Staff in the Department of Organisation, Work and Technology are active writers and researchers working within a wide spectrum of organisational settings, which helps to ensure that the courses we teach are up-to-date and relevant to the needs of students.
The Department enjoys a worldwide reputation for the quality of its work. As part of the Management School, it has received top ratings for its research and a rating of Excellent (the highest possible) for its teaching in the most recent assessments. As a group we are concerned with the development of sound social science concepts that can be applied and tested in the analysis of behaviour in a wide diversity of organisational settings.
The distinctive approach the Department has pioneered rests on pillars which underpin our research and teaching:
Our teaching is an interdisciplinary endeavour, drawing primarily on the disciplines of psychology, social psychology, sociology, law, philosophy, economics, history, political science, social anthropology and other social sciences. Understanding the inter-relationship between these disciplines and applying their distinctive perspectives to the different modules that we teach is central to the Department's work.
Analysis, not techniques
Management students often want to learn techniques for organising and managing. However, management history is littered with techniques that were once popular and then were discarded because they failed to fulfil what was expected of them. The emphasis in the Department is, first and foremost, on analysis and understanding of the dynamics of organisation, work and technology. Good practice, and knowing when a technique will and will not work, follows from a thorough appreciation of the complexity of many problems and issues.