Faculty
The professors: Peter Karnøe, Paul du Gay, Kristian Kreiner, Tor Hernes; Associated Professors: Signe Vikkelsø, Anne Reff Pedersen, Eva Boxenbaum; all from CBS

Course Coordinator
Professor Peter Karnøe

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 17 October 2011.

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 PhD 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 depict certain properties of entities as central (actors, decisions, meanings, 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 brings certain entities and processes into the foreground while others recede into the background.

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 resists 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 five constituting dimensions in making organizational analysis:

Preliminary plan:

Monday 7 November: Introduction and the Decision Making Perspective on Organizational Analysis (Peter Karnøe, Kristian Kreiner)

Tuesday 8 November: Organizational learning (Morten Vendelø) and Neo-institutional theory (Eva Boxenbaum)

Wednesday 9 November: Perspectives on Organizational Structure (Paul du Gay, Signe Vikkelsø)

Thursday 10 November: The sense-making andnarrative Perspective on Organizational Analysis (Tor Hernes & Anne Reff Pedersen)

Friday 11 November: The theoretical ontologies define and privilege certain ways to understand and study organizations (Peter Karnøe) 

Dialogue lectures and group discussions.

Course compendium with the provisional literature:

Reed, Michael (2006) Organizational Theorizing: a Historically Contested Terrain. The Sage Handbook of Organization Studies, second edition, Sage Publications, pp. 19-54.

Simon, Herbert A. (1946) The Proverbs of Administration. Public Administration Review, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 53-67.

Ariely, D. (2009). The End of Rational Economics. Harvard Business Review, July-August, pp. 78-84.

March, J. G. (1994). A Primer on Decision Making. How Decisions Happen. New York, Free Press., chapter 1.

Gibbons, R. (2003) Team theory, garbage cans and real organizations: some history and prospects of economic research on decision-making in organizations. Industrial and Corporate Change, Vol. 12, no 4, pp. 753-770 (the last pages of the article are less relevant).

Smircich, Linda and Charles Stubbart (1985) Strategic Management in an Enacted World. The Academy of Management Review, Vol. 10, No. 4: 724-736.

Weick, Karl E. (1993) The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster. Administrative Science Quarterly, 38 (1993): 628-652.

Weick, Karl E., Kathleen M. Sutcliffe and David Obstfeld (2005) Organizing and the process of sensemaking. Organization Science 16(4):409-421.

Bakken, Tore and Tor Hernes (2006) Organizing is both a noun and a verb: Weick meets Whitehead. Organization Studies 27(11):1599-161.

Stephens, Carlene and Steven Lubar (1986) A Place for Public Business: The Material Culture of the Nineteenth-Century Federal Office, Business and Economic History, 2nd series, Vol. 15.

Perrow, Charles (1986) Complex Organizations, chapter 1. McGraw-Hill Publishing Company.

Jaques, Elliot (1990) In Praise of Hierarchy. Harvard Busienss Review

Rohr, John (1999) Iran Contra and the Problem of Loyalty. Published in Public Service, Ethics, and Constitutional Practice, pp. 113-115.

Hazen, Mary Ann (1993) Towards Polyphonic Organization. Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 6, No. 5: 15-26

Czarniawska, Barbara (1997) A Four Time Told Tale: Combining Narrative and Scientific Knowledge in Organization Studies. Organization, Vol 4 (1): 7-30.

Vaara, Eero (2002) On the Discursive Construction of Success/Failure in Narratives of Post-Merger Integration. Organization Studies 23/2, 211-248.

Gabriel, Yiannis (1995) The Unmanaged Organization: Stories, Fantasies and Subjectivity. Organization Studies 16/3, 477-501.

Boje, David M. (1991) The Storytelling Organization: A Study of Story Performance in an Office-Supply Firm. Administrative Science Quarterly,Vol. 36.

Pedersen, Anne Reff (2009) Moving Away from Chronological Time: Introducing the Shadows of Time and Chronotopes as New Understandings of ‘Narrative Time’. Organization, Vol. 16(3): 389-406.

Currie, Graeme and Andrew D. Brown (2003) A Narratological Approach to Understanding Processes of Organizing in a UK Hospital. Human Relations, Vol. 56(5): 563-586.

Levitt, B., & March, J. G. 1988. Organizational learning. Annual Review of Sociology, 14: 319-340.

March, J. G. 1995. The future, disposable organizations and the rigidities of imagination. Organization, 2: 427-440.

Ansara, Shahzad, Peer Fiss & Edward Zajac (2010) Made to fit: How practices vary as they diffuse. Academy of Management Review, Vol. 35(1): 67-92.

Edelman, Lauren B. (1992) Legal Ambiguity and Symbolic Structures: Organizational Mediation of Civil Rights Law. AJS, Vol. 97, no. 6: 1531-76.

Lounsbury, Michael (2001) Institutional Sources of Practice Variation: Staffing College and University Recycling Programs. Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 46: 29-56.

Thornton, Patricia & William Ocasio (1999) Institutional Logics and the Historical Contingency of Power in Organizations: Executive Succession in the Higher Education Publishing Industry, 1958-1990. AJ, Vol. 15, no. 3: 801-43.

Westphal, James D. & Edward J. Zajac (2001) Decoupling Policy from Practice: The Case of Stock Repurchase Programs. Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 46: 202-228.

Boxenbaum, Eva & Stefan Jonsson (2008) Isomorphism, Diffusion and Decoupling in Greenwood, Royston, Christine Oliver, Kerstin Sahlin-Andersson & Roy Suddaby The Sage Handbook of Organizational Institutionalism, Sage Publications, 1st edition, pp. 78-98.