Guide to the Assignment
Individual Assignment:
Due date: To Be Advised
Length: 2,000 words
Weight: 40%
Aims of the assignment
The aims of this assignment are for you to:
Develop your understanding of the nature
of the key organisation perspectives and their related theories;
Demonstrate an
understanding of the key perspectives and the meta-theoretical assumptions
that underpin each;Develop
research skills and the ability to assess the strengths and weaknesses of
various debates and arguments;Gain skills in the
written presentation of an argument, including the ways in which scholars
incorporate and acknowledge the ideas of other writers.
Criteria for assessment
For this assignment your essay will be assessed
on the extent to which it demonstrates:
Your ability to present a clear,
compelling, well-presented and properly referenced argument.Your ability to respond directly to the
key issues raised by the question.Your
ability to engage with the work of other authors and extract relevant
detail and explanation.
Your
ability to assess the arguments and debates of and between other authors
and incorporate them into your response.
QUESTION:
“In considering
the influence that technology in general or any single technology has over
human affairs, it is … necessary to consider not only the technology and its
presumed “imperatives,” but also the key human agents of the
technology, the organisations in which they operate, and how these influence
the course of technological change” (Rudi, 257).
Select two of the four
perspectives and discuss how they provide different insights into the relations
between technology, organisations, management and employees.
Answering the Question:
In
answering the question you will need to engage with the nature of the various
perspectives and how each provide different insights into the relations between
technology, organisations, management and employees.
You must focus explicitly on the key issues identified in the
question.
You must consider at least two of the four perspectives.
A failure to follow this and the following instructions will have a
significant negative impact on your marks.
This essay is designed to develop your knowledge of the theoretical
perspectives, to build your understanding that each perspective is underpinned
by different assumptions that lead to different ways of seeing or understanding
organisations. Given their ontological
and epistemological underpinnings, each perspective has different ways of
seeing how organisations and technology intersect.
This essay is not an exercise in
describing various technologies and how they are used by organisations,
managers or employees.
There is a lot of literature available about how technology impacts
on contemporary organisations. Do not
get side-tracked into a descriptive discussion of technology-driven changes in
contemporary organisations. Remember, the question is about the relations between technology,
organisations, management and employees. If empirical examples of technology
within contemporary organisations are introduced they must be used to illustrate
how a theoretical perspective would view the
relations between technology, organisations, management and employees.
Presenting your answer:
Please use headings with care. It is better to avoid using them in
an essay but if you must, please keep them to a minimum and ensure that they
enhance rather than undermine your argument.
In order to construct a logical response to the question the
following structure is suggested. You do
not need to use the provided headings (see above comment regarding‘headings’)
and the structure itself is not
mandatory. But, if you are going to use an alternative structure please
ensure that it enables you to present a clear and direct response to the
question asked.
Introduction:
In this section you must provide an overview of your answer to the
question; provide answers to the key what and why questions of your
argument/answer. These should take the form of direct responses to the key
issues raised by the question. Your argument should be informed by a critical
analysis/engagement with the content of the essential readings.
Please keep in mind that in all sections of your response you must
move past description to analysis, this means providing answers to the why
questions that emerge from your key statements.
Exploration
of your argument:
In this section of the essay you need to accomplish two tasks.
First, you
must explore the key perspectives showing how each perspective’s theoretical
and metatheoretical approaches lead them to provide different insights into the
relations between technology, organisations, management and employees.
Second,
having demonstrated an understanding of the perspectives and their theoretical approaches
to the relationship between technology, organisations, management and employees
you then need to use these to explore the issue raised by the statement; the
notion of technological ‘”imperatives,” but also the key human agents
of the technology, the organisations in which they operate, and how
these influence the course of technological change.’ In other words what does each of the perspectives
have to say on this issue and why do they say it? What criticisms do they offer
of each other and why?
You can address the above, two tasks sequentially; beginning with
an exploration of the how and why of each of the chosen perspectives (ontology
and epistemology), and second: an exploration of the positions advanced by two
of the perspectives (modernist, symbolic interpretivist, critical theory and
postmodernism) as they provide different insights into the relations between
technology, organisations, management and employees. In your essay, you must
consider at least two of the four perspectives.
An alternative structural approach is to integrate the exploration
of the how and why of each perspective and how each provides different insights
into the relations between technology, organisations, management and employees.
For example; explore the how and why of the modernist position and then its
application to modernist arguments concerning the relations between technology,
organisations, management and employees. On completing the how and why of the
modernist position and its application and move on to the other selected perspective.
The two alternatives outlined above will enable you to present a
clear direct and disciplined response to the question.
The whole response must be informed by an engagement with essential
readings. You must draw upon and evaluate academic debates and arguments. This
is not to be viewed as an exercise in which you make up a response
off-the-top-of-your-head nor is it one in which you focus on description and
ignore analysis. You should also avoid
drawing on case studies of actual organisations. What you should focus on is
the theoretical aspects of the debates concerning the relations
between technology, organisations, management and employees.
Conclusion:
You must conclude with your general answer to the question. It should
reiterate the key argument/answer to the question provided in the introduction
and indicate to what extent it has been supported or challenged by your
analysis of the debates and arguments of other authors.
ADDITIONAL GUIDENCE: –
This essay question
has been designed to encourage you to prepare your own individual essay. There is no single ‘right’ answer. Markers will be looking for evidence that you
have read broadly, including the provided material, and have synthesised the
material to develop your own answer/ argument. The markers will also expect you
to answer the question in your own words.
The following points are to help you to understand
and complete your assignment:
The question asks you to compare and contrast
perspectives with regards to how they provide different insights into the
relations between technology, organisations, management and employees.
The essay has been
designed to allow you to demonstrate your understanding of the course material
covered in weeks 1-4.
Do not try to cover
every single detail; you only have 2000 words so concentrate on the major
points rather than fine details.
The focus in this
essay is on analysis rather than description.
Any description of your chosen perspectives must form part of your
analysis and must contribute to the argument that you are making in your essay.
This is not
an essay asking you to consider management practices or styles of
management. It is asking you to focus on ‘ways of seeing’ and thinking about technology
within organisations (different perspectives) and ways of understanding and
theorising about technology within organisations. Think of yourself as a
researcher (rather than manager) of an organisation and you have a range of
devices you can use to study technology within organisations. Each device
provides you with the ability to learn something different about technology and
its relationship toorganisations, managers and employees. Your job is to
explain how each of the devices provides you with different insights into the
relations between technology, organisations, management and employees.
You must use the sources provided to develop your answer.
They have been selected because they provide the essential material required to
answer the question.You will lose marks
if you fail to use them.
Before you begin to look for additional reading you
should first acquire a good understanding of the basics from the textbook and
the required readings. Once you acquire this understanding you can then look
for other material.
You can make use of the Web sources but they need
to be reliable sources-Wikipedia is not a reliable source of information. We encourage you to make use of journal
articles which can be found via a range of library databases. I suggest you use
Expanded Academic ASAP (Gale) database which is located through the Databases
section of the library website because it allows you to search a range of
journals using keywords. Some of the
keywords you should consider are: technology in organisations, organisations
and modernism, organisations and symbolic interpretivism, organisations and
critical theory,organisations and postmodernism, etc. You will find an enormous amount of relevant
literature. You can also do author
searches which can be helpful to locate recent articles by scholars mentioned
in the textbook. We also encourage you
to make use of the references and further reading suggested by the textbook at
the end of each chapter. ‘Citation Linker’ found through the library website is
a useful tool to locate some of the journal articles mentioned in the textbook.
There is a lot of information out there regarding the topic.
Students
are NOT allowed to use lecture notes
as reference materials.
You
should look at the assessment sheet found in the course guide. It will give you a feel for the sorts of
things we will be assessing.
You
should also look at the other part of the course guide which outlines the
differences between the grades -i.e. what separates a ‘P’ from a ‘C’.
A key point to remember in answering the questions is not to be
overly descriptive. In answering the
question you will need to develop an argument. An argument requires
‘expressing a point of view on a subject and supporting it with evidence’ (see http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/argument.html)
The basic components of an argument include:
Making a claim (informed by relevant
organisationalperspectives and/or theories)Supporting your claim with evidenceRecognising and engaging with counterclaims
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