Managing deadlock: organisational development in the British First Army, 1915
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Date
03/07/2018Author
Watt, Emir Patrick James
Metadata
Abstract
In terms of the British Army in the Great War, the study of whether or how the army
learned has become the dominant historiographical theme in the past thirty years.
Previous studies have often viewed learning and institutional change through the lens of
the ‘learning curve’, a concept which emphasises that the high command of the British
Army learned to win the war through a combination of trial and error in battle planning,
and through careful consideration of their collective and individual experiences. This
thesis demonstrates that in order to understand the complexities of institutional change
in the Great War, we must look beyond ill-defined concepts such as the learning curve
and adopt a more rigid framework.
This thesis examines institutional change in the British First Army in the 1915 campaign
on the western front. It applies concepts more commonly found in business studies,
such as organisational culture, knowledge management and organisational memory, to
understand how the First Army developed as an institution in 1915. It presents a five-stage
model – termed the Organisational Development Model – which demonstrates how
the high command of the First Army considered their experiences and changed their
operational practices in response. This thesis finds that the ‘war managers’ decision-making
was affected by a number of institutional and personal ‘inputs’ which shaped
their approach to understanding warfare. This thesis examines the manner in which new
knowledge was created and collated in the immediate post-battle period, before studying
how the war managers considered new information, disseminated it across the force and
institutionalised it in the organisation’s formal practices, structures and routines.
In a broad sense, this thesis does three things. First, by examining how the army learned
it moves beyond standard narratives of learning in the British Army in the Great War
and highlights the complex interplay between personal and institutional learning
processes. Second, by focusing on institutional change in the 1915 campaign, it sheds
new light on an understudied yet crucial part of the British war experience. Finally, in
creating the Organisational Development Model, it provides a robust platform on which
future research can be built.