ABSTRACT
The case for organization development (OD) culture boundedness is both clear and long standing. Moreover, OD has definite orientations to cultural artifacts: the early interaction-centered OD designs presumed at least a moderate or even small social distance, if not a T-Group kind of socioemotional closeness. OD philosophy contained liberal dollops of emphases considered strange if not seditious in some settings, as in biases toward greater power equalization, or even in pronouncements that "mutual empowerment is a mutual good." Recall the time-honored advice to "begin from where the client is," which assumes that OD's goal of a "new culture at work" often will stand in sharp contrast with typical cultures at work. The chapter suggests that OD designs are far from peas in a pod when it comes to their degree of cultural boundedness. It also suggests that, in a global sense, the corpus of OD designs are culturally specific in only attenuated senses that need quite precise specification.
