Under What Conditions Do Public Managers Favor and Pursue Organizational Change?

Organizational change and innovation has been a central theme in public management research for some time. In an age of government reinvention, downsizing, and contracting out, it is all the more relevant for the field to understand how organizations can successfully approach large-scale, planned change. This paper seeks to add to the growing literature on change by considering the forces in both the internal and external environments that lead managers to support and initiate change. Using the public education policy setting as a source of data, we build and test a model that predicts whether public managers support and initiate change. Using the extant literature as a base, we formulate a series of hypotheses, ultimately finding that a complex series of push and pull forces result in managers choosing to support and initiate change