The Politics of Evaluating Management Development
Abstract
Part 2. Politics and the Influence of Social ProcessesThe Politics of Evaluating Management Development SAGE Publications, Inc.1989DOI: 10.1177/135050768902000317 Stephen Fox CSML University of Lancaster MANAGEMENT EDUCATION AND DEVELOPMENT Volume 20 Part 3 7989 INTRODUCTION To be politic is both to be sagacious and scheming, prudent and crafty. It is to be expedient, which is to be both advantageous and suitable, but also to be a contrivance or device - 'politic rather than just'. (Oxford English Dictionary). Politics is a double-edged word and very often a dirty word (compare Jones, 1987, on the darker side of organisational politics). Political activities are often regarded as dishonourable per se; the political underlife of organisations is almost by definition a world of tacit understandings, hidden meanings and agendas, guarded secrets and exploitable ambiguities. Pitched against these two-faced, paradoxical dealings are the forces of light, clarity, explicitness, sound judgement, unambiguous statements and straight talk. And since everyone aspires publicly to these latter, the net result is to push the real nature of politics deeper and deeper into the non- discussable hinterland of the public arena of polite sociality. The consequence is that those very issues with which closet political activities deal are almost