From Transformation to TransformaCtion: Methods and Practices, by David Gutmann, London,  Karnac.

David Guttmann's From Transformation to TransformaCtion is an uneven compilation of papers and presentations dating from 1983 up to the publication of this volume in 2009.

Any historical compilation of work must meet the burden of relevancy; it should speak to enduring themes in a manner that should dazzle us with the innovativeness of the ideas when they were first articulated, or, more modestly, encourage us to reaffirm the core principles that it articulates. In such a work that purports to address issues of methods and practices, the embedded case material should remind us of the robustness and utility of these ideas. Unfortunately, this compilation meets none of those benchmarks.

The overarching theme of the book is the process of organisational change and the role of the consultant. Utilizing a psychodynamic framework, Gutmann, his various contributors and co-authors, articulate an organisational development model that relies heavily on Bion, Klein and other seminal thinkers with regard to unconscious processes and their enactment in organisational settings. These writings, however, do not reflect the innovative and fruitful ways in which the work of these thinkers has been richly developed by others since the 1960s. So, in reading the papers, one wonders as to who is the core audience. Even if the book were a primer on early organisational development theorizing, it fails on that account. It lacks careful explication of core ideas; instead, it offers thumbnail sketches of ideas that beg for detailed treatment. It does not help that many of these core ideas are not clearly linked to their authors, nor are they explained using the terminology of those authors.

From a more practical perspective, it is difficult to square the author's claim of a transformational process when what we get in the case material is the more incremental outcomes that are typical of interventions in complex organisational processes. In addition, there is an uneven deployment of case materi