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
Course Diploma
PhD students must participate in the entire course to be eligible for the course diploma. The diploma will be issued after the last day of the course or following any exam or assignment due after the course. It will be sent to the email address you provided during registration.
Registration Deadline and Conditions
The binding registration deadline is 1 December 2025. If you wish to cancel your registration, you must do so by this date. After the deadline, we will assess whether there are sufficient registrations to run the course and, if necessary, allocate seats if demand exceeds capacity.
If seats remain available after this deadline, the registration period may be extended to fill the remaining seats.
Please note that once you receive our acceptance or welcome letter, your registration becomes binding, and no refunds of the course fee will be issued.
If the number of course registrations exceed the available seats, admission will be granted on a first-come, first-served basis, or—where applicable—based on the motivation submitted at registration. Priority will be given to CBS PhD students
Payment Methods
Ensure you choose the correct payment method when finalizing your registration:
CBS students:
Select the payment method CBS PhD students. The course fee will be deducted from your PhD course budget.
Students from Other Danish Universities:
Select the payment method Danish Electronic Invoice (EAN). Provide your EAN number, attention, and any relevant purchase (project) order number.
If you do not pay via EAN number, select Invoice to pay via electronic bank payment (+71).
Students from Foreign Universities:
Select the payment method Payment Card. If you are unable to pay by credit card, choose Invoice International to pay via bank transfer.