|
|
|
Saint Martin’s University
Instructor:
Dr. Don Wallace,
Office Phone: 360- 438-4329
Office hours: 11:00 AM Daily Required Text: Morgan, Gareth: Images of Organization, (Sage, 2006,) plus handouts Course Content: The course begins with a brief overview the bio-techno evolution. We look at how its processes, produced humans, their diverse cultures, and varying political economies including organizations. Evolution also accounts for certain behavioral constants that apply to organizations of whatever type or purpose, business, government, military, or academic. The primary learning objective of this course is for the student to acquire a basic understanding of evolution’s process, and how it affects personal and social behavior in human organizations and elsewhere. This overview is given in lectures and “handouts”. It includes the recent the bio-sciences including the evolutionary process called “punctuated equilibrium” and “autopoiesis”, inclusive of self organization. These sciences reveal patterns of behavior that cut across cultures and through time. Within this framework we can better predict typical patterns of behavior that apply to different organizational “fitness environments”. We will see different patterns of behavior emerge depending on the terms of employment that define an employee’s identity in, and his or her relationship to, any kind of employer organization in any culture. We also trace the expanding scope and complexity of human organization, driven by new technological “hardware” that in turn requires changes in its “software”, that is to say in the operational rules and customs by which the people in any a society relate to its hardware. The two together make up a culture’s techno-structure that determines its competitive fitness in relation to other cultures. We then focus on contemporary organization from several points of view. Within the framework of evolution, we look at the purpose and goals of organization, its social order, structure, strategy, and both its regional and global environment and markets. Morgan’s text has a metaphorical perspective on organization that depicts organizations variously as machines, as organisms, as brains, as cultures, and even as psychic prisons and/or instruments of domination. The machine metaphor evolved as part of modern Western culture during the Age of Enlightenment and the rise of modern physics. The machine metaphor has given us valuable insights, but also created distortions and even pathologies in our “cultural software” that limited its relative fitness. Approach to the Course : Lectures and discussion are combined with independent team-centered research projects. Lectures will begin with some recent research. The teams, made up of three or four students, will be self managed. Class time is reserved for work on these projects. Each team will prepare and deliver a well-researched oral power point presentation based on course content. Each team will turn in copies of their presentation complete with a bibliography. Each team member will hand in a one-page summary of their project experience outlining their own contributions to the project and that of others, due at time of presentation. Class members will grade each team’s presentation and each team member will evaluate the contributions of the other members of his or her team. Grades Grades will have five components each valued at 20 points for a total of 100. There will be one midterm take home essay exam and one final essay exam, the team project, plus attendance/class participation. Each student will sign in for each class to record attendance and this record will have a 20% influence the final grade. Dates to Remember: February 20th is President’s Day Holiday Feb. 27th, first take home essay exam handed out March 8, first take home essay due in class March 9 to 18th is Spring Vacation March 27th, second take home essay handed out April 10th, second take home essay due in class May 3rd is the last day of class May 8th, 10:00am, final essay exam due. |