969595


Course
Perspectives on Communication, Organization, and Culture (runs every 1½ year)

Faculty
Professor Lars Thøger Christensen, CBS
Professor Dan Kärreman, CBS
Professor Dennis Schoeneborn, CBS

Course Coordinator
Professor Lars Thøger Christensen & Professor Dennis Schoeneborn

Prerequisites

The course is aimed at PhD students with a background from any discipline in the social sciences. Participation does not require prior training in communication studies. Only PhD students are accepted for the course.

Prior to the course, participants are required to hand in:
(1) a short motivational statement of about 500 words on why he or she is applying for the course, and

(2) a short paper of 2,500 – 3,000 words max. (plus references), in which his/her PhD project is explicitly related to the course curriculum. The paper must include specific links to one or more texts from the course literature (further instructions will follow after acceptance to the course). In addition, participants should be prepared to briefly present their short papers in the workshop.

Furthermore, it is expected that participants have at least read the recommended key literatures prior to the course (plus, ideally, also some of the optional readings).

It is a precondition for receiving the course diploma that PhD students hand in the required paper in advance and attend the entire course.


Aim
Across the social and political sciences and beyond, communication is often understood as a simple sender-receiver model, i.e. something that merely conveys, mirrors, or represents social and physical phenomena. Over the last 25 years, however, developments in several fields have demonstrated that communication takes center stage in processes of perception, sense-making, and world-construction. The “linguistic turn”, thus, has resulted in a rich body of research exploring how communicative practices constitute organizations. Studies of organizations as cultures, sites of identity formation, systems of power struggles, for example, have focused on the discursive and communicative processes through which organizing occurs and is “talked into existence”. This PhD course will foreground communication and explore some of these research traditions, examining the extent to which they meet the challenge of taking communication seriously as an essential and constitutive feature of organizations and organizational cultures.

Course content
The PhD course will allow students to discuss and experiment with the applicability of a communication-centered perspective for conceptual and/or empirical inquiries into organizations and organi¬zational culture. The course will address themes and concepts like discourse, narratives, identity, power, culture, change, responsibili¬ty, actorhood, and new organizational forms. Students will learn how to analyze organization and culture from a communication-centered perspective. Furthermore, the course will include an introduction to “communicative constitution of organizations” (CCO) perspective that has gained increasing attention in management and organization studies over the past years. Finally, students will be taught in the craft of writing for scholarly publication at the interdisciplinary intersections of communication, organization, and culture.

Teaching style
The teaching style will be a mixture of lectures, short presentations, and discussion sessions in which students are expected to actively participate. Each student will need to read all the short papers of the other course participants before the workshop and will be asked to act as a discussant of one short paper (these discussant roles will be assigned by the course coordinators).

Lecture plan
The course runs from 18 - 21 September 2018.

The lecture plan is preliminary and subject to further adjustments.

Tuesday 18  September Faculty Theme
10.30 - 11.00 Dennis Schoeneborn & Lars Thøger Christensen Welcome & a few practical matters
11.00 - 13.00 Lars Thøger Christensen Introduction: Communication Perspectives on Organization and Culture
13.00 - 14.00 Lunch break
14.00 - 16.00 Dennis Schoeneborn Introduction to the 'Communicative Constitution of Organizations' (CCO) Perspective
16.00 - 16.30 Coffee break
16.30 - 18.00 Lars Thøger Christensen & Dennis Schoeneborn Student project discussions
Wednesday 19 September Faculty Theme
9.00 - 12.00 Lars Thøger Christensen Organizational Talk and Performativity
12.00 - 13.00 Lunch break
13.00 - 15.00 Dennis Schoeneborn Organizational Actorhood and Agency
15.00 - 15.30 Coffee break
15.30 - 18.00 Dennis Schoeneborn & Dan Kärreman Student project discussions
19.00 - 21.00 PhD course dinner (tba)
Thursday 20 September Faculty Theme
9.00 - 12.00 Dan Kärreman Organizational Culture in Context
12.00 - 13.00 Lunch break
13.00 - 15.00 Dan Kärreman Organizational Discourse, tIdentity, and Power
15.00 - 15.30 Coffee break
15.30 - 18.00 Lars Thøger Christensen & Dan Kärreman Student project discussions
Friday 21 September Faculty Theme
9.00 - 12.00 Lars Thøger Christensen & Dennis Schoeneborn Writing for Scholarly Publication at the Intersection of Communication, Organization, and Culture (Part I)
12.00 - 13.00 Lunch break
13.00 - 15.00 Lars Thøger Christensen & Dennis Schoeneborn Writing for Scholarly Publication at the Intersection of Communication, Organization, and Culture (Part II)
15.00 - 15.30 Coffee break
15.30 - 17.30 Lars Thøger Christensen & Dennis Schoeneborn Student project discussion
17.30 - 18.00 Lars Thøger Christensen & Dennis Schoeneborn Course Evaluation and Farewell

Learning objectives
• To sharpen students’ sensitivity to important nuances between different theoretical approaches to communication, organization, and culture, including their ontological, epistemological, and axiological implications

• To enable students to detect and question simplistic assumptions about communication and to become familiar with more elaborate understandings that take into account the formative and constitutive role of communication for contemporary organizations and cultures

• To aid students in understanding organizations and cultures as ongoing communicative accomplishments, along with examining the consequences of assuming such a perspective

• To develop skills in crafting (incl. framing, positioning, and scoping) research that draws on insights from the field of communication studies and enable them to apply these insights to the context of organizations and cultures in an interdisciplinary way.

Exam
N/A

Other

Start date
18/09/2018

End date
21/09/2018

Level
PhD

ECTS
5

Language
English

Course Literature
(Preliminary)

Axley, S. (1984). Managerial communication in terms of the conduit metaphor. Academy of Management Review, 9(3), 428-437.

Windahl, S., Signitzer, B. & Olsen, J. T. (2009): Using communication theory – an introduction to planned communication. London: Sage. [Excerpt: chapter 2]

Schoeneborn, D. & Vásquez, C. (2017). Communication as constitutive of organization. In: C. R. Scott & L. K. Lewis (Eds.). International encyclopedia of organizational communication. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Christensen, L. T., Morsing, M., & Thyssen, O. (2013). CSR as aspirational talk. Organization, 20, 372-393.

Dobusch, L., & Schoeneborn, D. (2015). Fluidity, identity, and organizationality: The com-municative constitution of Anonymous. Journal of Management Studies, 52(8), 1005-1035.

Alvesson, M., Kärreman, D., & Ybema, S. (2017). Studying culture in organizations: Not taking for granted the taken-for-granted. In: A.Wilkinson, S. J. Armstrong, & M. Lonsbury (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of management (pp. 103-126). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Alvesson, M., & Kärreman, D. (2011). Decolonializing discourse: Critical reflections on organizational discourse analysis. Human Relations, 64(9), 1121-1146.

Locke K. & Golden-Biddle K. (1997). Constructing opportunities for contribution: Structuring intertextual coherence and “problematizing” in organizational studies. Academy of Management Journal, (40)5, 1023-1062.

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

Minimum number of participants
15

Maximum number of participants
18

Location
Copenhagen Business School
Dalgas Have 15
2000 Frederiksberg
Room: 2V071 (2nd floor)

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


Registration deadline
28/06/2018

The short motivational statement must be uploaded together with your registration.

In case we receive more registrations for the course than we have places, the registrations will be prioritized in the the following order: Students from Doctoral School of Organisation and Management Studies (OMS), students from other CBS PhD schools, students from other institutions than CBS.

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