The Nature of Contemporary Organization Development

3 Evidence on the Nature of Practitioner OD

Having examined the literature on OD in the last chapter, what is there in the way of evidence in terms of practice? In seeking to understand the perspective of practitioners on the development of OD, the operationalization of requirements though the medium of job advertisements was examined. This chapter therefore presents the findings from content analysis of job advertisements from a forty-year period (1970–2010) together with the bibliometric searches presented in Chapter 4, this addresses the research study’s first research question, which was to establish to what extent there is a difference between the academic literature and practitioner perspective of the development of the OD profession in ...