Course content
The purpose of the course is to enable engagement in problems that shape our organized business practices with special emphasis on presupposed kinds of individuals. The emphasis on problems and presupposed individuals implies that the course will ask the following questions: What overall conception of employees, actors, customers, clients, subjects etc. are implied or presupposed by different organized business practices? How do such conceptions interact with the ways in which various problems are addressed, deemed important and committed to within these practices?
The didactic purpose is to make the student capable of inquiring into these matters while combining the disciplines of philosophy and business administration/economics. This inquiry includes (a) the choice of a particular organized business practice apt for empirical study; (b) the application of specific analytical categories developed during the course; (c) the use of seminal theoretical contributions within philosophy and economics presented in the course; and (d) the articulation of a research question, arguments for choice of methods, and use of a final format for an adequate presentation of the above. Importantly, the inquiries are matters of co-development between students (choosing cases, theories, problems, etc.) and teachers (providing analytical categories and questions, discussion, framework for investigation, etc.) throughout the course. Moreover, they are prolegomenous in the sense that the work-in-progress examinations also prepare the student for carrying out larger scale project (not least a master thesis) by carefully discussing what it takes in terms of specified subject matter, analytical approach, empirical material, use of theory, methodology, literature review, etc.
See course description in course catalogue