The Mechanics of Top-Down Organizational Change: Donald Rumsfeld's Campaign to Transform the U.S. Defense Department, 2001-2004
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, we use Donald Rumsfeld’s campaign to transform the development of future capabilities by the U.S. Defense Department to illuminate the dynamics of top-down organizational change. This reform effort, launched by President George W. Bush during his first presidential campaign, encountered difficulties both in developing and promoting the content of the change being sought and in executing change. We develop an extrapolation-oriented case study of this episode, drawing upon interviews of sixty-nine participants and close observers. Following Eugene Bardach’s work on institutional craftsmanship and Michael Barzelay’s efforts to further develop Bardach’s methodology for extrapolation-oriented case studies, we identify several mechanisms linking common process context factors, exacerbated by process design features, to these negative outcomes and offer suggestions for rendering the design of change campaigns more robust to these challenges.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".