Building the guidance relationship. An institutional approach based on communication

Abstract

While substantial attention has been paid by the specialised literature about advising to what advising should be and the role advisors should play, less focus has been put on tools that advisors might use in their task. This paper is an attempt to contribute further to this second perspective. To do this, a focus on studying human problems in the context of social systems in which they emerge, is adopted. In this sense, it will be suggested that advisors always intervene in social systems, even when the problems needing intervention seem to be personal ones. This approach can be labelled organizational and complex in that it focuses on the whole organizational context in which complex social systems interact. Also, it can be named communicational in the sense that it focuses on how participants in the advising process build their relationship. And it is also pragmatics, because it is more concerned with the effects of this communicational process on participants’ behaviours than with their intentions and aims or the semantics of the messages they interchange. In particular, the paper is concerned with the traps and difficulties that can emerge from the relationship building process, and will provide some suggestions on how these can be managed by advisors.