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Organization development, from the margins: Reading class, race and gender in OD texts
Abstract
Organization development (OD) is an applied field of social science aimed at improving organizational performance and the quality of work life through planned change interventions. OD draws from a wide range of theories and methods such as group dynamics, management theory, and industrial psychology. Many OD professionals consider themselves social change agents who contribute to societal transformation by promoting humanistic and democratic values in organizations. This dissertation proposes, instead, that OD theory/practice is constituted through specific textual strategies and discursive formations which serve to do the opposite--to support relations of domination and to contribute to the sedimentation of current social practices in organizations. Using deconstruction, genealogy, feminist and third world theories, I argue that: (1) OD is the story of the making of a professional class caught in the contradictory purposes of working to produce more knowledge, that is, develop as a social science, and serving as an effective social technology, that is, develop as a practice of management. (2) OD comes to function as a technology of the social and managerial power/knowledge by inventing "the consulting relationship" and deploying a variety of "organization change strategies" to legitimate (through 'science') and sustain (through practice) current capitalist, patriarchal, and racist social relations in organizations. Analyses of three representative OD texts illustrate the credibility of these arguments: Beckhard's (1969) "Organization Development: Strategies and Models;" Lippitt and Lippitt's (1978) "The Consulting Process in Action;" and Weisbord's (1987) "Productive Workplaces: Organizing and Managing for Dignity, Meaning and Community." The texts are critiqued using a variety of deconstructive and feminist strategies and read, in particular, to call attention to the gendered, classed and raced subtexts contained in them. The readings demonstrate that OD is a product of a particular kind of discursive enterprise, yet, a non-unitary and contradictory one. It is because of the precarious nature of this discourse that resistant voices and significant "spaces" can be found which a third world-feminist-poststructuralist theory/practice can exploit to begin to envision possibilities for "organization changing."
Subject Area
Management|Womens studies
Recommended Citation
Holvino, Evangelina, "Organization development, from the margins: Reading class, race and gender in OD texts" (1993). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9316661.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9316661