This paper reports on the perceptions of consultants in consulting situations in less industrialized countries (LICs). Twenty-one consultants in the United States and ten consultants in Canada were interviewed in depth. They were asked to describe their experiences and give vignettes pertaining to periods of their consultations overseas and also to respond to a set of specific questions. Most of the Americans had worked in Southeast Asia in the area of public health and medicine, while the Canadians had experience working in Africa, Latin America and Europe in various areas. The responses of these consultants provide us with rich facts and insights into the process of consulting and knowledge of the variables in the consulting situation which may prove useful to project managers in both regions of the world.

Our concern with consulting and project management stems from our understanding of the development process in LICs and from our awareness of the fact that multinational teams engage in Research and Development projects. These teams investigate and resolve problems of local, regional and international concerns in growing numbers every year. We maintain that these two activities - investigating and attempting to find solutions to pressing problems - are facts in global life today. The movement of consultants, advisors, and experts across cultures and nations has increased in recent years and perhaps will continue to increase at a steady rate, although, perhaps, the economic downturn will likely be an adverse factor, at least for 1998-99.

Further we note that project managers do not operate in isolation; their interaction with others is embedded in the contexts of international R and D organizations whose activities, in turn, reflect the totality of international relations at a particular time. This is also the case with consultants and the consulting organizations. Factors such as who seeks consultation, from whom, when, under what conditions, and with what purposes, objectives and goals give specific character to a particular consulting situation. Thus both consultants and project managers interact with others in a specific social situation while performing their respective roles. It is clear to us that the definition of the social situation is often problematic, and that roles of consultants and project managers would be likewise problematic. Further we observe that consultants' interaction with others differs in many ways from the interaction which the project managers experience. One of the differences is that consultants are involved in performing narrower and specialized roles, whereas the project managers' responsibilities are much broader and comprehensive in scope. Therefore, it is our contention that insights and facts provided by consultants can be meaningfully utilized by project managers at various levels of their operations. One can fully appreciate the point being made here by familiarizing oneself with some of the basic ideas underlying symbolic interactionist approach to human behavior or conduct.

Briefly, the symbolic interactionist approach emphasizes the fact that human conduct or behavior is a product of human interaction which always takes place in a social situation. Human beings, through their own acts and interactions with others, either maintain or change the structure of social situations in which they find themselves performing several tasks. Each individual self enters into social situations with certain forms of awareness or social consciousness. The others, too, enter in the situations with their own respective forms of social awareness or consciousness. This implies that human interaction is always purposeful and qualitatively different from interaction among animals. In human beings, social act or behavior is an outcome of complex processes of perceiving, thinking, articulating, interpreting, and forming lines of actions in mind. This means that before and while human beings act they take into account the actions of others in the social situations. Thus, human behavior is not merely a function of those individual psychological qualities which individuals bring into interaction, but function of the interaction itself. Blumer has rightly argued that many social scientists have failed to recognize the significance of interaction by treating it as "a mere forum through which sociological or psychological determinants" result in certain behavior. As opposed to this, he argues that interaction "forms human conduct, instead of being merely a means or a setting for the expression or release of human conduct." And human conduct cannot be comprehended apart from the actual contexts in which it occurs. What interests us here most is the fact that what individuals actually do (in this case the consultants and project managers) in social situations (e.g. consulting or project management situations) and how they do what they do are crucial factors in comprehending human behavior and its social consequence.

Several methods are suggested by scholars to study how people carry out their activities in various social situations. A method suggested by Lofland includes the following four steps:
 

1. Getting close-up to people actually acting some place in the real world and developing intimate familiarity (with them and their situation),

2. Focusing on and delineating the prime or basic situation the scrutinized people (i.e., those people who are actually acting) are dealing with or confronting,

3. Focusing on and delineating the interactional strategies, tactics, and so on, by means of which scrutinized people (in our case consultants and project managers) are dealing with the situation (e.g., consulting) confronted,

4. Assembling and analyzing an abundance of qualitative episodes into disciplined abstractions about the situation and strategies delineated.

If we decide to follow the above method we will have to be physically present with consultants in their consulting situations in order to comprehend how consultants in various cross-cultural and international situations interact with others, evolve new behaviors, and carry out their roles. Obviously, this style of participation-observation research is time consuming and expensive. Surely, this kind of qualitative research will enhance our understanding of consulting process. However, given the financial and time constraints all we could do is to try "getting close up to people..." who have actually acted somewhere in the course of their career. In our case these people are, as mentioned earlier, thirty-one consultants who were interviewed in depth in an informal setting.
 

The total number of consultants interviewed was thirty-one. Out of this twenty-one were based in an American University and ten were working in a Canadian University. There was only one female in the Canadian sample while there were four females in the American sample. All of them except three females in the American University have an M.D. or Ph.D. in their respective fields. The age range of these consultants was between thirty-nine and seventy years. Most of them were in their late forties. Either by birth or naturalization the nationality of twenty-one consultants in America was American. Similarly the nationality of consultants in the Canadian University was Canadian. The first language of all the consultants was English except for four. A number of them were bilingual or multi-lingual. Most of them were Christian. Only six were of Asian extraction; the rest were White. The consultants in the American sample had spent relatively more years overseas in a cross-cultural situation than the consultants in the Canadian sample. In the American case the range was three to fifteen years while in the Canadian situation the range was one to three years. Only two consultants in the Canadian case had more than fifteen years of experience working in a cross-cultural situation. All of the consultants had secured positions at their respective universities and had published number of articles and reports.
 

All thirty-one consultants were asked to describe their experiences and give vignettes pertaining to periods of their consultation overseas (i.e., what do you think about the consulting situation?). In addition, ten consultants in the Canadian university were asked fifteen more questions (see Appendix A).

The remainder of this paper is concerned with analyzing, classifying, describing the experiences of these consultants, and formulating "working hypotheses" or generalizations which we hope will help project managers (1) in identifying and contracting appropriate consultants, (2) in evaluating their roles in a given situation, (3) in designing needed educational and training programs for consultants, and finally (4) in making project management more effective.

Responses to the open-ended question (What do you think about the consulting situation or what is your perspective of the consulting situation? Please describe your experiences and give vignettes as consultant) are classified into two broad categories:
 

A. Conditions under which consulting services are requested.

B. Problems that are encountered in delivering consulting services.
 

The analysis of the data informs us that consultations occur under three general conditions. The first condition is that of rapid socio-economic changes at the international level. Forces of change require fundamental restructuring of the existing social and cultural institutions of less industrialized countries (LICs). Put in another way, increasing global interdependency (social, economic, political, cultural and legal) creates a need for obtaining consulting services by the LICs from the ICs. The ICs in turn are interested in delivering these services for various social, political, cultural, and above all economic reasons of their own. Therefore, it is not very surprising to witness growth of huge consulting organizations in the ICs both in the private and the public sectors. These organizations are contracted for delivering varieties of services to LICs by various international agencies such as UNO, WHO, World Bank, to name a few. The consulting services are delivered on short or long term basis. The objective and subjective nature of dependency of LICs on ICs influence the exact mode in which consulting organizations deliver their services.

Secondly, the need for consulting services arises when there is a crises situation of personal and social nature; that is, when those in authority and power come to perceive that something is lacking (e.g., basic knowledge, technical know-how, material resources, legitimizing authority, professional and peer support, etc.) in their situation which is undermining their capacity to mobilize human and natural resources available to them in solving pressing problems that they are facing. These authorities feel this stress manifests a sense of urgency. Their resorting to requesting consulting services is a last minute rescue operation. The expectations of those who request consulting services are that outside consultants will somehow bail them out of a difficult but temporary situation. The consulting organizations and those agencies who contract them are well aware of this condition of their clients and in many cases do not hesitate in taking advantage of this situation for their own benefits. Thus in many cases consultants are hired on ad hoc basis without having any long-term perspectives on their role in a program or project. However, ad hoc recruiting of consultants serves other latent functions of these consulting and donor organizations.

Thirdly, consulting services are sought when there is a bond of "brotherhood" among consultants and consultees. That is, depending upon previous acquaintances and institutional linkages experts at national and international levels seek consultation from each other for professional support and for enhancing one's status, prestige and power in a stratified social order. The point is that there now exists a community of consultants at national and international levels with its own network, culture and sub-cultures, with an interest in creating conditions for growth and survival.

B. Problems in the Consulting Situation

Our analysis shows that consultants encounter many problems. Some of the most important problems they identified are classified in these six categories: (1) problems related to purposes, goals, objectives and implications of consulting, (2) problems related to organizations of consulting agencies, (3) problems related to local social structures, (4) problems related to lack of supportive systems, (5) cultural misunderstandings as a problem, and (6) factors contributing to other problems in consulting situations.
 

1. Problems Related to Purposes, Goals, Objectives and Implications of Consulting
 

In their interviews all consultants indicated that one of the major problems in consulting situations is to clarify purposes, goals and objectives of consultations. Expectations surrounding consulting situations are often not clear to those involved in it. For example, contracting agencies (i.e., donor agencies like FAO, World Bank, etc.), consulting agencies, and the counterparts in the LICs (receiving or requesting party) usually tend to have unrealistic goals which cannot be operationalized under the existing national and international institutional arrangements. In many instances consultants do not understand the language (i.e., the format of proposals, documents, business letters, etc.) in which the counterparts request consulting services. On the other hand clients do not know what sorts of services they should precisely be requesting and therefore expect consultants to perform miracles.

The consultants interviewed pointed out that some provision for rational discourse on the contingent and ultimate ends of consulting is necessary in order to arrive at a common definition of goals, purposes and objectives for which consulting services are requested and offered. Contingent ends are those social goals which are characteristic of a particular historical period. Even when these goals are realized they do not provide the conditions for individual fulfilment. Ultimate ends point to those social conditions which both permit and encourage the fulfilment of individual life. Increase in GNP is a contingent end but the well-being of all human beings in an interdependent world is the ultimate end. Utility is contingent; loving is ultimate. In general, social relationships are contingent when human beings involved become things or objects in the eyes of another, and therefore are subject to exploitation. These relationships are also perceived by many in consulting situations as anti-human, abstract, and alienated. On the other hand ultimate ends are trans-historical, in the sense that they are grounded in attributes of the human species and not in a specific social or cultural forms. Ultimate ends strive to overcome the vast network of historical and socially conditioned conception of reality in order to create conditions in which it becomes possible to transcend alienated social relationships. In the absence of trans-historical ends, consulting services run into the risk of becoming mechanical, positivistic, and alienating because consultants, consultees and project managers are involved in interaction by necessity. That is, they are interacting in order to merely survive rather than to freely and consciously choose creative activities which extend, develop, and realize those social relationships which are non-exploitative and free of distortion. This does not mean that contingent and ultimate ends are mutually exclusive. Indeed, they are dialectically related. What should be then the basic motivation underlying consulting and project management? The answer may lie in the comment of one of the consultants who said that "ultimately we got to preserve humanity." By this she meant that it is the effort to create the conditions necessary to realize human ends that should be the basic motivation in consulting and project management.

Situations in which a shared definition of the contingent and ultimate goals is lacking (which are part of the total environment in which consulting services are provided) lead to several other problems related to consulting. Three problems can be isolated from the interview data: problems related to training of local participants; problems surrounding evaluation, effectiveness, credibility and accountability of consulting. Each of these problems is briefly discussed below.

First, problems related to training were discussed in relation to duration of the consulting assignment and the life of the project. Generally, it was mentioned that either a consulting assignment should be of short term (six weeks or less) or long term (at least two years). In certain cases repeated short term (two or three weeks) visits by consultants were considered beneficial in the sense that this pattern did not make consultees dependent on outside consultants and thus avoided the dependency syndrome of the counterparts on the consulting services. Some consultants believed that ideas can be communicated in a short period of time, that a mere presence of a consultant beyond a certain time does not do any good, that minimum guidance is required after initial consulting had taken place, and that it is good to leave the local counterparts alone and let them take care of their own problems.

On the other hand, those consultants who visualized long term assignments as more beneficial pointed out that in short term, one-shot consultation, no provision is made to train the client in specific areas of competencies. Also, there is no provision for up-grading the skills of clients and for follow-up consultations to ensure that the client has attained the required or needed skills. Instead of reducing dependency, one-shot consulting situations tend to perpetuate it. The clients are usually overwhelmed by the mystique surrounding consultants (i.e., the feeling that consultants know the answers and will "fix" our problems). This encourages some consultants to feed on the situation. This is specially true in cases where the clients do not know how to use the consultants to their advantage because consultees lack competencies required to challenge and evaluate consultants' activities. Consequently, it is not uncommon to note that some consultants destroy local organizations and "kill" programs and projects without damaging the market for consulting services. There are many levels at which consultees can be trained. High levels of training programs should also be available to consultees so that they can learn those competencies and skills which will allow them to deal with high powered consultants confidently, who also play a decisive role in the setting up of evaluation criteria and the definition of effectiveness. Thus, the credibility and accountability of consultations tend to be located in the structure of sponsoring agencies and not in the client agencies. As a result of this, consulting often becomes a unclear and one-sided activity in which there is no room for learning and feedback. That is, generally there is no adequate built-in mechanism in a consulting situation whereby the client could set up meaningful procedures for evaluating the consultant's report. Further, sponsoring organizations tend to have built-in requirement for a certain amount of consultation.

Secondly, the question of who defines the needs for consulting services is an important one in the discussion of problems surrounding evaluation, credibility, and accountability of these services. Too often needs of clients are dictated by the sponsoring agencies which give their own employees some degree of role flexibility and mobility. On the other hand, consulting organizations too, once contracted, tend to create continuous need for their own kind of consulting services. Thus, marketing of consulting packages is often an integral part of the overall operations of consulting and contracting organizations.

A project manager needs information on a number of questions related to the organizational and task environments of both consulting and contracting organizations. Some of these questions are: What are the factors that make consulting and contracting organizations behave in the above ways? How do these organizations manage to penetrate the clients' situations and create needs for constant flow of consulting contracts? How are the institutional structures of these organizations linked with the overall global structures of interdependency? What role do consulting and contracting agencies play in global interdependency? Under what conditions does consulting become a two-way learning process? What are implications of two-way consulting situation for selection and training of consultants and evaluations of their activities? As far as we are aware little research exists which throws light on such questions.
 

2. Problems Related to the Organizations of Consulting
 

In ICs consulting organizations exist in the public and private sectors of the economy. Within these organizations consulting services are packaged, presented, and delivered to the clients in different modes. The structure and functions of these organizations affect the delivery of consulting services - both in terms of quantity and quality - and each mode of delivering services has its own consequences for the client's situation.

Usually, consulting services are delivered to the client at three different levels: primary, secondary, and tertiary. At the primary level consultants are asked by the client to get involved in the planning process of a project from the very beginning. On the other hand, at the secondary level consultants are asked to focus their efforts on explaining to the client what had gone wrong with the planning process and to interpret the recommendations of the previous consultants. In other words, at the secondary level consultants are often asked to perform a "cleaning up" operation. At the tertiary level of involvement, consultants are requested to legitimize the planning process and give visibility, respect, and status to the project. Thus consultants' roles vary according to the level at which the consulting services are requested and delivered.

Another point which the consultants emphasized during their interviews is that consulting takes place at village, town, city, district, region, state, national, and international levels involving different degrees of technical and professional expertise. All these factors make consulting process a complex reality and have various implications for contracting consulting services by the client.

One of the problems in contracting consulting services is certain attitudes of consulting organizations. Usually each consulting organization had developed its own standardized system of delivering its services based upon certain beliefs and assumptions. One such assumption is that its own system of delivery, with minor changes, can be perfected to serve requirements of clients everywhere. By basically ignoring the complexity of a client's changing environment (social, political, cultural, economic and legal) this notion of packaging consulting services somehow perpetuate the secondary level of consulting at the expense of client's resources and ignorance.
 

3. Problems Related to the Organization of the Local Institutions
 

Other problems of consulting are related to the organization of local institutions. Often there are internal rivalries and competition among local institutions which are reflected in the local politics. It is not uncommon to observe that long drawn-out local political issues tend to impede the capacities of local institutions to carry out certain tasks in the changing national and international environment. Besides, structures and functions of the local institutions are generally adopted from the colonial situation and need revamping in order for them to absorb new technologies and flow of resources from outside. Lacking adequate understanding of these two factors consultants, donor, and consulting agencies are inclined to have unrealistic expectations about the capacities of local institutions to achieve certain goals. Their unrealistic expectations may in fact conflict with the goals of the local institutions and the aspirations of person who work in them. For example, internal rivalries and competition often reflect genuine concern and fear about one's own job security, status, prestige, chances for future promotions, income and working conditions. Usually, any sort of linkage of a local institution with outside sponsoring and consulting organizations are seen by local persons as an opening of new opportunities and a chance to attain desired upward mobility through establishing personal and professional contact with the outsiders. This insensitivity to local institutional structure and internal politics -- especially underestimation of the real or anticipated aspirations and expectations of people working in these institutions acts as a barrier to successful consulting.

It seems that project managers will be well advised to make sure, as much as possible, that an open ended opportunity structure remains a built-in criterion in designing, implementing, managing, and evaluating of his/her project. The fact is that people everywhere, at all levels of society, do worry about their job security, income, and working conditions. It is a basic question of survival.
 

4. Problems Related to Lack of Supportive Systems
 

The importance of supportive structures in LICs is stressed by most consultants. A successful consulting effort is contingent on the nature of these structures, and on the degree these are accessible to consultants and to their counterparts in order for them to carry out the assigned tasks. One of the problems in this situation is that supportive systems (e.g., bureaucracies, courts, communications technology, research and development centers, information systems, transportation system, centers for social and cultural activities, libraries, scientific and technical information clearing houses, etc.) are inadequate or often inaccessible both to the consultants and the local counterparts even when they are present in LICs. This is because cooperation and coordination among various local institutions are lacking due to political and other social factors. However, in certain situations supportive systems are available to consultants only and not to the counter parts. This creates difficulties in the professional and social relationship among them. The local experts interpret unequal accessibility to their own institutions and resources as unjust and perceive this situation as an example of the lingering legacy of colonial rule. A fuller understanding of the organization of supportive systems in LICs and of the dynamics of political processes which affect the functioning of these systems will enhance consulting efforts.

On the basis of the various observations made by the consultants who were interviewed it is suggested that project managers may like to develop a set of criterion by which they can interpret local political processes. An informed analysis in turn may serve as guide lines for their actions in managing their projects. For example one experienced local politician - cum-bureaucrat from a Southeast Asian country communicated to an audience that he and his colleagues have formulated their own tentative test for understanding the survival of various political regimes in the region. The test, he claims, helps him and others in understanding changing political realities in Southeast Asia. By using the test bureaucrats, politicians, and various experts can make informed judgments about the impact of social, cultural, political, economic and legal forces on the local infrastructures and supportive institutions.

The basic assumptions underlying the test are that in Southeast Asia people are basically concerned with providing their people with education, housing, food, clothing and other basic goods and services necessary for survival. Further they are interested in the questions of national unity; economic stability; development of institutions of R and D and supportive infrastructures; how to modernize without losing their cultural roots and touch with the rural-based population; self-sufficiency, self-reliance, self-respect, and freedom from domination of super powers. According to these local political analysts in Southeast Asia the question of survival in the LICs is defined quite differently than in ICs. One of the differences is that in ICs people are concerned with maintaining a high level of standard of living whereas people in LICs are concerned with the availability of necessities of life. In this context the ongoing debate on the formation of a new economic world order is highly significant.

These political analysts suggest that by looking at some specific indicators one can infer the nature of local institutions in many countries in Southeast Asia. For example, instability of a particular political structure along with the weakening of local supportive institutions can be inferred if the leadership in a country (a) is investing its resources abroad, (b) is staying in power by polarizing different factions, (c) is regarding opposition as an enemy or adversary, (d) is using intelligence services for its own survival as opposed to the security of the country, and (e) is corrupt. Further, instability and lack of support systems can be inferred if (f) development is city-based rather than rural-based, (g) greater number(s) of talented people are employed in the private sector than in the public sector, (h) immigration is high, and (i) substance of political debate is trivial rather than based on serious policy issues.
 

5. Cultural Misunderstanding as a Problem
 

All the consultants attached great importance to cultural variables in consulting and believed that such factors as values, ethics, perception, language, socialization, speech pattern, self-image, communication styles, and definition of a situation, to name a few, somehow contribute to cultural misunderstandings. Each of the consultants had his/her own anecdotes and stories to tell. These are so personal, elaborated, and diffused that it is impossible here to describe them in detail.

However, three perspectives on sources of cultural misunderstanding can be isolated from their comments. These are labelled as follows: faulty communication, unequal social structures, and negotiated social reconstruction.

Faulty communication perspective seems to emphasize the point that when a number of people from different social-cultural backgrounds work together there is bound to be vast cultural misunderstanding arising out of their social interaction. This is so because attitudes, values, intentions, and behavior of participants are usually guided by individuals' socio-economic backgrounds. In cross-cultural and international interaction situations they are more likely to be uncoordinated. This unfortunate misunderstanding can be improved if one can just improve the communication among the participants by making them realize that each of them is involved in complex, institutionalized social activities, that the purpose is to achieve certain agreed upon social goals, and that recognition of the purpose by all will benefit both the individuals and the particular organizations with which they are associated.

On the other hand, the unequal social structure perspective tends to emphasize the fact that sources of cultural misunderstanding lie in the unequal distribution of social power and other valued goods in society such as occupation, income, education, status, prestige, leisure time, and other alike things. Thus cultural misunderstandings can be reduced by reducing the gap among the powerful and the less powerful. Achieving this goal requires fundamental changes in social structure.

The negotiated social reconstruction perspective combines both the above-mentioned perspectives by emphasizing the point that changes both in faculty communication and in unequal social structure are necessary to reduce cultural misunderstandings. This can be achieved by encouraging dialogue among people around mutual problems. The ultimate goal of this perspective is to create a preferred world order which is conducive to human survival.

One can gather from the above discussion, as mentioned at the out set of this paper, that consultants enter into consulting situations with certain perspectives (forms of consciousness) and this will influence their style of consulting. This would also be the case with donor, consulting, and local organizations. A project manager may like to take these facts into account in his/her effort to manage the project in a cross-cultural situation and decide for him/her self how he/she should go about dealing with the issue of cultural misunderstandings.
 

6. Factors Contributing to Other Problems in Consulting
 

The consultants pointed out that there are a host of other factors which contribute to numerous problems in consulting. For example, technical expertise is only one factor in the selection of consultants. In specific cases, age, sex, class, ethnicity and race of consultants play crucial role in establishing successful consulting and professional relationships with the local counterparts, and in the resolution of problems. An older professional woman of Southeast Asian extraction may be perceived more effective in her consulting task which requires establishment of child care facilities, recruiting and training of local female health workers in Southeast Asian countries than a white, young male doctor. Knowledge of the local language(s) and dialects facilitates consulting. Nationality of consultants seems to create initial difficulties in establishing a healthy relationship and communication among the consultants and the consultees. For example, when an American consultant in India states that "population growth is a problem because it affects national interest of the United States," nationality becomes a negative factor in consulting. Further, there are many theoretical and methodological issues. These relate to availability of quality data and information which can be used for analyses purposes. Usually, much of the initial effort of a new consultant is focused on establishing reliability and quality of information with which he/she has to work. Experienced consultants become well acquainted with these problems and have worked out effective channels of communications with their counterparts. In many cases they try to get involved in the primary stage of consulting and provide help to the counterparts from the very beginning in deciding the mode of data collection, analysis and the nature of information which is needed for attaining certain goals. There is a great need for developing data-based information systems in LICs.

In this section we summarize the perceptions of the thirty-one consultants about consulting in less industrialized countries and suggestions made by them to improve the consulting process.

Firstly, consulting should be approached from a larger socio-cultural and historical perspective. Local and international societal conflicts should be well understood by consultants. The way global interdependency is interpreted by a particular developing country is one of the crucial factors in professional and personal relationships among consultants, their counterparts in LICs, and contracting agencies.

Secondly, consulting should not be a one-shot activity. Implications of long/short term consulting should be well thought out before hand by considering it a well planned social activity. A sense of realism should be maintained as it related to the expectations, goals, and objectives of consultation.

Thirdly, technical expertise of consultants alone is not adequate input in effective consultation. Consultants should be selected on the basis of their experience in living in the clients' culture/country and interacting with counterparts in their cultural and ecological settings. Cultural sensitivity on the part of consultants should be an important variable in selecting them. Personality and socio-cultural background of consultants should also be taken into account during the selection process.

Fourthly, upgrading of clients' skills and competencies should be built into the consulting contract. Most of the training should be done in client's country using local examples. A majority of the participants should be local people. In many cases consultants are needed to be present physically only for a short period of time to help their counterparts set up training programs at early stages. There after funds and other material resources should be supplied directly to the counterparts to run these programs. However, follow up procedures should be included in the consulting contract (e.g., a retainer system) to enable consultants to return and work with the client whenever the need arises. The need for consultation should be determined by the clients. Consulting organizations should invest in research and development activities that are directly related to training and up-grading of skills and competencies required by the client.

Fifthly, criterion for assessment of participants' (both consultants and clients) activities should be included in consulting proposals. Procedures should be worked out to evaluate consultants' reports and be included in the contract from the very beginning. A super-consulting structure may be devised to catalog specific activities and capabilities of various consulting institutions with the purpose of providing the client more adequate information about the quality of consultation available. The information may help the client in selecting consultants and in evaluating their work effectively.

Finally, the consultants emphasized the fact that although cultural sensitivity and professional knowledge in one's own field of specialty are important factors in delivering consulting services effectively, nevertheless consulting should be considered an art form.

APPENDIX A

In this appendix responses of the ten Canadian consultants to the following fifteen questions are presented in a tabular form:

• What sorts of things have the professors been asked to do?
• What sorts of things have professors actually done in their field-based activities?
• For whom were services provided?
• What discrepancies are found between particular requests and the actual consultant activities?
• What competencies are used in responding to particular requests.
• What competencies are identified as lacking in reference to particular consultant activities?
• What is the value of these field-based activities to the scholarly field and to the professional person?
• Of what consequences are particular services rendered?
• What are the current issues and questions perceived by you as consultant in your own field?
• What is the likely future of the concerns and emphasis in your discipline?
• What skills are likely to become more important in light of those anticipations?
• What are the consequences of particular kinds of experiences in terms of continued or expanded professional involvement?
• What is your model of man or human nature?
• What is your model of man and society or how do you conceptualize relationship between man and society?
• What is your model of modernization? Or what is your thinking on modernization?

** Dr. George Hickman, Memorial University, read this and an earlier related article "Cross-National Consultation in International Collaboration," The Morning Watch Vol. 21, Nos. 3-4, Fall 1994, pp. 33-42, written by this author. The author thanks Dr. Hickman for reading these articles and providing valuable comments. Dr. Hickman has extensive experience in international, national and local consultation processes. Needless to say, the author bears sole responsibility for ideas expressed in these articles.