Introduction

This book offers a new approach for the practice of organization development (OD). OD is a planned change practice managed from the top that focuses on the organization as a whole with the aim of increasing effectiveness. The new approach, a habitus-oriented OD (HOOD), sees consultees’ thinking and behavior a result of habitus, a cognitive structure developed historically in endless interactions between human behavior and social structures in a given social field. In the introductory chapter, I present the book’s main argument, critical concepts, methodology and two goals: to re/define the objectives of what I call ‘individually oriented OD’ in terms of habitus and social structure and to re/position OD between organizations and society. I end the chapter with a few words describing the book’s chapters.