What is organization development? The short answer is that it is a particular approach to improving the way organizations work. Efforts to improve organizational effectiveness have been around for as long as there have been organizations, but the term organization development got off the ground in the middle of the twentieth century based on the latest findings in the behavioral sciences. The most well known OD authors did the bulk of their publishing from the 1960s through the 80s. A search on Amazon shows that many OD books available are new editions or revisits of the field by some of its original leading lights.
A recent book entitled Reinventing Organization Development, by David L. Bradford and W. Warner Burke, Pfeiffer, 2005 starts with a chapter called “The Crisis in OD” and includes one called “On the Demise of Organization Development.” A great classic is Organization Development by Wendell L. French and Cecil H. Bell, Jr, which was published in its 6th edition and maybe its last in 1998, 10 years ago. Another good book, from the UK, is Organisation Development: Metaphorical Explorations, edited by Cliff Oswick and David Grant, 1996.