Abstract A great deal of commentary and controversy about the state of organization development (OD) has to do with a lack of clarity regarding what it is about organizations that can be affected by an OD effort. Recent initiatives suggest that a new set of OD practices are emerging, based on a social constructionist orientation. With this in mind, this article aims to contribute to a theoretical understanding of what it is about organizations that can change, based on Berger and Luckmann's (1966) social constructionist framework. It describes three distinct change processes that take place as a consequence of OD interventions. The article ends with a discussion of some of the implications for OD practice, specifically with regard to ‘programming’ dialogue as the main vehicle for change.
Introduction
As a field as well as a profession, organization development (OD) has spawned a diversity of approaches and methods (Mirvis, 2006; Marshak and Grant, 2008). Multiple stakeholder methods based on dialogue and whole-systems approaches such as strategic scenario planning, whole-scale change and appreciative inquiry show that OD has expanded beyond individual and small-group dynamics (Van Nistelrooij and De Wilde, 2008). These new OD practices are taken to be applicable not only to interpersonal matters, but also to more strategic issues (Sminia and Van Nistelrooij, 2006). Regardless of the possible applications and underlying assumptions, OD interventions, in general, have always been accompanied by a normative perspective on human behavior and by high ambitions of achieving enhanced performance and human fulfillment (Burke, 1987; Jamieson and Worley, 2008). However, as pointed out earlier by Pettigrew et al. (2001), Wirtenberg et al. (2004) and Marshak (2006), and maybe with the exception of Bartunek and Moch (1987), Weisbord (1976) and Golembiewski et al. (1976), little thought has gone into specifying more precisely what it is about organizations that can be affected by an OD effort and what kind of problems are being adressed with OD.
Conclusion
Essentially, what has been done in this article is to take a more general ‘theory of change’, derived from Berger and Luckmann (1966), to propose a ‘theory of changing’ which allows us to assess how a change process takes shape (Porras and Robertson, 1992; Austin and Bartunek, 2006). This strengthens OD’s basic idea that shared perception is one of the main desired outcomes of any intervention. It is also argued that shared perception can be established by dialogue. Being able to distinguish between three types of change allows us to suggest that an OD practitioner can do two things. First, it is possible to target an OD intervention to a particular problem by diagnosing what type of change is required to alleviate this problem. Second, an OD practitioner can monitor the course of the process and assess what type of change is taking place.
The argument that is offered in this article is still at the proposition stage. Further research of actual OD interventions is needed to see whether the three change types can be observed and linked with the organizational problems that have been associated with them, and whether OD interventions targeted to deal with these problems, by designing dialogue in such a way that the required type of change occurs, actually alleviate these problems. This would require longitudinal case studies using a process methodology (see, for example, Sminia and van Nistelrooij, 2006; Sminia, 2009), which track the course of the process and try to explain the outcome in terms of how the process progresses over time.