ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the critiques and develops the claims of appreciative inquiry (AI), a prevalent consultancy methodology discourse for working with organisational development and hailed by some as 'the most important advance in action research in the last decade'. It examines discourses embedded in AI methodology and consideration is given to how to extend the methodology so that power and other relational dynamics are made more overt and available for critique. The chapter offers the constraining discourses within a piece of consultancy work about management and team development in a health context and an illustration made of the use of the extended AI methodology as critical appreciative inquiry. The frame employed here for both the critique and the refinement of the AI discourse is that of social constructionism. The contexts of significance designed here for exploring and developing AI are: culture of power, relationship accountabilities, subject position, rules for communication episode, interpretive act.
