ABSTRACT
The concept of strategy gives us a useful purchase on the various issues discussed in the Introduction. In essence, strategies are ways of achieving goals. One definition of strategies is as patterns of ‘specific and repeatable acts chosen and maintained in logical relationships with one another to serve the larger and long-term rather than the smaller short-term objectives …’. 1 So they are identifiable packages of action linked to broad, general aims. More immediate objectives might be subsumed under them together with the associated planned action, as tactics within strategies. Many are patterned and complete in themselves, and governed by some controlling principle. Goals cannot be taken for granted. They may be different from what they appear to be, or they might be conditioned in some way, they might have to be seen within a range of priorities, or in the degree of desire to reach them. There might be goals within goals, some almost unattainable like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the others representing a series of successive fall-back positions. The associated strategies would overlap, and by no means neatly, as now one goal appeared uppermost, now another. For example, teachers might have some general aims of ‘teaching’, ‘educating’, ‘socialising’, etc., but with a rebellious form in a secondary school, one teacher might aim to ‘hammer some sense into them’ to achieve some objective standard; another to humour them with a view of teaching them something ‘about life’ — another simply to pass the time away as agreeably as possible. Or, a single teacher might display these, and many more, within his own framework. Clearly, the more complicated the goal, the more complex the strategy; and the higher the goal, the greater extension of risk. For it is the problems that intervene between intention and risk that give strategies their character.
