PhD Courses in Denmark

Course coordinators: Susanne Boch Waldorff & Morten Thanning Vendelø, Department of Organization (IOA)

Faculty

Professor with special responsibilites Anne Reff Pedersen
Department of Organization, CBS

Associate professor Lasse Folke Henriksen
Department of Organization, CBS

Professor Jan Mouritsen
Departgment of Operations Management, CBS

Associate professor Kirstine Zinck Pedersen
Department of Organization, CBS

Professor with special responsibilites Morten Thanning Vendelø
Department of Organization, CBS

Professor Sara Muhr
Department of Organization, CBS

Associate professor Susanne Boch Waldorff
Department of Organization, CBS

Associate professor Ursula Plesner

Department of Organization, CBS

Prerequisite, progression of the course
The PhD students must submit a five-pages student paper, in which they select and relate two perspectives from the course literature to their research project. Deadline for submission of student papers is Wednesday November 13, 2024.

The student papers serve as input to discussions during the course, and the students must prepare for and participate in group work.

Also, the students must prepare and bring a project poster to the course on the first day. We will post all posters in our course room, and encourage the students to use their poster, when they present their project, as well as when they discuss their project with other participants during breaks, etc.

For further information about student paper, poster, and group work please consult the Guidelines for Student Preparation.

Aim
This course introduces and familiarizes PhD students to a set of analytical perspectives, which are well-alive in contemporary organizational analysis. The core idea of the course is to give the PhD-students an opportunity to work with a variety of perspectives in organiza-tional analysis and engage in discussions of contemporary research and concepts within this field.

Content
Our ambition is to enable PhD students to mobilize different analytical perspectives in or-ganizational theory and inspire them to ‘see’ something different and new in their own em-pirical work. Thus, the course seeks to increase participant’s reflexivity on the role of theo-ries in ‘making objects for research’.

The course will enable PhD students to work with theories as ‘tools’ for making research and empirical inquiries. However, theories are not innocent or neutral. They form and fra-me the phenomena being studied. Theories frame phenomena because they depict certain properties of entities as central (actors, meanings, and organizations), certain relations, certain developmental processes, and certain causalities (linear or non-linear). It is critical to understand how the choice of theory for organizational studies highlights certain enti-ties and processes, while others fade.

The observer and the object are not separate but co-produced in the research process, and the empirical data are not just ‘given out there’, as the researchers’ empirical data are con-structed through selection and edited based on the theoretical tools mobilized. Theories are not considered as something that has to be ‘proven’, but more as resources for ‘seeing, discussing, imagining’ interesting properties of the phenomena studied.

Theories are devices for making sense of phenomena – and at the same time the empirical field is a not a passive thing, because how researchers engage in an empirical field also sha-pes how they come to ‘see and understand’ phenomena.

The course will be explicit about how this new understanding can be linked to your own projects.

Preliminary Lecture plan

Monday: Introduction (Susanne Boch Waldorff & Morten Thanning Vendelø), The Institutional Perspective (Susanne Boch Waldorff) and The Sensemaking Perspective (Morten Thanning Vendelø).

Tuesday: The Network Perspective (Lasse Folke Henriksen) and Actor-Network Theory (Jan Birkelund Mouritsen)

Wednesday: The Pragmatism and Practice Perspective (Kirstine Zinck Pedersen) and Professions in an Organizational Context (Anne Reff Pedersen)

Thursday: Digitalization in an Organizational Perspective (Ursula Plesner) and The Cri-tical Management Perspective (Sara Louise Muhr)
Friday: How theories define and privilege certain ways to understand and study organizations (Susanne Boch Waldorff & Morten Thanning Vendelø)

Teaching Style
Dialogue lectures and group work

Learning Objectives
After participating in the course, the students will be able to:

• Critically reflect on how the choice of theory for organizational analysis brings certain entities and processes into the foreground while others recede into the background.
• Account for the theoretical positions presented in the course and critically reflect on how they can be applied in their Ph.D.-projects.
• Account for contemporary debates in organization theory and know how their projects are positioned in relation to these debates.

Tentative Course literature
(the final readings will be made available to the participants after the registration deadline)

• March, J. G. (2005) Parochialism in the evolution of a research community: The case of organi-zation studies. Management and Organization Review, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 5-22.
• Meyer, J. W., & Rowan, B. (1977) Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony. American Journal of Sociology, vol. 83, no. 3, pp. 340-363.
• Johansen, C. B., & Waldorff, S. B. (2017) What are institutional logics - and where is the perspec-tive taking us? In: C. Mazza, R. Meyer, G. Krucken & P. Walgenbach (eds.), New Themes in Insti-tutional Analysis: Topics and Issues from European Research. Chelterham: Edward Elgar, pp. 51-76.
• Waldorff, S.B. and Madsen, M.H. (2023) Translating to Maintain Existing Practices: Micro-tactics in the implementation of a new management concept. Organization Studies, vol. 44, no. 3, pp. 427-450.
• Weick, K. E., Sutcliffe, K. M., & Obstfeld, D. (2005) Organizing in the process of sensemaking. Or-ganization Science, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 409-421.
• Vendelø, M. T. (2016) Disasters in the sensemaking perspective: The Præstø Fjord accident. In: R. Dahlberg, O. Rubin & M. T. Vendelø (eds.) Disaster Research – Multidisciplinary and Internatio-nal Perspectives. London: Routledge, pp. 176-188.
• De Rond, M., Holeman, I., & Howard-Grenville, J. (2019) Sensemaking from the body: An enactive ethnography of rowing the Amazon. Academy of Management Journal, vol. 62, no. 6, pp. 1961-1988.
• Podolny, J. M., & Page, K. L. (1998) Network forms of organization. Annual Review of Sociolo-gy, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 57-76.
• Granovetter, M. S. (1977) The strength of weak ties. In: Social networks (pp. 347-367). Acade-mic Press.
• Latour, B. (1984) The powers of association. The Sociological Review vol. 32, pp. 264-280.
• Mouritsen, J., Hansen, A., & Hansen, C. Ø. (2009). Short and long translations: Management accounting calculations and innovation management. Accounting, Organizations and Socie-ty, vol. 34, no. 6-7, pp. 738-754.
• Mol, A. (2010) Actor-network theory: Sensitive terms and enduring tensions. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, vol. 50, no. 1 pp. 253-269.
• Cohen M D. (2007) Reading Dewey: Reflections on the study of routine. Organization Studies, vol. 28, no. 5, pp. 773-786.
• Pedersen, K. Z. (2018). Learning in Patient Safety in Organizing Patient Safety: Failsafe Fanta-sies and Pragmatic Practices. Palgrave Macmillan. Health, Technology and Society, chapter 6. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53786-7
• Dewey, J. (1922) Habit and Intelligence: The Place of Intelligence in Conduct. In: Human Nature and Conduct. New York: Prometheus Books, pp. 172-180.
• Noordegraaf, M. (2015). Hybrid professionalism and beyond:(New) Forms of public profess-sionalism in changing organizational and societal contexts. Journal of Professions and Organi-zation, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 187-206.
• Andersson, T., & Liff, R. (2018). Co-optation as a response to competing institutional logics: Professionals and managers in healthcare. Journal of Professions and Organization, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 71-87.
• Mik-Meyer, N. (2018). Organizational professionalism: Social workers negotiating tools of NPM. Professions and Professionalism, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. e2381-e2381.
• Orlikowski, W.J. (2007) Sociomaterial practices: Exploring Technology at Work, Organization Studies 28(9): 1435-1448
• Fleming, P. (2019) Robots and Organization Studies: Why Robots Might Not Want to Steal Your Job, Organization Studies 40(1): 23-37. 
• Justesen, L. & Plesner, U. (forthcoming). Angry citizens and black belt employees: Cascading classifications of and around a predictive algorithm, Valuation Studies (in press)
• Alvesson, M., Bridgman, T. & Willmott, H. (2011) Introduction. In: M. Alvesson, T. Bridgman & H. Willmott (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Critical Management Studies. Oxford: Oxford Uni-versity Press.
• Muhr, S. L. & Kirkegaard, L. (2013) The dream consultant: Productive fantasies at work. Culture & Organization, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 105-123.
• Muhr, S. L. & Salem, A. (2013) Specters of colonialism – illusionary quality and the forgetting of history in a Swedish organization. Management & Organizational History, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 62-76.

ECTS awarded
5 ECTS – 140 student work hours, distributed in the following way:

• Reading of Course Literature (approximately 450 pages): 85 hours       
• Preparation for Participation in Group Work:10 hours
• Paper Writing + Preparation of Project Poster:15 hours
• Course Participation:30 hours