Organizational perspectives on the maneuver warfare movement in the United States Marine Corps: insights from the work of James G. March

Abstract

AbstractThis article describes a key period in the institutional and organizational history of the United States Marine Corps. Using historical, archival, and interview material, we apply some of the ideas and perspectives of James G. March to understand the organizational dynamics and mechanisms that enabled the maneuver warfare movement and made the modern Marine Corps a more innovative and adaptive organization. We build on and integrate several streams of March’s research, legacies, and interests, including understanding the organizational conditions that help novelty and outlier-ness flourish, finding interest and value in apparent contradictions, and deriving implications for organizational scholarship and for the organization under study.