ABSTRACT
The next stages in the development of Organisation Development (OD) in healthcare will be enacted by OD practitioners, by the “organisations” that they work both for and with and by the emerging social and economic context within which they take place. This chapter sets out some of the key influences and choices in that process, so it is not intended to be any kind of blueprint, recipe or even grand narrative for OD. The 1980s saw a fundamental change in the context within which OD was operating. A third modernity grounded in post-modernism and embodying a dominant neoliberal ideology saw organisations reject the possibilities of operating in a pluralist manner and opt instead for a unitary command-and-control model of working. Managerialism asserts that dissension, conflict and argument are largely unnecessary for the solving of organisational problems. Complex social processes and events are translated into simple figures or categories of judgement and thus appear as misleadingly objective and hyper-rational.
