Course Title: Organisational Analysis A

Part A: Course Overview

Course Title: Organisational Analysis A

Credit Points: 12


Course Code

Campus

Career

School

Learning Mode

Teaching Period(s)

BUSM1048

City Campus

Postgraduate

630H Management

Face-to-Face

Sem 1 2006,
Sem 1 2007

Course Coordinator: Assoc Prof Rosalie Holian

Course Coordinator Phone: +61 3 9925 5943

Course Coordinator Email:rosalie.holian@rmit.edu.au


Pre-requisite Courses and Assumed Knowledge and Capabilities

Admission into Graduate Diploma in Human Resource Management and Industrial Relations or Master of Business Leadership or equivalent


Course Description

This course will provide students with first-hand experience of organisations and the opportunity to develop a more reflective and critical understanding of the various interweaving factors that constitute contemporary organisational life. A variety of theoretical explanatory perspectives and empirical illustrations will be studied in order to assist students to respond to these complex organisational issues.  More specifically, this course will  focus on the analysis of organisational structures and processes and how this affects the way an organization does business, how it learns and how it solves its problems. Such understanding is essential for ongoing organizational improvement.

Topics will vary depending on student interests.


Objectives/Learning Outcomes/Capability Development

By the end of the course, you will be able to:

  1. analyse and appraise the work and approaches of different schools of thought and theorists writing on organisational analysis;
  2. appreciate and understand the academic research that provides the basis of our knowledge in understanding organisational processes; 
  3. develop analytical skills through case study based methods of learning; 
  4. prepare written and oral evaluations of journal articles and relate them to other articles and to your own experience:
    This will help you develop your application, analytical and synthetic capabilities.


As the course material covers in-depth topics, a sustained reading program is required of students. The educational benefit that results is the development of a substantive understanding of the dynamics of organisational processes, which will assist students in making sound applied management judgments.


Overview of Learning Activities

The structure of the teaching and learning environment will promote an interactive dialogue. This type of setting is designed to allow the exploring of ’tentative’ ideas as an open-ended process based on the premise that learning / managing is a lifelong activity. While the atmosphere encouraged will be informal, rigorous and substantive student involvement is required.



Overview of Learning Resources

A blackboard for this course has been set up at RMIT’s online learning hub.  Please log in to http://www.rmit.edu.au/online to gain access to this resource, which will include announcements, readings/links to readings, and copies of study materials.

You will need to be able to access the library’s catalogue electronic databases to search for additional references for your assignment work. Relevant databases include Proquest and EBSCO, among many others.


Overview of Assessment

Assessment tasks may include:

  • an applied analysis assignment
  • an evaluative essay
  • a case study report