Practicing Organization Development: A Guide for Leading Change: A Third Edition

SIMILARITIES IN NEW FORMS OF OD THAT MAKE IT DIFFERENT FROM CLASSICAL OD

Perhaps the most important similarity in these new OD practices is that they assume organizations are socially co-constructed realities and, because of this, that there is nothing inherently real about how we organize, no ultimate truth about organizations to be discovered, and no model of the right way to organize independent of the people who make up any particular organization (Bushe & Marshak, 2008). There may be models of social process and organization dynamics that practitioners find useful, but as Kenneth Gergen (1978, 1997) has forcefully argued, most if not all of those are culturally specific—they are more descriptions of how things work inside a particular ...