Organization Development and Society

Baruch Shimoni is a professor of sociology and organization development at Bar-Ilan University Israel. He has a Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During his Ph.D. studies, he spent a year (1999-2000) at Sloan School of Management at MIT. In the 2003-2005, he had a post-doctoral fellowship at the Department of Anthropology at Yale University. In the course of the last 25 years, he has developed a professional career that integrates academic research with practical consulting to organizations. His challenge has been to both enhance his practical engagement with the most current research and theoretical insights and to use this practical engagement for the development of theory in the OD field. In addition to research and teaching, he founded and now serves as the academic head of the M.A. program in Organization Development and consults with organizations outside the university. In his most recent research project, Professor Shimoni uses the concept of habitus to theoretically and practically understand and cope with processes of change and development. Specifically, he links the Bourdieuan concept of habitus to the field of OD and in so doing provides an alternative way to incorporate the individual and the social in OD.