Handbook for Strategic HR

CHAPTER 22

Diversity and Social Justice

Practices for OD Practitioners

Michael Brazzel

THE WORDS “diversity” and “social justice” are familiar enough to Organization Development (OD) practitioners that most of us know what they mean and how they work. Many of us would say they are part of our OD practice. Yet we can be uncomfortable with diversity issues when they come up in our OD practice and we seek ways to address organizational issues without having to directly take on diversity aspects.

This is true of the OD profession as a whole. A review of the content indexes of current OD textbooks yields few listings for diversity and social justice concepts and dynamics. Bob Marshak comments that, “Given the core values of OD and the increasingly ...