Book review: Organization Development Today: How individuals, groups and organizations can flourish in today’s volatile world

Abstract

Organization Development Today (Isbouts, 2025) is most usefully read as a contemporary statement of organizational development’s ambition and its predicament. The volume brings together 10 practitioner–scholar chapters from Fielding Graduate University’s Organizational Development and Change doctoral program and advances a humanistic vocabulary of learning and connection in which development unfolds through sensemaking and relational engagement with uncertainty. Its contribution to Management Learning readers lies equally in the tension between these humanistic ideals and the institutional realities in which “development” is authorized, narrated, and put to work. The volume offers practice-near illustrations of organizational learning and invites reflection on how developmental discourses position actors within managerial and institutional rationalities.

The edited volume examines leadership, learning, and professional practice in diverse contexts, including healthcare, education, technology, and community-based organizations. Many chapters adopt narrative, case-based, and interpretive approaches that foreground how individuals and groups interpret complexity, navigate transition, and construct meaning in practice. The volume does not advance a single theoretical framework but presents a series of situated explorations that collectively portray organizational development as a relational and reflective field concerned with sensemaking, identity work, and learning through organizational challenges. In this sense, the volume can be read as a collection of reflective practitioner studies and as an illustration of how professional learning and development are constituted in contemporary organizational and institutional contexts.