Organizational Images: Towards a Model of Organizations

This study develops a general theoretical frameiwork for the analysis of organizational behavior by focusing on the notion that organizations develop unique informationprocessing frameworks, which it labels "organizational images" or "images of operations," that strongly determine their behavior. The model is then used to draw inferences about the forms of counterinsurgency strategies practiced by the US military in the second war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan. The paper argues that militaries tend to view the tasks they undertake in terms of the coercive application of force, and that this tendency tends to determine the forms of counterinsurgency strategies they chose, leading them to eschew strategies that rely on bargaining with enemy forces. The purported dominance of this coercive "image of operations" is then investigated in military field reports from the war in Afghanistan. Thesis Supervisor: Roger Petersen Title: Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science