Contemporary Social Scientific Debates in Organisation and Management Studies (6- 8 December 2010)

Faculty
Professor Tor Hernes, Associate professor Chris Mathieu, both from the Department of Organization, CBS, and Professor Tore Bakken, BI, Norway

Course Coordinator
Associate professor Chris Mathieu, Department of Organization, CBS

A background in social sciences, philosophy or history is helpful and a Phd project studying organization and/or management is necessary. It is expected that the students have read the literature for each of the units as the course is taught in a seminar style requiring the active participation of the students.

The PhD student is required to present a five-pages (maximum) written presentation (in English) in which s/he relates parts of the curriculum literature in the course to his or her project. The presentation must include specific references to the literature used in the course, but may naturally include other sources.

Deadline for submission of presentations is 22 November 2010.

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

A precondition for receiving the course diploma that the student attend the whole course.

The aim of the course it to introduce several current issues and controversies that figure prominently in organizational and management analysis. As these issues are central to organizational and management studies it is assumed that PhD students will probably confront one or more of these issues in some manifestation during their dissertation work. It is hoped that the course will give the student an initial capacity to analyze the extent of these issues and how they can be confronted.

As the title of the course reflects, focus is on seeing how broad social scientific debates and issues have been applied in the analysis of organizations and management .Thus these issues are broad and central, meaning that they are debated outside the ambit of organization theory/analysis, but this breadth and centrality also means that virtually any study of organizing or organizational phenomena necessarily must (and do – explicitly or implicitly) touch on most of these issues in some way or another. This course is designed to equip you to gain awareness of where and when these issues can arise, how they are dealt with in contemporary organizational analysis, and how you can explicitly deal with them

The course focuses on four topics or areas of controversy. The first is the levels of analysis/levels of explanation issue. Here we look at several examples of dividing up the analytical world of relevance to organizational and management analysis, how explanations of phenomena are offered at these levels and how the linking or disjuncture between levels is dealt with. One central point of debate is whether explanatory primacy is top-down (macro-primacy), bottom-up (micro-primacy) or unique and generated at each particular analytical level. To a certain extent this issue builds upon and can be seen as a current verion of the the classic micro-(meso)-macro controversy. The second topic is what we call the sociality-materiality debate. Here we explore the claims primarily associated with Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) that the role of the material is grossly under-played or absent in the social sciences in general and organizational and management studies as well. We also look at the counter-claims that at least some ANT over-emphasizes the material and under-emphasizes or entirely neglects central social processes. The third topic exams three basic forms of explanation and orientation: action/agency; structural; and relational. Each one of these perspectives makes a claim for explanatory priority, and each perspectives allows for its perspective to be “scaled up or down” allowing for us to speak of micro to macro actors and micro to macro structures that are active in and bear on organizational and management phenomenon. A more recent challenge to both the agency and structural perspectives comes from relational theorizing, which posits that both “substantialist” perspectives are inherently flawed. The fourth topic looks at the tension between various forms of (critical) realism and various forms of social constructivism/constructionism as they have played out in organizational and management theory and analysis. The fifth topic addresses systems theory, with particular reference to Luhmann’s autopoietic systems theory.

The student can expect to attain a reasonable level of familiarity with the four central debates/controversies in organizational analysis dealt with during the course, as well as refining a skill in seeing how controversies in this field are constructed and can be dissected

The course is based on thematic seminars requiring the active participation of the student. Students should be prepared for each session by critically assessing the literature for the session as well as thinking out how the issue for the session might relate to the student’s PhD project.

The course runs over two and a half days at the Copenhagen Business School. The first day starts with a brief introduction to the course – its structure, aims and practical details, and a brief presentation of the teachers and PhD students. The rest of the first day is devoted to two topics, on in the morning and one in the afternoon. The second day also takes up two topics, one in the morning, one in the afternoon. The third day is devoted to a round-table discussion and wrap-up where an effort is made to show how the four topics inter-relate, where methodological and theoretical compatibilities and incompatibilities lie, and possibly practical means of brokering these issues in you PhD projects.

Levels of analysis/levels of explanation and sociality/materiality
* AG Scherer (2003) “Modes of explanation in organization theory” in Tsoukas & Knudsen The Oxford Handbook of Organization Theory
* Tor Hernes’ (2007) Understanding Organizations as Process: Theory for a Tangled World, London: Routledge.

Action/agency; structural; and relational
* Ira Cohen “Theories of Action and Praxis”
* M Emirbayer “Manifesto for a relational sociology” American Journal of Sociology 103(2): 281-317.
* S Fuchs (2001) “Beyond Agency” Sociological Theory 19(1): 24-40.

Critical realism and social construcivism
* N Fairclough (2005) “Discourse analysis in organization studies: the case for critical realism” Organization Studies 26(6) 915-939.
* Articles in the “roundtable debate” on discourse, organization and epistemology written by Oswick, Keenoy, Grant & Marshak; Chia; Parker; Reed; Chia (again) and Oswick, Keenoy, Grant & Marshak (again) in the journal Organization (2000) v.7(3): 511-544.
* S Fleetwood (2005) “Ontology in Organization and Management Studies: a critical realist perspective” Organization 12(2): 197-222.