Faculty
The professors: Peter Karnøe, Paul DuGay, Kristian Kreiner, Tor Hernes; ass. Professor: Signe Vikkelsø and Anne Reff Pedersen. All from CBS

Course Coordinator
Professor Peter Karnøe, e-mail pka.ioa@cbs.dk

The PhD student is required to present a five-pages (maximum) written presentation, in which she/he relates the curriculum literature in the course to his/her project. The presentation must include specific references to the literature applied. Deadline for submission of presentations is 22 September, 2009.

The student presentation should provide material for discussion during the course, and the student must be willing to participate in discussions of other presentations.

This course seeks to introduce the PhD-student to some of the classical dimensions or themes that constitute the scientific grounding of ‘organizational theory’ such as decision processes, sense-making processes, and strategy processes, and organizational design processes.
The central idea in designing the course is to work with the classical constitutive dimensions in organizational theory, but also to make some ontological moves from classical treatment of these constitutive dimensions to more post-structural treatments. The post-structural treatment view underscores ‘organizing as a process’ and the ambition is to understand the classical themes in light of the new ontological position and link it to ways we in which we understand the unfolding of concrete organizing and business practices.

Our ambition is to enable the PhD to mobilize classical dimensions in organizational theory, so they ontologically come to ‘see’ something different and new in their empirical work. Thus, the course will increase participant’s reflexivity on the role of theories in ‘making objects for research’.
An emphasis on the variety of ontologies will enable Ph.D.-students to work with theories as ‘tools’ for making research and empirical inquiries. But as ontological tools theories are not innocent because through their ontology the theories also frame how the phenomena being studied can be conceptualized and studied in the first place. Indeed, theories frame phenomena because they include certain properties of entities (actors, decisions, meanings, organizations), certain relations, certain developmental processes, and certain causalities (linear or non-linear).

Further, 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’. By contrast 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. However, we are not claiming a ‘relativist position’, and may discuss situations where reality resist certain claims, while at the same time multiple claims can be made.

Thus, theories are ontological devices for making sense of phenomena – and at the same time the empirical field is a not a passive thing, because the way researchers engage in the empirical field also shapes how they come to ‘see and understand’ phenomena. Can the engagement with the empirical inquiry surprise the beliefs and assumptions of the researcher?

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

This course covers four constituting dimensions in making organizational analysis:

1. DECISION-MAKING PROCESSES
2. SENSE-MAKING AND MEANING PROCESSES
3. NARRATIVE PROCESSES
4. ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN AND ARRANGEMENT PROCESSES

Dialogue lectures and group discussions

Compendium