includes an overall evaluation of the article's helpfulness in enhancing my understanding of the consultation process, a brief sampling of those practical implications that I believe can be derived from the article, and the theory I find most useful personally.
Regarding the foregoing, I found the article to be of strong heuristic value in that it provides a comprehensive overview of the conceptual underpinnings of how consultation is generally defined as a process. I found the presented overview to be so extensive and solidly backed (in terms of both logic and citations) that it can be used as a general framework for understanding the field of consultation and the importance of theory to the field. Although, of course, some theoretical views are not presented, it seemed that those views considered in the existing researh to be the major conceptual approaches are covered in the article.
Regarding theory, the authors present a sort of developmental perspective in that there is an attempt to show an evolving paradigm of consultation models. The models reviewed are: (1) theories based on the behavioristic perspective;
(2) theories based on the gestalt perspective (which is a humanistic/existential perspective); (3) theories based on the psychoanalytic perspective; and (4) systemic theories related to the organizational perspective.
One feature of the discussion of these theoretical perspectives that I found to be very helpful, both in terms of better understanding the models and in terms of deriving practical implications from them, is that each of the general theoretical approaches is followed by a summary section. This section delineates the major strength (and sometimes weakness) of each view.
The helpfulness of the summary section in t...