FORMAL ORGANIZATIONS

Catalog description

Formal organizations are ubiquitous in contemporary societies, such as firms, schools, hospitals, and government agencies. They educate us, manage our financial accounts and structure our daily routines, and they distribute resources, status, and opportunities among social groups. This course introduces dimensions and aspects of formal organizations and basic concepts and theoretical logics for analyzing them. A multidisciplinary approach is adopted to understand organizational phenomena, with special attention to complementary perspectives drawn from economics, psychology, and sociology. Organization research literature and specific cases, especially those in a comparative perspective, are used to illustrate the applications of the analytic models and concepts in the real world of organizations.