Experiential Learning: A Declining Force for Change

Organisational Development is said to be reaching an age of maturity. Articles in recent years have welcomed its growth as a discipline and advocated the direction its own further development should take. (Friedlander 1976, Burke 1976). The most insistent belief expressed in these writings seems to be that maturity will be gained through increasing quantities of ever more sophisticated research. Certainly the last decade has seen a proliferation of work in a more obviously scholarly vein than was the case in the earlier and more impassioned years of Organisational Development’s emergence. The question is whether the direction of these developments is, from that earlier standpoint, truly an advance, or whether it represents a decline of Organisational Development as a radical influence within organisations. The argument of this article is, in summary, that: ( 1) The original charter of Organisational Development was based on a programme of radical change in the quality of human relationships at work and in the distribution of power in decision making