Culture, Organization and Management

The Culture, Organization and Management (COM) master's programme engages with pressing and complex challenges faced by contemporary organizations and societies. From climate justice and migration to digital surveillance, precarious identity work, and organizational transformation, the program invites students to critically examine how culture, power, and meaning are socially constructed, negotiated, and contested in organizational contexts. The programme combines rigorous academic inquiry through organization science theories with a strong commitment to educating a future generation of ethical, reflexive, and socially engaged practitioners. We understand processes of organizing not simply as a technical or managerial endeavour, but as a socially embedded sensemaking process that unfolds within and across organizations—locally, nationally, and globally. By focusing on the cultural and political dimensions of organizing, the program equips students to analyse and engage with real-world issues in ways that are both theoretically informed and practically relevant. We emphasize that culture, organization, and management are always interlinked in concrete organizational settings with palpable interactions. In exploring the dynamics of these interlinkages and interactions, the COM programme relies on the ethnographic research tradition. The ethnographic toolbox – including (participant) observation, (informal) interviewing, and other methods such as digital and visual ethnography – enables students to critically study organizational phenomena up-close and within their societal and global contexts. We consider ‘doing ethnography’ as a coveted skill in transitional times.

The COM programme familiarises students with the major theories in the field of social sciences-inspired organization studies, including theories on sensemaking, identity, power, change, diversity, and globalization. Students ethnographically apply these theories to organizational practice. They learn how to identify, problematise, and analyse organizational problems, contextualize them, and develop theory-inspired, empirically grounded interpretations and solutions. Theoretical courses also serve as inspiration for the thesis trajectory, which encompasses the full empirical cycle, including three months of ethnographic fieldwork. Students can choose from a variety of themes for their thesis research, ranging from entrepreneurship to organizational control and from diversity to professionalism in organizations. In preparation for their fieldwork, students learn about the implications and demands of ethnographic research. They learn and practice ethnographic methods – notably interviewing and (multisensory) observing – as well as analysing and writing up the empirical material that it produces. In doing so, they receive ample support from their thesis supervisor and in the context of guided peer support groups throughout the year. The COM programme also allows students to master important professional skills that prepare them for a career within or outside academia. These, for example, include project management, providing peer feedback, and positioning oneself within a professional field. The professional skills activities run parallel to and build on the activities that students do as part of their thesis research. Taken together, the theoretical, methodological, and professional skills learning lines that make up the COM programme allow students to develop themselves as academics and practitioners.