To start my internet investigation I went to Google Scholar and typed in, “What is new in Organization Development?” I came up with an excerpt from a 1970 book on O.D. by Blake and Mouton. Now that is really new? So I decided to keep exploring. Then I typed in “What is new in O.D.?” This time I came up with a 1998 version of Cumming’s and Worley’s book on Organization Development that we have all used for years in our classes and a pdf of a 1996 MIT working paper by Ed Schein called Organizational Learning: What is New? Now I think highly of all three of these gentlemen but I hardly call these works new. So I tied to dig deeper. “There must be something new happening O.D.,” I mused, but how do I go about finding it.

 Going further down the list I found a Neither Market nor Hierarchy: Network Forms of Organization by Walter W. Powell published in a Sociology Anthology by Michael J. Handle in 2003 by Sage. I down loaded the chapter from Sage and read it. I enjoyed the chapter and looked at the table of contents of Handle’s book The Sociology of Organizations: Classical and Contemporary Readings and decided to order a copy. Finding this book was worth asking the question and taking some time to find out.

 If you have anything that you would like to share in this newsletter about what is new in O.D. please send it to the editor and we’ll included it in an upcoming newsletter