Faculty
Tor Hernes (IOA)

Course Coordinator
Tor Hernes (IOA)

Co-requisite: This course must be taken with OS42, as the exams are combined.

Both OD and APM focus on the role of a variety of technologies in maintaining and transforming organisations. APM concentrates specifically on the multiple roles played by technologies in relation to accounting procedures and performance measurement. This instantiates and illustrates the general situation elucidated in OD, in which human actors and technologies together shape organisational designs and outcomes The OD and APM courses are integrated in shared workshops, which focus on the role of accounting and performance technologies in stabilising or transforming organisational designs.

In this course, Organisational design is understood broadly as the attempt made by organisations to stabilise their internal and external relations or to transform them. Different theories offer widely different answers to the question of which actors actually shape organisations. These range from traditional approaches, based on assumptions of managerial rationality and relying on rather understandings of organisational structure. In contrast to such theories, the course views organisational design as an ongoing process, which involves multiple actors from all organisational levels. Traditional approaches to organisational change has likewise focused almost exclusively on human actors as the central organisational change agents. In contrast to this view, the course introduces theories, which view organisation as networks consisting of human actors and a heterogeneous set of non-human actors, including information and accounting systems. Central to this perspective is that while people shape the technologies used in organisations – and thereby design specific organisations, it is also the case that people and organisations are shaped by their technologies. What emerges is therefore a perspective on organisational design as an ongoing and partly uncontrollable process, in which organisational actors and technologies are adapted to and changed by each other.

From this point of view the attempt to design organisations involves the effort to associate and align such diverse actors in reliable patterns of action. Such a view has met with increasing interest over the last decade not least as a result of the increasing technological sophistication and geographical dispersion of organisations. One prominent solution in recent years has been to use new information technologies as tools with which to do knowledge management or facilitate knowledge sharing in and across distributed organisations. The course makes use of knowledge management literature as illustrative of new organisational challenges, and it considers what it takes to make the mixed set of resources such as technologies, people, and their knowledge resourceful for one another in accomplishing organisational design.

Information will be provided on e-campus by 1 September.

Indicative literature