Faculty
Professor Susse Georg and Professor Jesper Strandgaard, both from CBS

Course Coordinator
Professor Jesper Strandgaard, CBS

The course is designed so that no matter how far you are in your research process you can join and will benefit from this course. However, it is a prerequisite that the participants’ work on their research projects has reached a stage – including the empirical work – where they can bring forth reflections, experiences and problems from their organizational analyses.

The participants are required to submit a written presentation – 7-10 pages – that relates to the content of the course and tells about their current struggle with the research questions in the conflict between the field’s phenomenology and theoretical perspectives/positions, empirical data and methods for generating and analyzing data, field work and study, field players’ and research colleagues’ interpretations. Deadline for submission of the presentation is 7 September 2012.

It is a precondition for receiving the course diploma that the PhD student attends the entire course.

The objective of the course is to help the participants in their methodological reflections and choices in connection with their PhD dissertation. Through the confrontation between the participants’ dissertations and chosen methodologies of organization and management analyses the aim is to get a profound understanding of the basic considerations that must follow the exploration of organizations and other social systems. The methodology course differs from other methodology courses that are specialized in specific themes (e.g. ‘the qualitative interview’ or ‘case studies’) by dealing with the overall methodology of the project – i.e. the relation between research questions, the theoretical frame, the data generation and analysis, and the work with the dissertation. It is the ambition of the course to draw attention to and discuss the methodological coherence of each project and especially of the connection between the different parts of the project’s overall research design.

The course is built up around four basic methodological elements:

1) How can you work with the research question?

2) How can you work with a theoretical frame of reference?

3) How can you generate and analyze data?

4) How can you write the dissertation?

 

The course mornings will be used for lectures within a specific methodological aspect followed by discussion and plenary debate. The afternoons, on the other hand, are reserved for presentations of the participants’ projects and discussions of these in groups of 4-6 persons. The course is based on the following assumptions and premises:* The research process as creative process involving both learning processes and personal development; An organizational and management sociological methodology that constantly connects theory and target fields within organization, organizational and management processes. *Methodology as concrete connections of theoretical perspectives, models, methods (in the sense of techniques), target field, researcher and working process. *Methodology as a practice which finds its legitimacy in relation to the completion of the research project and the research publications’ ability to convince relevant research and practitioner communities.

Preliminary programme

 

The course provides the students with greater insight into a number of approaches to organizational analyses, offering them a larger repertoire to choose from and better opportunities to make qualified and consistent choices.

The course improves the participants' ability to be critical and take a reflexive approach to the coherence and consistency between the different choices and in parts of the research process, which improves their methodological ability in relation to their own project as well as other research projects, etc. (the latter increases their competences in connection with other research-related tasks, such as: Reviewer and opponent / discussant)

The course is not an introductory course to methodology with the intention of giving ‘solutions’ to the participants’ projects in terms of design. Instead the course invites to a joint reflection and discussion to develop the participants’ methodological competence especially in relation to their own project, but also as a qualified participant in research-related connections as opponent, reviewer, etc. The reflection is based on two elements (that benefit from each other mutually throughout the course): 1) Discussion of methodological questions related to the course participants’ own projects. 2) Presentation and discussion of methodological reflections and experiences related to completed research projects.

A course compendium with selected texts that relate to the four headlines of the morning lectures. Background literature:  Denzin & Lincoln (eds.) (1994) Handbook of Qualitative Research. Sage · Becker, H. (1998): Tricks of the Trade. How to Think About Your Research While You’re Doing it. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.