ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a short overview of the OD field. It is almost impossible to bring all OD’s ideas, concepts and practices into one chapter (for valuable overviews, see Burke, 2006; Burnes and Cooke, 2012; Freedman, 1999; French, 1977). Thus, this overview goes historically through major events in four periods that can be distinguished by their understanding of the source of consultees’ thinking and behavior: the interaction between the individual and the social context (1940s to 1950s), within the individual (1960s), in the social context (1970s to1980s) and in the interaction between individuals (1990s to now). I include this overview in order to place HOOD (habitus-oriented OD) in the historical and conceptual context of OD and to highlight both what HOOD takes from and gives to the OD field. I use this chapter also to further emphasize HOOD’s main assumption, that consultees’ thinking and behavior are mainly a product of habitus, a cognitive structure developed historically in constant interactions between human agents and social structures in a given social field.
