Faculty
Cand.merc

Course Coordinator
Eric Guthey, IKL

Bachelor degree. Knowledge of corporate strategy, management theory, and organisational behaviour is an advantage, but not a requirement for participation. The course is offered as a required component during the first year of the CMI concentration in Leadership and Management Studies, but it is also open to students in other graduate programmes at CBS, including international students.

Integration

This course stands alone as an advanced masters level class, but it also provides a springboard for issues explored further in Managing Cultures as Strategic Resources, Intercultural Management in Action, Collaborative Practices in Competitive Environments, Project Management in Practice. The course also supplements the required first semester courses in Business and Development Studies.

This course prepares students for careers as effective managers by exploring the key practical and conceptual tasks and challenges facing contemporary managers and by emphasising theoretical approaches to these challenges that build on the experiences and activities of people actively engaged in work organisations. The course stresses that strategic, organisational and cultural aspects of management practice always intersect and overlap. At the same time, the course explores several theories that link these dynamics tightly together. The course also pursues the notion that attention to the emergent and strategic nature of individual and organisational identities provides a solid foundation for a fresh approach to the practice of management. The course, therefore, includes discussion of those aspects of organisational life that are often marginalised in standard texts, including the politics and complexities of managerial decision-making, the personal stresses associated with managerial work, the roles played by ordinary human interaction, relationships, and humor in organisational mischief, and the ethical dilemmas faced by managers.

Towards the end, the course will examine both conventional, mainstream and alternative, critical approaches to strategy, organisation, and management. Course participants will examine a wide range of different work situations, industries and organisational types paying close attention to high-level strategic management, day-to-day middle management and supervisory work as well as to the efforts of ordinary organisational members trying to organise their working lives.

At the end of the course, students should be able to:

Individual oral examination on all material covered in the course, based on a three pages written synopsis, which is to be handed in two weeks prior to the exam. The content of the synopsis is chosen by the student. It is not graded and may be written with one or two fellow students, and it serves as a starting point for the discussion. Duration including marking: 20 minutes.

Class time will include lectures and discussions, in which participants will explore theoretical perspectives and apply them to specific case studies.

Tony Watson (2002) Organizing and Managing Work (Financial Times/Prentice Hall)

Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand, Joseph Lampel (1998) Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour Through The Wilds of Strategic Management (Free Press)

Selected pages from Karl Weick (1995) Sensemaking in Organizations (Sage Publishers)

Selected pages from Robert G. Eccles, Nitin Nohria, and James D. Berkley (1994) Beyond the Hype: Rediscovering the Essence of Management (Harvard Business School Press).