Strategic management and evaluation: Rivals, partners, or just fellow travellers?

The evolution of strategic management closely parallels that of evaluation in several respects. Each seeks to improve the quality of policy decisions, and the practitioners of each have sought to incorporate both hypothetico-deductive and holistic-inductive methods. Mutual cooperation could enhance prospects for the utilization of evaluation and implementation of strategy, but differences, especially in assumptions about the nature of leadership, could cause conflict. Strategic management theory should be understood if its applications are to be evaluated appropriately.