ABSTRACT
There are many ways of approaching the study of management development from both theoretical and practical perspectives. While this supposed dichotomy itself might characterize two broad approaches, they are not in our view mutually exclusive. This chapter is based on a study of the design and implementation of two education-based and practical management development programmes which, as well as ‘containing’ theory as part of their content, were also informed by theory in their design and development. The review and evaluation of the programmes were also informed by a similar theoretical framework; that is, that of stakeholder theory. Our overall purpose, therefore, is to explore the utility of applying stakeholder theory to understanding decisions on management development and meeting associated purposes of judging effectiveness. One benefit of stakeholder theory is that the specification of ‘effective’ is inherently subjective and will vary depending on the interests of the different categories of parties involved, and so we are unlikely to have a universally accepted specification. That being the case, privileging the interests of one single category, which is usually the case with many perspectives on management development, is unlikely to provide a full understanding. Our objectives in this chapter can be summarized as follows:
• to describe two particular examples of qualification-based programmes
• to explore the validity and utility of applying stakeholder theory to understanding management development
• to describe and assess a set of related conceptual models of management education design and evaluation.
