Dualisms and Dualities in the Ongoing Development of Organization Development

This chapter addresses three major developments in Organization Development (OD) over the course of its existence. Each of them involves tensions that may be experienced as dualisms (“either-or”) and/or dualities (“both-and”), and each of them has been playing an integral role in the ongoing journey of OD. These developments are: 1) intellectual distinctions between “diagnostic” and “dialogic” approaches to OD, 2) the organizational life of OD that coexists with continued proclamations of its death, and 3) the progressive separation between the scholarship and the practice of OD. Intellectually, tensions in these developments are usually handled in either-or fashion, and the practice of OD is a bit more likely to embody both-and approaches. We suggest implications for what the ongoing development of OD might mean in both theory and practice.