The political metaphor looks at how organizations are governed, at the pursuit and use of power and at themicropolitics of organizational life. Indi- viduals in organizations can be competitive as well as co-operative, pursuing di¡erent interests that may con£ict. Often, as in the System Of Systems Methodologies (SOSM) (see Chapter 2), the possible political relationships that can obtain between participants in an organization are represented as being either unitary, pluralist or coercive ^ signalling greater con£ict and reliance on power, as a means of settling disputes, as we move along that spectrum. However refreshing this perspective might be, critics suspect that it can overemphasize and, by doing so, contribute to the politicization of organizational life. And it does so to the neglect of other factors crucial to the health of organizations.