The following is a list of graduate courses that may be of interest to students studying organizations across Northwestern University.
Title: Advanced Qualitative Methods
Instructor: James Spillane
This course in advanced qualitative research is designed for students who have taken an introductory graduate course in qualitative research methods and are in the process of analyzing qualitative data for their trial research, dissertation, or some other research project. The course will focus chiefly on: a) Analyzing qualitative data to develop and justify assertions. b) Epistemological underpinnings of various qualitative approaches. c) Issues of reliability, validity, and making generalizations. The course will be conducted as a seminar with class work organized around prescribed readings on a particular issue as well as data and other materials from researchers and students qualitative studies.
Title: Topics in Organizations, Institutions, and Society: Persistence and Change Among Public, Private, and Non-Profit Settings
Instructor: Jeanette Colyvas
This graduate seminar introduces theories of institutional persistence and change in the context of public, private, and nonprofit settings. The course is organized as a seminar and will blend foundational studies in institutional theory with contemporary work from sociology, organization sciences, management, education, and nonprofit studies. An overarching theme of the course addresses how new practices and organizational forms spread (diffusion), how they stick (institutionalization), and how they take the form that they do (emergence). Topics covered will include accountability and performance; organizational learning and change; contemporary debates about social mechanisms; and micro-foundations of institutional theory. Ideally, this course will provide a platform for students to develop and advance their own research projects, in the form of a research proposal for beginning doctoral students, or an empirical analysis for more advanced students.
Title: Collective Action Online
Instructor: Aaron Shaw
Peer production and related modes of online collective action are the most significant organizational innovations that have emerged from Internet-mediated social practice. The best known examples include free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) projects such as the GNU/Linux operating system, and free culture projects such as Wikipedia. This graduate seminar will survey some of the most influential empirical and theoretical research on peer production and related practices of online cooperation and collective action.
Title: Behavior in Organizational Systems
Instructor: William Ocasio
This course considers theory construction, with an effort at verification, drawing on empirical studies. The focus is on problems of internal organizational systems such as goals, structure, roles, power, authority, decision making communications and controls.
Title: Organizations and Their Environments
Instructor: Paul Hirsch
This course provides an analysis of the behavior of organizations vis-à-vis their environment, drawing upon organizational and institutional theories and cross-cultural empirical studies in the fields of organization theory, strategy and organizational sociology. The course focuses on the ecology of organizations, how internal characteristics condition external relations and how environments influence internal processes.
Title: Social Network Analysis
Instructor: Noshir Contractor
Over the past two decades networks have come to play an increasingly important role in our understanding of a wide array of human phenomena. In communication and the organizational sciences, extraordinary developments in computing and telecommunications have engendered new organizational forms based on fluid, dynamic networks. These new network forms of self-organizing are constantly evolving in dynamic communities as new network links are created, and dysfunctional ones dissolved. While many writers assert that the capability to nurture networks will differentiate dominant 21st century organizations, little is known about how this important new organizational form emerges and evolves. This seminar is intended to review theoretical, conceptual, and analytic issues associated with network perspectives on communicating and organizing. The course will review scholarship on the science of networks in communication, computer science, economics, engineering, organizational science, life sciences, physical sciences, political science, psychology, and sociology, in order to take an in-depth look at theories, methods, and tools to examine the structure and dynamics of networks.
Title: Designing & Constructing Models with Multi-Agent Language (Graduate)
Instructor: Uri Wilensky
This course focuses on the exploration, construction and analysis of multi-agent models. Sample models from a variety of content domains are explored and analyzed. Spatial and network topologies are introduced. The prominent agent-based frameworks are covered as well as methodology for replicating, verifying and validating agent-based models. State of the art ABM and complexity science tools are used.
Title: Designing Technological Tools for Thinking and Learning
Instructor: Uri Wilensky
This course takes a constructionist approach to Design. Participants discuss learning design literature, critique software, and design and build computer-based learning environment (CBLE). Student LE designs can include microworlds, goal-based scenarios, games, robots, complex systems models among many others. Projects are completed working primarily in Logo, NetLogo and NetLogoLab.