1105965

Professor Jan Mouritsen

Associate Professor Thomas Frandsen

The course aims to study research papers intensively including making different papers talk with each other. Therefore, reading papers thoroughly is a prerequisite for learning optimally from the course. 

The course not only requires presence, it also asks students to develop a small paper about their learning in relation to their PhD topic, and it requires that each student engages in review of and feed back to two other students’ submissions. It is therefore a prerequisite that the PhD student has started his or her PhD project and made reflections on its empirical theme, theory and level of analysis

The purpose of the PhD course in technologies of managing technology is to focus on the role of tools and artefacts in managerial action. The course starts from the observation that there is no management without tools and then embarks on a discussion of how tools on the one side are mobilised by mangers to extend their reach to impact their world, and on the other side poses obligations and requirements that prescribe what they have to do. The role of management tools is thus ambiguous, and the course relates this observation to issues in managerial economics, supply chain management, operations management, innovation management, performance management, management accounting and valuation.

The objective of the course is to

• Enable the student to critically relate to the field with a view to reflect on and transgress established frames of understanding
• Debate issues where the field’s issues collide particularly in relations between performance management, operations management, innovation management and management of interorganizational relations
• Focus on systematic reflection of the premises of the field, its empirical propositions, theoretical hypotheses and methodology.

The course starts with the question how to study ’systems’ when it is unclear when one systems stops and another starts. The course thus is concerned with how systems are made manageable. Typically, this concerns how systems’ resources and activities can be made part of the production of effects and be attached to accountability.

On this basis the course has four main themes:

1. Management Technology
2. Managing inter-organisational relations and performance
3. Valuation
4. Critical appraisal

The course emphasises finding dilemmas and problematisation which make a theme researchable. Not all questions are research questions; some are merely empirical questions. Research questions require theorisation, which is input, process and output of a research process.

The course requires reflexivity generally in the area of business and management studies, but it nevertheless focuses on two dimensions in the business of business firms namely performance management and inter-organisational relations. These are the central empirical elements in the course which then are used to illustrate how reflexivity and researchable questions can develop.

Integrated with this, the course has a particular focus on what characterises a management

technology. There are many management tools, but their power and consequences are rarely given by their logical or aesthetical constitution. Looking at management tools as technology the central question is how a set of procedures which reduce a 3-dimensial empirical space to a 2-dimensional informational space make intervention more possible? This discussion concerns both generally what is a representation and also how does a representation hold the entities that it is supposed to represent? Management technology and research methodology have much in common and this is explored in this course.

This is the preliminary program. There will be changes including updates of literature when the course moves closer. However, the themes will endure:

The objective of the course is to

• Enable the student to critically relate to the field with a view to reflect on and transgress established frames of understanding
• Debate issues where the field’s issues collide particularly in relations between performance management, operations management, innovation management and management of interorganizational relations
• Focus on systematic reflection of the premises of the field, its empirical propositions, theoretical hypotheses and methodology.

In addition to participations, PhD students are required to submit a small paper (about 5 pages) about the relationship between the course and their PhD topics. They are also required to review and give feedback on two other students’ papers.

The course is 5 whole days of a week.

The following description of the course is indicative to provide a ‘feel’ for it.

A. Systems and networks

1. Czarniawska, B. (2004) On Time, Space and Action Nets, Organization 11(6) pp. 773-791

2. Pidd, M. (2003) Soft systems methodology in Tools for Thinking. Modelling in Management Science (chapter 5)

3. Ackoff, R. L. (1994). Systems thinking and thinking systems. System Dynamics Review, 10(2-3), 175-188.