1045950

Course

Perspectives in Organizational Analysis (Runs annually)

Faculty

Paul du Gay, Lasse Folke Henriksen, Tor Hernes, Jan Mouritsen, Sara Muhr, Majken Schultz, Morten Thanning Vendelø, and Susanne Boch Waldorff; all from Copenhagen Business School.

Course Coordinator

Susanne Boch Waldorff and Morten Thanning Vendelø

Prerequisites

The PhD students must submit a five-pages student paper (equals a max of 11375 characters, incl. spaces), in which they select and relate two perspectives from the course literature to their research project. The paper must include specific references to the literature applied. Deadline for submission of student papers is November 15, 2019.

The student papers serve as input to discussions during the course, and the students must prepare for and participate in group work.

Also, the students must prepare a poster and bring it to the course on the first day. The poster should illustrate their current research question, empirical case, data collection, and theoretical framework. We will hang all posters in our course room, in order to, allow the students to use their poster, when they present their project, as well as when they discuss their project with other participants during breaks, etc.

It is a precondition for receiving the course diploma that PhD students participate the entire course.

Aim

This course introduces and familiarizes PhD students to a set of analytical perspectives, which are well-alive in contemporary organizational analysis. The core idea of the course is to give the PhD-students an opportunity to work with a variety of perspectives in organizational analysis, and engage in discussions of contemporary research and concepts within this field.

Course content

Our ambition is to enable PhD students to mobilize different analytical perspectives in organizational theory and inspire them to ‘see’ something different and new in their own empirical work. Thus, the course seeks to increase participant’s reflexivity on the role of theories in ‘making objects for research’.

The course will enable PhD students to work with theories as ‘tools’ for making re-search and empirical inquiries. However, theories are not innocent or neutral. They form and frame the phenomena being studied. Theories frame phenomena because they depict certain properties of entities as central (actors, meanings, and organizations), certain relations, certain developmental processes, and certain causalities (linear or non-linear). It is critical to understand how the choice of theory for organizational studies highlights certain entities and processes, while others fade.
The observer and the object are not separate but co-produced in the research process, and the empirical data are not just ‘given out there’, as the researchers’ empirical data are constructed through selection and edited based on the theoretical tools mobilized. Theories are not considered as something that has to be ‘proven’, but more as resources for ‘seeing, discussing, imagining’ interesting properties of the phenomena studied.

Theories are devices for making sense of phenomena – and at the same time the empirical field is a not a passive thing, because how researchers engage in an empirical field also shapes how they come to ‘see and understand’ phenomena.

The course will be explicit about how this new understanding can be linked to your own projects.

Teaching style

Dialogue lectures and group work.

Lecture plan

Monday, November 25, 2019 – Introduction, Organizational Structures – Formal and Informal
8.30 – 9.00	Coffee/ tea
9.00 – 10.00	Welcome, introduction to the course and presentation of participants, Morten Thanning Vendelø and Susanne Boch Waldorff
10.00 – 12.00	Bureaucracy as Organizational Structure, Professor Paul du Gay
12.00 – 12.45	Group Work I
12.45 – 13.30	Lunch
13.30 – 15.30	The Network Perspective, Associate Professor Lasse Folke Henriksen
15:30 – 16:30	Group Work II + Reflections on the Day
Tuesday, November 26, 2019 – Organizational Identity and Organizational Time
8.30 – 9.00	Coffee/tea
9.00 – 11.00	Organizational Identity, Professor Majken Schultz
11.00 – 12.00	Group Work III
12.00 – 13.00	Lunch + Walk and Talk
13.00 – 15.00	Organizational Time, Professor Tor Hernes
15.00 – 16.30	Group Work IV + Reflections on the Day
18.00 –	Dinner
Wednesday, November 27, 2019 – The Institutional Perspective and The Sense-Making Perspective
8.30 – 9.00	Coffee/tea
9.00 – 11.00	The Institutional Perspective, Associate Professor Susanne Boch Waldorff
11.00 – 12.00	Group Work V
12.00 – 13.00	Lunch + Walk and Talk
13.00 – 15.00	The Sense-Making Perspective, Professor Morten Thanning Vendelø
15.00 – 16.30	Group Work VI + Reflections on the Day
Thursday, November 28, 2019 – Actor-Network theory and the Critical Management Perspective
8.30– 9.00	Coffee/tea
9.00 - 11.00	Actor-Network Theory, Professor Jan Birkelund Mouritsen
11.00 – 12.00	Group Work VII
12.00 – 13.00	Lunch + Walk and Talk
13.00 – 15.00	The Critical Management Perspective, Professor Sara Louise Muhr
15.00 – 16.30	Group Work VIII + Reflections on the Day
Friday, November 29, 2019 – How theories define and privilege certain ways to understand and study organizations
8.30 – 9.00	Coffee/tea
9.00 – 12.00	Course wrap up. Reflections on: What kind of research questions are relevant and possible to ask in each perspective? How do organization theories make certain properties of the object ‘organization’ visible and analyzable - how may this influence the research design? How has your participation in the course changed how you think about your Ph.D.-project?
12.00 – 13.00	Lunch

Learning objectives

• Learn how the choice of theory for organizational analysis brings certain entities and processes into the foreground while others recede into the background.

• Learn that the observer and the object are not separate but co-produced in the re-search process, and the empirical data are not just ‘given out there’.

• The course will increase participant’s reflexivity on the role of theories in ‘making objects for research’.

Exam

N/A

Other

Start date

25/11/2019

End date

29/11/2019

Level

PhD

ECTS

Language

English

Course Literature

Tentative Course literature

Perrow, C. (1986) Why Bureaucracy? Chapter 1 in Complex Organizations.

Brown, W. (1965) Informal Organization? In: W. Brown & E. Jaques Glacier Project Papers London: Heinemann Educational Books 144-62

du Gay, P. (2015) Organization (Theory) As a Way of Life. Journal of Cultural Economy, vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 399-417

Mintzberg, H. (1979) The Structuring of Organizations: A Synthesis of Research. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, chapter 1,2,4:

du Gay, P., & Vikkelsø, S. (2017) Core Task as a (Continuing) Concern. In: P. du Gay & S. Vikkelsø (eds.) For Formal Organization: The Past and Present in the future of organization theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Podolny, J. M., & Page, K. L. (1998). Network forms of organization. Annual review of sociology, 24(1), 57-76.

Granovetter, M. S. (1977). The strength of weak ties. In Social networks (pp. 347-367). Academic Press.

Johansen, C. B., & Waldorff, S. B. (2017) What are Institutional Logics - and Where is the Perspective Taking Us? In: C. Mazza, R. Meyer, G. Krucken & P. Walgenbach (eds.), New Themes in Institutional Analysis: Topics and Issues from European Research. Chelterham: Edward Elgar, pp. 51-76.

Waldorff, S. B. (2013) Accounting for Organizational Innovations: Mobilizing Institutional Logics in Translation. Scandinavian Journal of Management, vol. 29, no. 3, pp 219-234.

Weick, K. E., Sutcliffe, K. M., & Obstfeld, D. (2005) Organizing in the Process of Sensemaking. Organization Science, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 409-421.

Maitlis, S., & Sonenshein, S. (2010) Sensemaking in Crisis and Change: Inspiration and Insights from Weick (1988). Journal of Management Studies, vol. 47, no. 3, pp. 551-580.

Vendelø, M. T. (2016) Disasters in the Sensemaking Perspective: The Præstø Fjord Accident. In: R. Dahlberg, O. Rubin & M. T. Vendelø (eds.) Disaster Research – Multidisciplinary and International Perspectives. London: Routledge, pp. 176-188.

Gioia, D. & Hamilton, A. (2016) Great Debates in Organizational Identity Study. In: M. Pratt, M. Schultz, B. Ashforth & D. Ravasi (eds.) Handbook of Organizational Identity. Oxford. Oxford University Press, pp. 21-38.

Schultz, M. (2016) Organizational Identity Change and Temporality. In: M. Pratt, M. Schultz, B. Ashforth & D. Ravasi (eds.) Handbook of Organizational Identity. Oxford. Oxford University Press, pp. 93-105.

Schultz, M., & Hernes, T. (2013) A Temporal Perspective on Organizational Identity. Organization Science, vol. 24, no. 1., pp. 1-21.

Chia, R. (1999). A ‘Rhizomic’ Model of Organizational Change and Transformation: Perspective from a Metaphysics of Change. British Journal of Management, vol. 10, pp. 209–227.

Hernes, T. 2017. Process as the Becoming of Temporal Trajectory. In A. Langley & H. Tsoukas (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Process Organization Studies. Los Angeles, CA: Sage, pp. 601-606.

Latour, B. (1984) The Powers of Association. The Sociological Review 32(51): 264-280.

Harris, J. (2005) The Ordering of Things: Organization in Bruno Latour. The Sociological Review, vol. 53, no. s1, pp. 163-177.

Mol, A. (2010) Actor-Network Theory: Sensitive Terms and Enduring Tensions. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, vol. 50, no. 1 pp. 253-269.

Alvesson, M., Bridgman, T. & Willmott, H. (2011) Introduction. In: M. Alvesson, T. Bridgman & H. Willmott (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Critical Management Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Muhr, S. L. & Kirkegaard, L. (2013) The Dream Consultant: Productive Fantasies at Work. Culture & Organization, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 105-123.

Muhr, S. L. & Salem, A. (2013) Specters of Colonialism – Illusionary Quality and the Forgetting of History in a Swedish Organization. Management & Organizational History, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 62-76.

Fee

DKK 6,500 (covers the course, coffee/tea, lunch and one dinner)

Minimum number of participants

Maximum number of participants

Location

Copenhagen Business School
Kilevej 14 A
2000 Frederiksberg
Room: K4.74

Contact information

The PhD Support
Katja Høeg Tingleff
Tel.: +45 38 15 28 39
E-mail: kht.research@cbs.dk

Registration deadline

01/10/2019

Please note that your registration is binding after the registration deadline.

In case we receive more registrations for the course than we have places, priority will be given to PhD students from Doctoral School of Organisation and Management Studies (OMS), and then to students who are 1.5 year or less into the PhD study.

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