Programme

PhD

Term

Induction

Academic Year

2021-22

Course title

Socio-Political Contexts for Research in Management

Area

PhD

Credits

0.75

Instructor(s)

Prof. Ernesto Noronha, Prof. Vijaya Sherry Chand

Course Description & Objectives

Management phenomena occur within particular contexts, and with the increasing diversity in such contexts, understanding the role of context in either illuminating phenomena or influencing them has become important. Contexts are usually seen as a combination of material and ideational systems, along with the institutional outcomes resulting from these.  Material systems include economic features like ownership of business assets, efficiency and openness of markets, networks, and capital, and technology features like intensity of use of ICT and transport infrastructure. Ideational systems include (a) cultural values with respect to authority, identity, gender, risk taking, (b) religious values related to morality and honesty, gender and participation in education and work, and wealth, and (c) political values regarding state control, income distribution, private ownership and internationalism. The institutional outcomes that follow from these two systems include the government, a range of intermediate institutions and conformity to international regulations and standards. These elements, taken together, define the way in which a particular society constitutes itself, thus providing the context within which organization-level phenomena happen. However, in order to understand how a society thus gets constituted, and therefore how the macro-micro interaction in management happens, it is essential to be able to apply certain key concepts or ideas.   In order to help you do this, we draw on one of the foundational disciplines of management, sociology, to examine the following key concepts and ideas:  action and interaction in society, social structures and processes, the sociology of organizations, culture, class, genders and sexualities, work and employment, urbanization, technology, and globalization and the networked society.  A copy of The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Sociology (WBCS), edited by George Ritzer, is kept in reserve in the Library. Objectives: To develop a sociological understanding of the material and ideational systems, and their institutional outcomes, that constitute ‘context’ in management research. To discuss concepts that help in understanding how the social universe operates at the meso and the macro levels.   To develop an appreciation of the macro-level of a social universe that contains within it the organization of large numbers of people in their physical and socially created environments, and to understand its features in terms of social structure and processes. To understand the macro-level forces that have shaped national and international contexts: modernization, the networked society, the nature of contemporary globalization. To provide an understanding of the meso level of social reality through an examination of the social relations, networks and processes in the modern workplace.