Relationships in Organized Helping

This edited volume offers up-to-date research on the interactive building and managing of relationships in organized helping. Its contributions address this core of helping in psychotherapy, coaching, doctor-patient interaction, and digital helping interaction and document and analyze essential communicative practices of relationship management. A summarizing contribution identifies common dimensions of relationship management across the different helping contexts and thereby provides a framework for understanding and researching how interactive practices and helping relationships are interconnected. The volume brings together researchers and practitioners and merges academic approaches to studying relationships with practical knowledge about verbal helping in these settings. The book is intended for scholars in the field of organized helping as well as for students and researchers of communication and discourse / conversation analysis in professional and organized contexts. It is also addressed to practitioners interested in learning more about the micro- and meso-management of their working relationships.

Ben Ong, Monash University, Journal of Pragmatics 210 (2023).:
I found this book interesting and helpful on a couple of levels. Firstly, it presents various nuanced ways that helpers and help-seekers pragmatically manage alliance or affiliation in their relationships. For me, this reflects interesting findings on the subtlety and minutiae of these conversational practices. Secondly, I was interested in how various chapters were broadening the frame of organised helping relationships into other modalities of interaction. This helped me to reflect on the current research interests in organised helping and to wonder “where to next?” for the field and for my own research. This book thus serves as a useful summary and punctuation point for reflection on the current state of research on organised helping and what directions we may meaningfully explore in future.