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This course introduces PhD students to a set of analytical perspectives, which are well-alive in contemporary organizational analysis, such as; Actor-Network Theory, New Institutional Theory, the Sense-Making Perspective, the Narrative Perspective, Organizational Identity and Strategy as Practice.

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.

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 research 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, decisions, 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.

Every day from 9 am - 4.30 pm (Friday from 9 am - 1 pm)

Monday: Introduction (Susanne Boch Waldorff & Morten Thanning Vendelø), Bureaucracy as Organizational Structure (Paul du Gay) and Designing and Organizing (Signe Vikkelsø).

Tuesday: Neo-institutional theory (Susanne Boch Waldorff) and The Sense-making Perspective (Morten Thanning Vendelø).

Wednesday: Organizational Identity (Majken Schultz) and The Narrative Perspective (Anne Reff Pedersen)

Thursday: Actor-Network Theory (NN) and Strategy as Practice (Martin Kornberger)

Friday: How theories define and privilege certain ways to understand and study organizations (Susanne Boch Waldorff & Morten Thanning Vendelø)

• 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 research 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’.
and group discussions