3Social Constructionist Challenge to Representational Knowledge

Implications for Understanding Organization Change

Frank J. Barrett

The field of Organization Development and Action Research emerged in the 1940s at the height of the Industrial Age. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the mindset of those who designed the foundational OD interventions was part of the larger ethos of Industrial Age thinking inherited from the Enlightenment tradition. This chapter will outline the precepts of modernist thinking that grew out of the Enlightenment and how the legacy of several of these notions informed the early practice and theories associated with OD. Having established the influence of those ways of thinking on mid- twentieth-century ...

Get Dialogic Organization Development now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.