Toxic Politics, Organizational Change, and the “Greening” of the U.S. Military

Abstract

Despite the practical, normative, and theoretical import of large-scale organizational change in public organizations, scant research exists on this topic by political science, public administration, or public management scholars. Moreover, scholars have classified the broader literature on this topic as rife with complexities, competing theoretical pressures, and inconclusiveness. This article returns to basics by using a grounded theory approach to develop and illustrate an empirically informed and theoretically integrated “politycentered” framework for studying large-scale organizational change in public organizations. Informing the framework are the patterns of politics driving, and driven by, efforts in the post—Cold War era to “green” the U.S. military by incorporating environmental and natural resource protection values into the services' core missions.