People and Organizations

About

15.668 People and Organizations is a course taught at the MIT Sloan School of Management and published through MIT OpenCourseWare. The Fall 2005 materials are archived in DSpace@MIT; a later Fall 2010 version is available on the current OCW site.

Description

The course treats organisations as human systems rather than as org charts, and asks how work actually gets done inside them. Its material covers the design of jobs and organisational structures, motivation and reward, teams and group process, power and influence, organisational culture, negotiation, organisational change, and leadership development. Students are typically required to analyse a real organisation and to build a personal development plan alongside the analytic work.

Its underlying premise — associated with the Sloan tradition running through Edgar Schein, Douglas McGregor, Lotte Bailyn, Thomas Kochan and John Van Maanen — is that organisational behaviour is not a soft supplement to strategy but the mechanism by which strategy either happens or does not.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Organisations are among the most consequential human–technical assemblages in existence, and most of the technology cyborg anthropology studies is designed, funded and shipped inside one. A course of this kind is useful in two directions: as an account of how the institutions that produce technology work, and as a body of theory that transfers to online groups. Concepts developed for firms — role, status, norms, socialisation of newcomers, informal networks versus formal structure — map with surprising directness onto forums, open-source projects and platform communities, and often explain their behaviour better than technology-specific theories do.

License

This course is listed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States Creative Commons License. As a reader, you are free: to Share — to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work, and to Remix — to make derivative works, under the following conditions:

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Related Reading

• Status
• Charisma
• Internalization of moral code
• The Idea Factory
• Teaching and Learning Cyborg Anthropology

External Links

• 15.668 People and Organizations, Fall 2010 (MIT OCW)
• 15.668 People and Organizations, Fall 2005 (DSpace@MIT)