The premise of this paper is that planned organizational change, commonly known as organizational development, induces compliance and conformity in organizational members and thereby increases the power of management. These consequences occur because organizational development efforts create uncertainty, interfere with the informal organization, reinforce the position of management, and further entrench management purposes. These consequences occur regardless of the intentions of management and regardless of whether the goals of the organizational development intervention were achieved. Instead of examining these consequences, practitioners (...) and theorists have engaged in self-deception and depoliticized the practice of induced organizational change by creating a field known as Organizational Development. (shrink)

In this article it is argued that much research into processes of moral learning and development in organisations has been conducted under somewhat controlled conditions, and that these do not permit testing of individuals' thought and action under more extreme circumstances. Therefore in practice one needs to acknowledge the effect of the actual organisational context. Three aspects or issues concerning the effect of this context on interventions are identified: first, systemic factors, especially corporate culture, impact on individual behaviour; second, consultants (...) and developers may have difficulty when working with people at different levels of moral development; and, third, differential influence among members of an organisation affects the possibility of, and the enactment of, moral development programmes.Each of these considerations is discussed while employing conceptualisations based on Kohlberg's ideas. However the question of influence and power is not one which has been addressed to any significant extent by writers in this particular area. The essential argument in this article is that this must be done if the full potential of research into moral development in organisations is to be realised. (shrink)