Introduction

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Wendell L. French is well known as co-author of the first major textbook on organization development. He has, in addition, published widely in the fields of human resource development, organizational behavior, and organization development. His Personnel text (Houghton-Mifflin, 1982) is now in its fifth edition. In the following article, French summarizes his most current update on the history of OD that first appeared in his OD text. For the third edition of Organization Development (Prentice-Hall, 1982), French has in a vareity of ways expanded and extended this overview of how OD began, including a detailed examination of various trans-Atlantic links between U.S. and Tavi stock researchers. Our reviewers responding to an earlier draft of this article had a variety of reactions, each taking exception to some of French's discussion and interpretation. We will therefore present a set of reactions to French's article in the next issue of G&OS.

This publication has 8 references indexed in Scilit: