Organizational Innovation: Lessons from Military Organizations

Abstract

Sociologists interested in organizational dynamics have tended to ignore military organizations, leaving these to political scientists and historians to study. This is a pity, since military organizations often serve as extreme cases of processes that occur in other kinds of organizations, thereby providing useful tests of sociological propositions. The books reviewed here are written almost exclusively by historians. They deal with a tightly focused topic: How did various military organizations respond to rapid technological change in a period of constrained resources and great environmental turbulence? They ask a series of interesting questions: Which organizations were best at innovating, and why? How important were resource constraints, past history, organizational leadership, and clarity of organizational mission in producing successful responses to change? Their answers are varied, but if a common answer exists it is this: An organizational culture conducive to open debate, and identification of a clear organizational task, together with sufficient organizational autonomy to focus on that task without major distractions, were the primary factors producing innovation and organizational adaptation. The organizations studied in these four books shared a lot of features. They were all in the same business-preparing for war. The time frame of these studies is the period between the First and Second World Wars. The First World War had seen the introduction of armored fighting vehicles (the tank), and an extensive use of the new airplane technology. These technical innovations, together with the wireless radio, would clearly change