ABSTRACT
Some postmodernist and social constructivist researchers in organization studies have embraced ideas originating from 'the linguistic turn' in philosophy. It is the unwillingness to disrupt order, ironically, that makes it impossible for the organization to create order. Consulting practice thus produces and introduces new language, deconstructs and disturbs established orders of discourse, and translates and mediates between new and old languages and metaphors. The consultant translates language games, produces noise through introducing new metaphors and mediates through translation. Consultants as parasites 'mediate between two or more systems, they are in between, neither here nor there but in the middle, 'crossed by a network of relations''. Translation is not about turning the language of theory into management's language; it is not about simulating the foreign in order to make it the same. The concept does not contribute to improving the organization of production but analyses the production of organization such that new productions might be possible.
