Organisation and Process Theory (Autumn 2024)

Abstract

The overall aim of the course is to enable students to conduct an organizational analysis. The course introduces students to particular forms of organizational analysis as well as a broad spectrum of organization theories. More specifically, the aim is to enable students to draw on organizational theory in the analysis of what we nominally characterize as events; the purposeful organization of concerted action towards specific goals, and to situate this approach in a broader landscape of organizational theories. 

Description

Organizations are both unavoidable in, and fundamental to, society. Classical organization theory was considered a practical and empirical science, something that in many cases was developed by organizational members to better understand, navigate, and advance the organizations within which they operated. Here, an organization was typically considered a delimited entity.

Increasingly, however, organization scholars have directed their attention towards the processes through which organizations become organizations, focusing on the importance of how actors, technologies, documents, rules, things, and buildings, for instance, dynamically come together in the continuous formation of organization. Here, social practices may also be understood as organised activities and, therefore, something that takes place both within and outside formal organizations. Here, organization is considered a process. Organization may, therefore, be understood as the effect of concerted action in everyday practices and situations.

The field of organization theory is very heterogeneous and has thrived dynamically, not least because of the proliferation of information technologies in enterprises and society. IT and technology, in other words, matters for organizations as well as for the development of organization theory. Organization and process theories are attempts at developing concepts for understanding organizations and organized activities.

Practice and process perspectives are given priority in this course. These perspectives mark a move away from a view of organizations as fixed and stable entities and towards a more dynamic and process-based understanding. Students will apply such perspectives to understand, study, and analyze the multiple ways in which heterogenous actors participate in the purposeful organization of concerted action towards a specific goal. The course will furthermore situate such perspectives by introducing different and more traditional perspectives on organization and by addressing how different concepts help us to think through the various ways in which organizing unfolds.

Formal prerequisites

There are no formal prerequisites for this course.

Intended learning outcomes

After the course, the student should be able to:

• Select, qualitatively investigate, and describe an event, including the relevant actors, technologies, texts, and/or things, that dynamically come together in the continuous formation of the event .
• Apply concepts from organization theory for analyzing the event.
• Analyze the event using concepts of organization included in the literature and present the analysis in a concise manner.
• Discuss and reflect on how concepts shape the analysis of the event.

Ordinary exam

Exam type:
C: Submission of written work, External (7-point scale)
Exam variation:
C1G: Submission of written work for groups