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Secrecy, Information, and Politics: An Essay on Organizational Decision Making

The Weatherhead School of Management, Division of Management Policy, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio 44106.

The literature on organizational politics has described organizational decision making as a fluid, informal process characterized by conflict and compromise. One of the most important reasons decision making tends to become politicized is because decision situations are uncertain and open to multiple interpretations. The political process develops as coalitions attempt to define the decision context to gain control over the decision-making process. But the concept of information typically used to investigate organizational politics is defined in terms of the ability to predict future states of the world. This definition completely overlooks the socially constructed nature of information and the fundamentally socially constructed nature of the decision-making process. The result has been an ignoring or underestimating of the role the distortion and manipulation of information plays in communicating and decision-making processes. In this essay, information is understood as a socially constructed phenomenon and a concept of secrecy is developed to investigate its effect on decision making. This framework is applied to a battle between staff and line groups for control over the Phone Stores in a Bell Telephone operating company. The concept of secrecy is developed empirically and elaborated theoretically.

Human Relations, Vol. 41, No. 1, 73-90 (1988)
DOI: 10.1177/001872678804100105


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