ABSTRACT
Organisation Development (OD) practitioners may be working to create a genuinely better future or they may be sinister covert agents of the status quo, either as willing servants of managerialism. Even within what might loosely be described as the field of OD, this delineation plays out in respect to how practitioners choose to approach their practice. There are those whose orientation tends towards an approach that mirrors traditional business thinking: they work on a consulting model where a diagnostic is undertaken using a range of data sources in order to define a problem that can be addressed through a prescribed intervention or set of activities. All of which tends to lead to a sense of OD being to some extent binary: it is largely seen as humanistic, egalitarian, and democratic, insofar as it seeks to engage with staff in order to enhance their lived experience of work and the workplace.
