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Perspectives in Organizational Analysis - 5 ECTS

Date and time

Monday 24 November 2025 at 09:00 to Friday 28 November 2025 at 16:00

Registration Deadline

Wednesday 1 October 2025 at 23:55

Location

Room TBA, Campus TBA, 2000 Frederiksberg Room TBA
Campus TBA
2000 Frederiksberg

Perspectives in Organizational Analysis - 5 ECTS

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

Faculty

Professor Anne Reff Pedersen
Department of Organization, CBS

Associate Professor Lasse Folke Henriksen
Department of Organization, CBS

Assistant Professor Trine Pallesen
Departgment of Organization, CBS

Associate Professor Kirstine Zinck Pedersen
Department of Organization, CBS

Associate Professor Morten Thanning Vendelø
Department of Organization, CBS

Professor Sara Muhr
Department of Organization, CBS

Associate professor Susanne Boch Waldorff
Department of Organization, CBS

Department of Organization, CBS
 
Prerequisite, progression of the course

The participants will be invited to join an online introductory session, taking place on October 31st 2025 from 1.00 to 2.30 pm. During the introductory session the participants will meet the course coordinators, present themselves and their expectations to the course, and be able to ask questions about the course and its content.

The participants 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 submis-sion of student papers is Wednesday November 12th 2025.

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

Also, the participants 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 participants to use their poster, when presenting 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 at-tached 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: Welcome (Susanne Boch Waldorff & Morten Thanning Vendelø), The Institutio-nal Perspective (Susanne Boch Waldorff) and The Sensemaking Perspective (Morten Thanning Vendelø).

Tuesday: The Network Perspective (Lasse Folke Henriksen) and Actor-Network Theory (Trine Pallesen)

Wednesday: Professions in an Organizational Context (Anne Reff Pedersen) and The Pragmatism and Practice Perspective (Kirstine Zinck 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 orga-nizations (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.
  •  Kudesia, R. S. (2017) Organizational sensemaking. In: I. Johnsrude (eds.) Oxford Research Ency-clopedia of Psychology, pp. 1-47. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • 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.
  • Granovetter, M. S. (1973) The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, vol. 78, no. 6, pp. 1360-1380.
  • Tortoriello, M., & Krackhardt, D. (2010) Activating cross-boundary knowledge: The role of Sim-melian ties in the generation of innovations. Academy of Management Journal, vol. 53, no. 1, pp. 167-181.
  • Latour, B. (1990) Technology is society made durable. The Sociological Review, vol. 38, no. S1, pp. 103-131.
  • Akrich, M. (1992) The de-scription of technological objects. In. W. E. Bijker & J. Law (eds.) Sha-ping Technology/Building Society, pp. 205-224. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Ossandón, J., & Pallesen, T. (manuscript under review). The new new economic sociology —the market intervention Test. Submitted to Journal of Cultural Economy, special issue: Do Ethnogra-phers Make Markets.
  • Pedersen, A. R. (2020) A resistance and everyday view on health care professionals. In: A. R. Pe-dersen, Making Sense of Organizational Change and Innovation in Health Care, pp. 52-69. Lon-don: Routledge.
  • Pareliussen, B., Æsøy, V., & Giskeødegård, M. F. (2022) Professions, work, digitalization: Techno-logy as means to connective professionalism. Journal of Professions and Organizations, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 100-114.
  • Brodersen, M. (2022) Social closures: Reconfiguration of professional work in the Danish State School. Professions & Professionalism, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 1-20.
  • 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.
  • Dewey, J. (1922) Habit and Intelligence: The Place of Intelligence in Conduct. In: Human Nature and Conduct. New York: Prometheus Books, pp. 172-180.
  • Orlikowski, W. J., & Scott, S. J. (2016) Digital work: A research agenda. In. B. Czarniawska (ed.) A Research Agenda for Management and Organization Studies, pp. 88-96. Northampton, MA: Ed-ward Elgar.
  • Justesen, L. & Plesner, U. (2024) Invisible digi-work: Compensating, connecting, and cleaning in digitalized organizations. Organization Theory, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 1-26.
  • Fleming, P. (2019) Robots and organization studies: Why robots might not want to steal your job. Organization Studies, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 23-37.
  • Fournier, V., & Grey, C. (2000) At the critical moment: Conditions and prospects for critical ma-nagement studies. Human Relations, vol. 53, no. 1, pp. 7-32.
  • Mumby, D. K., & Ashcraft, K. L. (2017) Critical approaches. In: C. R. Scott & L. Lewis (eds.) The International Encyclopedia of Organizational Communication, pp. 1-23. Wiley.
  • Dobusch, L., Holck, L., & Muhr, S. L. (2021) The im/possibility of hybrid inclusion: Disrupting the ‘Happy Inclusion’ story with the case of the Greenlandic Police Force. Organization, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 311-333.
 
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

Registration deadline and conditions

The registration deadline is 1 October 2025. If you want to cancel your registration on the course it should be done prior to this mentioned date. By this date we determine whether we have enough registrations to run the course, or who should be offered a seat if we have received too many registrations.

If there are more seats available on the course we leave the registration open by setting a new regsitration deadline in order to fill remaining seats. Once you have received our acceptance/welcome letter to join the course, your registration is binding and we do not refund your course fee. The binding registration date will be the registration deadline mentioned above.

Payment methods
 
Make sure you choose the correct method of payment upon finalizing your registration:
 
CBS students:
Choose payment method CBS PhD students and the course fee will be deducted from your PhD course budget.
 
Students from other Danish universities: 
Choose payment method Danish Electronic Invoice (EAN). Fill in your EAN number, attention and possible purchase (project) order number.
Do you not pay by EAN number please choose Invoice to pay via electronic bank payment (+71). 
 
Students from foreign universities:
Choose payment method Payment Card. Are you not able to pay by credit card please choose Invoice International to pay via bank transfer. 

Event Location

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Organizer Contact Information

CBS PhD School
Nina Iversen
Phone: +45 3815 2475
ni.research@cbs.dk

Organizer Contact Information

CBS PhD School
Nina Iversen
Phone: +45 3815 2475
ni.research@cbs.dk