BUSI49K30: Power, Control and Resistance in Organisations

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• To provide students with the advanced knowledge and skills that will enable them to re-conceptualise organisational processes normally seen as management and being managed in terms of power, control and resistance.

• Reconceptualising Management: Introducing Power, Control and Resistance
• Introducing Critical Theorists: Marx, Foucault, Freud and Butler
• Classic Critical Studies of Management
• Cultural Representations of Management, Work and Organisation
• Alternative practices in organising
• Implications for organisational life
• Research approaches that support this content in particular, forms of participant observer research methods
• Ethical challenges in management and organisation studies

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• Have an advanced understanding of a range of Critical Theories (e.g. varieties of Marxism, feminism, post-structuralism etc.) and how they have been applied in management and organisation studies;
• Have an advanced understanding of alternative, non-managerial/non-hierarchical ways of organising;
• Have a critical appreciation of managers cultural and symbolic (not merely functional) roles;
• Have a critical appreciation of the significance of the representation of managers and workers in cultural media novels, films, TV etc.
• Have an advanced understanding of ethical challenges in management and organisation studies, and the appropriate responses.

Subject-specific Skills:

• Be able to see managerialism as an ideology in a variety of ways;
• Be able to critique the received wisdom of mainstream management studies especially in terms of the disciplines power effects;
• Be able to articulate how management practices could be different opening possibilities for work to be less coercive and more cooperative.
• Analytical: ability to look at organisational phenomena as exotic, arbitrary and strange rather than as managers traditionally might see them as rational, functional and self-evident.
• Methodological: To be able to use methods to support this anthropologically orientated view of organisations particularly important will be ethnography

Key Skills:

• Ability to make an initial formulation and articulation of a potential scheme of research
• Ability to understand and resolve the problems and issues in undertaking doctoral research
• Ability to formulate, articulate and complete a scheme of research at doctoral level
• Enhanced personal effectiveness
• Effective written communication
• Advanced skills of self-awareness and time management

• The pre-module online session will provide students with a clear steer on what they need to do to prepare for the module and enable them to ensure that they have completed the requisite reading before the Durham based module teaching commences. It will enable students to reflect, engage with module materials and think about the academic commitment that they have taken on.
• The module will be delivered in a workshop format over an intensive three-day teaching block. Workshops will comprise a balanced mix of lecture- and seminar-type delivery combined with small group discussions and other activities as appropriate to the nature of the material. For example, excerpts from films will be used in order to illustrate observation-based approaches and develop students ability to de-familiarise organisational phenomena. Learning will also occur through tutor-supported, as well as self-support learning groups. There will also be on-line teaching support through a module blog. Finally, guided reading will address key topics. This range of methods will ensure that students will acquire the advanced skills and knowledge to enable them to develop a thorough understanding of this specialist field of study. The assessment of the module will be with an essay, designed to test students' knowledge and understanding of the subject-matter and their ability to apply it to the analysis of specific issues relating to the study of skills.

Towards of the end of the workshop, each student will be required to deliver a short individual presentation that demonstrates how the student might make sense of these ideas in the context of their own work place.

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