Kursens beskrivning

Introduction to Management is a bachelor-level course, which introduces students to the fascinating world of management in the context of modern organizing. The course aims to develop capabilities for independent thinking about management as a phenomenon ultimately concerned with a particular relationship to the human subject at work. This is achieved through a course structure that recognizes the cultural-historical specificity of management in modern Anglo-Saxon and European cultures. The course content is organized along three thematics. The first theme locates the emergence of management within the historical context of modern and industrial capitalism. Students will be introduced to three lines of critique of early industrial society and its particular modes of organization. This includes the analytical categories of anomie, alienation, rationalization and the objects of division of labour, the labour process, work ethic and bureaucratic organization. A second theme allows students to engage in managerial ideas and practices in terms of their origins, intentionalities, development and effects in the course of the 20th century. This includes scientific management, human relations and organizational psychology, systems theory, the management of culture and Human Resources. A third and final theme considers the technological horizon of possibility and discusses the self and subjectivity in contemporary organization as well as imaginations of future modes of managing. The latter includes themes of self-management, aspects of the ‘automata’ in the form of AI and Machine learning and issues about privacy and surveillance.

The course is guided by the conviction of a learning experience where students are treated as young adults whose independent thinking in the world of management and organization studies can be cultivated through a collaborative mode of learning, akin to that in other parts of the social sciences and humanities, where problematizing of the object of study is considered germane. As such the course aims at sophistication rather than simplification (or ‘dumbing down’) and problematizing rather than prescribing thinking and analysis of the thought-world of management.