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Course: 2017/2018

Organization Theory

(17167)

Study: Master in Business and Finance (69)

EPE

Coordinating teacher: GUTIERREZ CALDERON, MARIA ISABEL

Department assigned to the subject: Department of Business Administration

Type: Electives

ECTS Credits: 5.0 ECTS

Course: 1º

Semester: 2º

Competences and skills that will be acquired and learning results.

This course will survey the contemporary literature in organization theory, in order to provide an overview of the field. The assumption that guides the course is that contemporary organization theory (OT) had its roots in the work of late 19th and early 20th century sociologists, particularly Max Weber. The contributions of Weber and others provided the basis for the development of what has been called Structural Contingency Theory in the 1960s and early 1970s. For a time, structural contingency theory provided an integrative paradigm roughly similar to those that Kuhn describes for normal science disciplines. But the dominance of structural contingency theory broke down in the late 1970s, because of critiques of the perspective and the openness of organization theory to conceptual imports from other disciplines. The outcome of the breakdown was the differentiation of the field into a number of distinct perspectives, many of which conceptualized organizations and their relationships with their environments by borrowing heavily from other social or even natural science disciplines. These perspectives have now become institutionalized as distinct schools of thought in OT, though none has yet emerged as a hegemonic new paradigm.
The perspective outlined above is one approach to understanding the recent intellectual history of OT, though certainly not the only possible one. It provides a framework within which to organize the readings for this course.

Description of contents: programme

PART 1: INTRODUCTION
	1. Organizations and management
	2. Organization and bureaucracy
	3. Organizations and organization theories
	4. Organization and decision theory
PART 2: ORGANIZATION THEORIES
	5. Structural contingency theory
	6.Resource dependence theory 
	7. Population ecology 
	8. Institutional theory 
	9. Transaction costs theory
	10.Approaches comparison
PART 3: PUBLISHING 
	11. Organization Theory as a field of academic research and publishing

For each topic a list of specialized readings will be provided

Learning activities and methodology

This course is a seminar, utilizing a mix of very little lecture and a lot of discussion.   I am not a lecturer in this seminar.   I will serve as the coordinator and class director, but the majority of the time the participants will be directing the discussion.I   will begin each class with a short introduction of the subjects and a discussion of a series of questions I will have provided to you the week before.   Finally, the topic leader will lead discussion of the papers assigned to him/her.

Assessment System

The grade for the seminar will be based on a combination of assignments

- Literature summaries: 30% 
- Class participation:  15 %
- Presentations: 20 %
- Final exam: 35 %

% end-of-term-examination 35
% of continuous assessment (assigments, laboratory, practicals...) 65

Basic Bibliography

Pfeffer, J.. Organizations and Organization Theory. Pitman. 1982
Scott, R.. Institutions and Organizations. Ideas, Interests and Identities. Sage. 2014

The course syllabus and the academic weekly planning may change due academic events or other reasons.