1.Introduction

In contemporary organisations, management practices are increasingly related to shaping the flows of information, ideas and resources for the sake of organisational success. This means that the managers of the organisation are expected to reflect and analyse organisational activities, processes and human relations in order to gain a systemic understanding of the workings of the organisation that, in turn, forms a basis for short- and long-term decision-making. These views can be traced back to a shift from positivist management models towards relational and constructivist approaches that emphasise the situated and interpersonal nature of organising and leadership (e.g. Cunliffe and Eriksen 2011Cunliffe, Ann L., and Matthew Eriksen 2011 “Relational Leadership.” Human Relations 64 (11): 1425–1449. ). In constructivist management literature, managing organisation has been referred to as “critically reflexive practice” (Cunliffe 2016Cunliffe, Ann L. 2016 “Republication of ‘On Becoming a Critically Reflexive Practitioner’.” Journal of Management Education 40 (6): 747–768. ) that takes into account the socially constructed nature of the social world and recognises the ways in which organisational realities are embedded in everyday social encounters. Similar to other practitioners, the managers of the organisation thus have to learn to view their social worlds in socially organised ways that form the basis of their professional scrutiny, namely, allow them to perceive how organisation as a living system is constituted and steer its course accordingly.

In this paper, we approach this special kind of organisational perception as the core essence of managerial expertise and examine how it is developed in the context of management training and organisational consulting. More specifically, by drawing on an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approach, we analyse the ways in which the managers’ tacit knowledge concerning their organisation is transformed into codified knowledge concerning managing in and through situated training practices.

Our data come from a management training where the steering groups of an educational organisation took part in the training program provided by a consulting company specialising in management and organisational development. In terms of managerial expertise, the training context of our data represents a complex setting for two reasons. Firstly, the consultant delivering the training is not familiar with the client organisation or their specific field, resulting in the negotiation of knowledge between different professions and the relevance of that knowledge. As noted in prior research, organisational consulting is typically based on the prevailing management theories (Czarniawska and Massa 2013Czarniawska, Barbara, and Carmelo Massa 2013 “Consulting University: A Reflection from Inside.” Financial Accountability & Management 29 (2): 124–139. ) which are renewed and disseminated in the training, the primary site of consulting (Nissi and Hirsto 2021Nissi, Riikka, and Heidi Hirsto 2021 “Policing Language in the World of New Work: The Commodification of Workplace Communication in Organizational Consulting.” Applied Linguistics Review. Published Ahead-of-Print. ). However, throughout its history, consulting has also faced criticism and challenges regarding its legitimacy (Von Platen 2018Von Platen, Sara 2018 “Communication Consulting and Consultancies.” In The International Encyclopedia of Strategic Communication, ed. by Robert L. Heath, and Winni Johansen. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ). This is particularly the case in contemporary organisations where the consulting practice emphasises the client’s own agency and focuses less on providing solutions to the clients’ problems than assisting the clients in their own professional reflection (Nissi and Hirsto 2021Nissi, Riikka, and Heidi Hirsto 2021 “Policing Language in the World of New Work: The Commodification of Workplace Communication in Organizational Consulting.” Applied Linguistics Review. Published Ahead-of-Print. ). Secondly, although all the steering groups include a headmaster who holds a formal managerial position in the organisation, the groups operate on the principle of distributed leadership and all the group members take part in organisational sense- and decision-making, resulting in the negotiation of their mutual knowledge concerning the organisation.

In this paper, we investigate how these negotiations of knowledge become visible in training interaction as the steering groups accomplish the training assignment where they learn to classify their own managerial actions with the help of the coding scheme provided by the consultant. Therefore, we adopt an interactional perspective on expertise and show how managerial expertise as a nexus of different kinds of knowledge is composed and shaped by the training participants as they publicly display and update their understanding of the coding scheme on a turn-by-turn basis. Our paper thus contributes to previous research on the interconnections between knowledge, expertise and social interaction (see Arminen, Koole and Simonen 2021). In particular, it sheds light on the interactional practices of organisational consulting and management training as an institutionalised format for producing expertise concerning organisational management.

2.Knowledge and expertise in professional contexts

Categorising and coding are an intrinsic part of professional practice and the work of many professionals is thus highly dependent on the classification of specific phenomena, such as diseases in medical professions (see Bowker and Star 2000Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star 2000 “Invisible Mediators of Action: Classification and the Ubiquity of Standards.” Mind, Culture, and Activity 7 (1–2): 147–163. ). In social interaction, categorising and coding can be seen in the use of various coding schemes, identified by Goodwin (1994)Goodwin, Charles 1994 “Professional Vision.” American Anthropologist 96 (3): 606–633. as a central aspect of professional expertise. Coding schemes are often materialised as textual and visual objects, such as tables, grids or forms that the professional is expected to fill in a context-relevant way. A case in point is Goodwin’s (2000)Goodwin, Charles 2000 “Practices of Color Classification.” Mind, Culture, and Activity 7 (1–2): 19–36. own study on archaeologists’ practices in categorising dirt, its colour in particular. The categorisations are written on a form, and the archaeologists use the Munsell colour chart in determining the colour of the dirt. In the medical field, Slack et al. (2007)Slack, Roger, Mark Hartswood, Rob Procter, and Mark Rouncefield 2007 “On Professional Vision and the Lived Work of Mammography.” In Orders of Ordinary Action: Respecifying Sociological Knowledge, ed. by Stephan Hester, and David Francis, 175–193. London: Routledge. have shown how, in mammography, doctors use a detailed form to mark what they see in the scan. In airports, security operators similarly use a classification system in screening X-ray monitors for different kinds of security threats (Bassetti 2021Bassetti, Chiara 2021 “The Tacit Dimension of Expertise: Professional Vision at Work in Airport Security.” Discourse Studies 23 (5): 597–615. ). Such tools are also employed extensively in management practices. For example, Hughes et al. (2002)Hughes, John A., Mark Rouncefield, and Peter Tolmie 2002 “Representing Knowledge: Instances of Management Information.” British Journal of Sociology 53 (2): 221–238. investigate how managers in a bank make sense of the performance of their departments to upper management with what they call the “Management Information Pack” where information is compiled in specific ways.

In our management training data, the consultant also provides the trainees a special kind of textual aid – a fillable grid – in order for them to make sense of their organisational reality through coding. In our analysis of training interaction, we show how the participants orient to three different aspects of knowledge in filling the grid: the nature of access to the knowledge, domain of knowledge and the distinction between knowing-that and knowing-how. In this section, we will review earlier studies of these dimensions of knowledge, and make remarks on how they are related to expertise in general and coding as an expert practice.

Access to knowledge has been an important feature of conversation analytic discussions of epistemics. In her classic paper, Pomerantz (1980)Pomerantz, Anita 1980 “Telling My Side: “Limited Access” as a “Fishing” Device.” Sociological Inquiry 50 (3–4): 186–198. divided our rights to know things into two categories. Type 1 knowables are those to which there is first-hand access, experience of what one is talking about whereas type 2 knowables are topics where the speaker does not have first-hand experience. This distinction has been shown to be important in professional contexts. For example, Gill (1998)Gill, Virginia Teas 1998 “Doing Attributions in Medical Interaction: Patients’ Explanations for Illness and Doctors’ Responses.” Social Psychology Quarterly 61 (4): 342–360. has shown how, in the medical context, the patient is treated as knowledgeable vis-à-vis her/his experience, while the doctor’s sphere of knowledge has to do with medical knowledge of, for example, the causes and effects of illnesses. Studies of coding practices show how access is an important prerequisite to doing the coding. For the archaeologists, for example, access to the dirt is extremely concrete: in order to investigate the colour of the dirt, they hold the specimen in the viewing holes of the Munsell chart with their trowel and compare the colour of the dirt to that of the chart (Goodwin 2000Goodwin, Charles 2000 “Practices of Color Classification.” Mind, Culture, and Activity 7 (1–2): 19–36. ). Readers of mammograms (Slack et al. 2007Slack, Roger, Mark Hartswood, Rob Procter, and Mark Rouncefield 2007 “On Professional Vision and the Lived Work of Mammography.” In Orders of Ordinary Action: Respecifying Sociological Knowledge, ed. by Stephan Hester, and David Francis, 175–193. London: Routledge.) or airport security (Bassetti 2021Bassetti, Chiara 2021 “The Tacit Dimension of Expertise: Professional Vision at Work in Airport Security.” Discourse Studies 23 (5): 597–615. ) have access to the object of scrutiny through images.

Hughes et al. (2002)Hughes, John A., Mark Rouncefield, and Peter Tolmie 2002 “Representing Knowledge: Instances of Management Information.” British Journal of Sociology 53 (2): 221–238. show how access is also important in the management context: the managers compile management information packs about their own area of responsibility and are expected to know what goes on there. In a similar vein, Angouri and Bargiela-Chiappini (2011Angouri, Jo, and Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini 2011 “ ‘So What Problems Bother You and You Are Not Speeding Up Your Work?’ Problem Solving Talk at Work.” Discourse & Communication 5 (3): 209–229. , 214) maintain that decision-making in organisations is inextricably connected with “the local history of workplaces”. The issue of access may, however, be complex in the workplace setting as it has to do with immaterial experiences and entail work-related knowledge about how work tasks have been accomplished in the organisation. Moreover, such experience may be oriented to not only as part of the managers’ but also other personnel’s expertise and used, for example, as a basis for resisting organisational changes (see Nissi and Lehtinen 2016Nissi, Riikka, and Esa Lehtinen 2016 “Negotiation of Expertise and Multifunctionality: PowerPoint Presentations as Interactional Activity Types in Workplace Meetings.” Language & Communication 48: 1–17. ). In the case at hand, the trainees display their access to knowledge of and experience in their organisation as they fill in the grid and negotiate about its content.

The second dimension that we want to highlight is that of knowledge being related to specific domains. Heritage (2012)Heritage, John 2012 “Epistemics in Action: Action Formation and Territories of Knowledge.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 45 (1): 1–29. addresses this issue through the concept of ‘epistemic status’, namely, socially sanctioned restrictions on who is entitled to know about which issues or domains of knowledge. This is related to the question of experience, as it can be thought that experiences are the knowledge domain of the person with the experience, but the question of epistemic status has wider repercussions as different professionals are usually treated as having epistemic rights with regard to their professional domain. Rights to specialised knowledge is what Sarangi and Roberts (1999Sarangi, Srikant, and Celia Roberts 1999 “The Dynamics of Interactional and Institutional Orders in Work-Related Settings.” In Talk, Work and Institutional Order: Discourse in Medical, Mediation and Management Settings, ed. by Srikant Sarangi, and Celia Roberts, 1–57. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ; also Sarangi and Candlin 2011Sarangi, Srikant, and Christopher N. Candlin 2011 “Professional and Organisational Practice: A Discourse/Communication Perspective.” In Handbook of Communication in Organisations and Professions, ed. by Christopher N. Candlin, and Srikant Sarangi, 3–58. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ) see as the core of professions. This is highly relevant for professional coding practices in that the coding tools often epitomise the professional domain with its specific perspective on the issue. For example, the screening reporting form in the mammography screening contains information that is deemed relevant from the medical perspective.

The domains of knowledge become especially salient in multiprofessional contexts where different professionals are expected to contribute to the tasks at hand from their own perspective (e.g. Housley 2003Housley, William 2003 Interaction in Multidisciplinary Teams. London: Routledge.). Workplace teams are often put together in order to achieve multiprofessional co-operation (Angouri 2018Angouri, Jo 2018 Culture, Discourse, and the Workplace. London: Routledge. ). In such contexts, professional domain may be intertwined with the issue of access, having or not having experience of the workings of an organisation. A case in point is Nissi and Lehtinen’s (2016)Nissi, Riikka, and Esa Lehtinen 2016 “Negotiation of Expertise and Multifunctionality: PowerPoint Presentations as Interactional Activity Types in Workplace Meetings.” Language & Communication 48: 1–17. study of PowerPoint presentations in workplace meetings having to do with a development project, in which both the presenters and the audience are professionals. The presenters, however, are outside experts, while the members of the audience are employees from various units of the organisation. They are treated as knowledgeable vis-à-vis their respective professional domains, but importantly, also, through having experience of working in the organisation. The presenters orient to this expertise through asking questions about the experiences of the audience members, and the employees themselves sometimes draw on their experiences when making critical comments vis-à-vis the presentations. A somewhat similar case is Svennevig’s (2011)Svennevig, Jan 2011 “Leadership Style in Managers’ Feedback in Meetings.” In Constructing Identities at Work, ed. by Jo Angouri, and Meredith Marra, 17–39. London: Palgrave Macmillan. study of employees’ reports to the superior about their areas of responsibility in an intra-organisational meeting: the superior’s access to the topic of the reports is treated as more indirect than that of the employees. This is seen in how the superior makes requests for clarification before he diagnoses the situation and gives directions. The intertwinedness of professional domain and access is highly relevant in our case. While the consultant is treated as primarily knowledgeable vis-à-vis the managerial knowledge in the coding scheme embedded in the assignment, he lacks access to the processes of the particular organisation where that knowledge should be applied.

Lastly, we come to the third dimension of knowledge that we see as relevant in coming to terms with expertise, namely, the distinction between ‘knowing-that’ and ‘knowing-how’. This distinction has been famously presented by Ryle (1946)Ryle, Gilbert 1946 “Knowing How and Knowing That: The Presidential Address.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 46: 1–16. , who argued that these forms of knowledge are distinct in that knowing-how cannot be reduced to knowing-that as doing things in a skillful way is not an operation of blindly applying a known set of facts. Instead, the expert performs the activities themselves in a skillful manner. The problem of knowing-how has also been central in ethnomethodology. Garfinkel (1967)Garfinkel, Harold 1967 Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall., in his early writings, was interested in ‘ethnomethods’, that is, the procedures through which people accomplish their – both lay and professional – daily activities. Such procedures can take a myriad of forms. For example, Sarangi (2010)Sarangi, Srikant 2010 “Healthcare Iteraction as an Expert Communicative System: An Activity Analysis Perspective.” In New Adventures in Language and Interaction, ed. by Jürgen Streeck, 167–197. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. sees professionals’ interactional skills as an example of this kind of knowing-how. As Holmes and Woodhams (2013)Holmes, John, and Jay Woodhams 2013 “Building Interaction: The Role of Talk in Joining a Community of Practice.” Discourse & Communication 7 (3): 275–298. show, learning appropriate ways of talking and interacting is an important part of becoming part of a professional community. At the same time, knowing-how may entail physical activities such as handling dirt with a trowel by an archaeologist (Goodwin 2000Goodwin, Charles 2000 “Practices of Color Classification.” Mind, Culture, and Activity 7 (1–2): 19–36. ). Professional procedures are important with regard to coding practices as well. Arriving at a professionally appropriate code or filling a form in an appropriate way is the result of professional techniques, practices and negotiations. For example, Slack et al. (2007)Slack, Roger, Mark Hartswood, Rob Procter, and Mark Rouncefield 2007 “On Professional Vision and the Lived Work of Mammography.” In Orders of Ordinary Action: Respecifying Sociological Knowledge, ed. by Stephan Hester, and David Francis, 175–193. London: Routledge. describe the techniques such as magnifying or measuring some parts of the pictures that professional readers of mammograms use in order to make sense of the pictures. Williams (2007)Williams, Robin 2007 “The ‘Problem of Dust’: Forensic Investigation as Practical Action.” In Orders of Ordinary Action: Respecifying Sociological Knowledge, ed. by Stephan Hester, and David Francis, 195–210. London: Routledge., in his study, shows the methodical character of how crime scene examiners make sense of what they see in the scene. Hughes et al. (2002)Hughes, John A., Mark Rouncefield, and Peter Tolmie 2002 “Representing Knowledge: Instances of Management Information.” British Journal of Sociology 53 (2): 221–238. describe how arriving at a particular management information pack is an accomplishment where material from a wealth of different sources is woven into a coherent story.

The centrality of knowing-how does not, however, make knowing-that unimportant. Professionals also orient to explicitly stated principles and ‘facts’. Often what is in the forms, tables or grids is this kind of theoretical knowledge. For example, the Munsell chart can be seen as that kind of knowing-that theoretical knowledge that is turned into practical knowledge through the expert work of the archaeologists (see Goodwin 2000Goodwin, Charles 2000 “Practices of Color Classification.” Mind, Culture, and Activity 7 (1–2): 19–36. ). As we already noted, such a material aid is used in our data as well. The consultant presents the relevant managerial knowledge in the form of a fillable grid that entails a specific coding scheme. Using this aid, however, requires skill as it is not just a mechanical task of marking down certain organisational phenomena but rather a complex activity of learning to perceive those phenomena in everyday organisational life with the help of the scheme. This is the kind of skill the trainees in our data are learning to master as part of their managerial expertise: how to apply a coding scheme entailing general, theoretical knowledge to the local conditions of their particular organisation. Managerial expertise is, thus, for us, the skill of applying theoretical managerial knowledge to the everyday reality of the particular organisation the manager is in charge of.

3.Data and method

Our data come from a management training where steering groups of a Finnish educational organisation – a school district responsible for providing comprehensive education – took part in the training and development program provided by a private consulting company. The overall target of the training was to advance participatory leadership culture within the organisation. The training lasted for eight months and was arranged as specific training days that took place at schools or external meeting premises and were attended by one-two consultants and between 80 and 250 trainees, namely, employees that came from different schools and represented their steering groups with five-six members each. The steering groups were led by headmasters who typically had some management qualification while other steering group members were school teachers. Although the headmaster was officially in charge of the organisational decisions, the issues related to those decisions were discussed in steering group meetings and in some schools the other group members were in charge of other work groups. In collecting the data, all the training days were observed ethnographically and video recorded in their entirety, leading up to forty-five hours of video data. In video recording, three steering groups and the consultant were followed more closely by using several cameras and separate microphones.

During the initial analysis of the data we noticed that all the training days were based on regular activities such as the consultant’s lectures and group assignments. Especially the latter ones were very salient throughout the data and took the most part of the time during the training days. In group assignments, (1) the consultant issued to the groups a request to reflect on their professional practices and (2) the groups undertook the task and discussed the given issue. All the assignments aimed at enhancing the managerial expertise of the trainees but focused on different aspects of managerial work depending on the theme of the training day. In this article, we focus on an assignment that took place during the training day that focused on managing well-being at work. This particular case was chosen for a more detailed analysis for the reason that in that the consultant provided a material coding scheme for the use of the trainees, and this, in turn, made the situated negotiation of knowledge and expertise very perceptible. For the analysis section, we have chosen excerpts from different phases of the process of carrying out the assignment to best illustrate the before mentioned negotiation.

Methodologically, we rely on multimodal conversation analysis. This means, foremost, that we conduct a sequential analysis of the data (see Schegloff 2007Schegloff, Emanuel A. 2007 Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ). Sequentiality can be seen in the training activity in two ways. Firstly, we analyse the design of the consultant’s request turn and what kinds of interactional trajectories it creates for the accomplishment of the assignment (cf. Levinson 2013Levinson, Stephen C. 2013 “Action Formation and Ascription.” In The Handbook of Conversation Analysis, ed. by Jack Sidnell, and Tanya Stivers, 103–130. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.). Secondly, we look at the sequential unfolding of the actual group discussion as the trainees respond to the consultant’s request and orient towards accomplishing the task given. Regarding expertise, the training activity thus brings forth the dual negotiation of knowledge peculiar to the training setting – between the consultant and the groups as well as between the group members.

A multimodal perspective, for its part, means that we do not only look at the spoken contributions of the participants but also how embodied action such as gaze, gestures, and handling of physical objects contribute to the sequential activity (see Mondada 2016Mondada, Lorenza 2016 “Challenges of Multimodality: Language and the Body in Social Interaction.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 20 (3): 336–366. ; Nevile et al. 2014Nevile, Maurice, Pentti Haddington, Trine Heinemann, and Mirka Rauniomaa 2014 “On the Interactional Ecology of Objects.” In Interacting with Objects: Language, Materiality, and Social Activity, ed. by Maurice Nevile, Pentti Haddington, Trine Heinemann, and Mirka Rauniomaa, 3–26. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ). This is because, as mentioned above, we focus on a case where the consultant’s request is delivered both verbally and visually in the form of a coding scheme. This coding scheme is presented as a table and projected on the screen of the training hall as well as drawn by the groups on a sheet of paper (see Table 1).

The table presents a classification of managerial actions related to well-being at work: in the columns, these actions are divided with regard to the measures taken (‘reactive’, ‘preventative’ and ‘successful’ actions) while in the rows they are divided with regard to the dimensions of well-being (actions that have to do with ‘health’, ‘efficiency’ and ‘profitability’). In the request, the consultant asks the groups to reflect their own organisational issues and managerial responses – discussed already earlier during the training day – and place them in the right boxes. In the analysis, we will examine how the grid as a textual artefact entailing a specific coding scheme is used as a resource for setting and accomplishing the training assignment but also treated as troublesome by the groups, thus forming a material basis for the negotiation of knowledge and expertise within the training activity.

4.Construction of managerial expertise through the task assignment

In the following sections, we will examine the interactional construction of managerial expertise from the viewpoint of access, domain and know-how within the task assignment of the training. The subsections of the analysis are thus organised according to the sequential unfolding of the assignment. At first, we will analyse the way the consultant formulates the request that projects the accomplishment of the task and topicalises the coding scheme of the grid. After that, we will focus on the actual accomplishment of the assignment and examine the ways in which the group members orient to filling in the grid and organise their mutual work through specific interactional practices.

5.Conclusion

In this article, we have analysed the interactional construction of managerial expertise in a specific context: management training provided by a consulting company. In the training, the steering groups of an organisation were given a task of reflecting on their managerial actions related to well-being at work and categorising them by using a specific coding scheme. We thus defined managerial expertise the skill of applying theoretical managerial knowledge to the everyday reality of the particular organisation the steering groups are in charge of. From this viewpoint, the training context of our data is illustrative in that it makes the mutual negotiation of knowledge between the group members observable. In addition, the group’s knowledge can be juxtaposed with the knowledge of the consultant. We approached the case at hand with the help of a conversation analytic method and investigated how the participants displayed their orientation to different kinds of knowledge and negotiated the mutual relations between knowledge systems as part of their effort of constructing managerial expertise in and through situated training practices.

In previous conversation analytical research, expertise has often been approached through the notion of professional domains of knowledge (e.g. Heritage 2012Heritage, John 2012 “Epistemics in Action: Action Formation and Territories of Knowledge.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 45 (1): 1–29. ; Nissi and Lehtinen 2016Nissi, Riikka, and Esa Lehtinen 2016 “Negotiation of Expertise and Multifunctionality: PowerPoint Presentations as Interactional Activity Types in Workplace Meetings.” Language & Communication 48: 1–17. ). Also, ‘expert knowledge’ has been distinguished from experience-based ‘lay knowledge’ (Heritage 2013Heritage, John 2013 “Epistemics in Conversation.” In The Handbook of Conversation Analysis, ed. by Jack Sidnell, and Tanya Stivers, 370–394. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.). However, we have argued for a more multi-dimensional approach to the relationship between knowledge and expertise. In our analysis, we showed that the use of the coding scheme the training assignment is based on is contingent on connecting general managerial knowledge to specific and local knowledge of the particular organisation, displaying access to organisational processes and activities and moving from knowing-that to knowing-how type of knowledge.

As for the domains of knowledge, they are often realised as coding schemes that may be materialised in tables, grids and standardised forms. In the training, such a scheme – materialised in the form of a fillable grid – represents the classification of organisational phenomena from the viewpoint of managerial knowledge and is construed as a learning object for the trainees. In setting the task, the consultant positions himself as the epistemic authority with regards to the managerial knowledge of the scheme by framing the task as potentially challenging for the trainees and by offering help. The trainees also orient to the consultant’s specific knowledge regarding the scheme by asking for help after displaying difficulties in understanding the descriptions used in the grid. Utilising such a scheme, however, is not just a mechanical task of marking down certain organisational phenomena but rather a complex activity of learning to perceive those phenomena in everyday organisational life with the help of the scheme. Therefore, it is not only managerial knowledge that is utilised by the trainees in accomplishing the assignment. They also use knowledge in their specific professional domain, namely, educational domain where the consultant, for his part, does not display any expertise either in the initial request or in providing help.

A related issue is that of access. The managerial expertise the steering groups are expected to learn is contingent on having access to the daily life of a particular organisation. It is because of that access that the trainees can recognise the ‘social facts’ of their organisation and elaborate on the ‘social facts’ to various degrees. However, their access to organisational issues also varies and is not directly related, for example, to their organisational position. As the group work unfolds through the interactional structures of proposals, questions, and responses to these actions, the group members display their access to organisational phenomena and thus negotiate their mutual knowledge with regard to the task given. The consultant, on the other hand, does not claim any access to the life of the organisation: he gives generalised examples of practical managerial expertise but does not provide direct advice.

Finally, managerial expertise requires applied knowledge, proceeding from knowing-that to knowing-how. In our case, the managerial knowing-thats were materialised in the grid. However, as mentioned, the whole aim of the training has to do with applying this knowledge: the trainees need to learn to categorise phenomena in their organisation by finding connections between the descriptions of the grid and their organisational reality. While this aim is already present in the initial request turn of the consultant, it is also the dimension of knowledge that is visibly resisted by the trainees. This brings into the spotlight the core challenge of the training: the trainees need to do this application and find the relevance of the coding scheme in their own right. As we saw in our example, their own area of expertise can act as a mediating link in resolving this challenge. That is, the trainees can use methods for categorising phenomena derived from their own area of expertise, in this case the educational domain, in order to apply the knowing-thats of the grid for the purposes of their own organisation.

As discussed in the introduction, in current organisational cultures, managing organisation is often expected to be based on ‘reflexive practice’ so that the managers’ expertise largely consists of analysing organisational phenomena in a systemic way and making decisions accordingly (e.g. Cunliffe 2016Cunliffe, Ann L. 2016 “Republication of ‘On Becoming a Critically Reflexive Practitioner’.” Journal of Management Education 40 (6): 747–768. ). In this article, we have looked at the construction of such managerial expertise in action and analysed how the training participants display their orientation to different types of knowledge in trying to learn this special kind of organisational perception but also resist the task and their role as ‘trainees’. On the broader level, the training thus also demonstrates the mutual relations and boundaries between different professions with their expert areas. As mentioned earlier, consulting as a profession has often faced problems of legitimacy (Von Platen 2018Von Platen, Sara 2018 “Communication Consulting and Consultancies.” In The International Encyclopedia of Strategic Communication, ed. by Robert L. Heath, and Winni Johansen. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ), particularly in contemporary organisations where the consulting practice emphasises the client’s own agency and problem solving (Nissi and Hirsto 2021Nissi, Riikka, and Heidi Hirsto 2021 “Policing Language in the World of New Work: The Commodification of Workplace Communication in Organizational Consulting.” Applied Linguistics Review. Published Ahead-of-Print. ). Our analysis has shed light on the roots of these problems, namely, that the expertise of the consultant is not free-standing but necessarily overlaps with the expertise of other professionals and is actually dependent on it. In this way, its relevance has to also be negotiated in situated ways in each professional encounter.