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Can governmental organizations change? Reform initiatives have swept through governments in the United States and overseas, again and again bringing news about efforts to reinvent, transform, or reform government agencies (Barzelay 2001; Kettl 2000; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2000; Stillman 1999). Curiously, however, this recurrent theme of change in government agencies has not induced a high volume of articles that explicitly address the topic in public administration journals. There are prominent exceptions to this observation (e.g., Bryson and Anderson 2000; Chackerian and Mavima 2000; Mani 1995; Wise 2002) and journal articles about topics related to organizational change (e.g., Berman and Wang 2000; Brudney and Wright 2002; Hood and Peters 2004). Articles reporting research and theory with tides containing "organizational change" and with that dneme as a focal topic, however, appear with much less regularity in public administration journals than in research journals focusing on general management and organization theory.
In that literature on organization theory, Van de Ven and Poole (1995) report a count of one million articles relating to organizational change. This vast body of work abounds with complexities, including multiple and conflicting theories and research findings and a good bit of inconclusiveness. This complexity presents a challenge to public administrators and public administration researchers alike. To respond to that challenge, the full version of this article, which is available on PARs Web site (www.aspanet.org), provides an overview of the vast literature on organizational change-a review demonstrating its complexity but also bringing some needed order to the literature. Here, the analysis identifies points of consensus among researchers on what are commonly called organizational transformations: initiatives involving large-scale, planned, strategic, and administrative change (Abramson and Lawrence 2001; Kotter 1995). These points serve as testable propositions for researchers to examine in future research and as major considerations for leaders of change initiatives in public organizations.
Theories of Organizational Change in Public Organizations
The variety of theoretical perspectives summarized in the online version of this article presents a rather confusing picture, but it provides insights into the nature of organizational change, and in particular, the causes of change and the role of managers in the change process. Some of the theories downplay the significance of human agency as a source of change (e.g., DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Hannan...