BUSI46S15: Competitive Strategies and Organisational Fitness

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• To provide a unified theoretical framework to analyse issues from diverse areas of management including issues of strategy, human resource management, marketing, and change management. The theoretical framework stems from Organisational Ecology but includes considerations from Institutional Theory as well as Transaction Cost Economics.

• Selection and adaptation: The foundation of Organisational Ecology
• Forms and populations
• Emergence and demise of organizational forms
• Legitimation and Competition, Density dependence and Density delay
• Age-dependence of organisational Mortality Hazard
• Markets and the Socio-Demographic (Blau) Space; Tastes
• Organisational Niches
• The dynamics of Niche-width
• Resource partitioning
• Organisational status, typecasting, middle status conformity
• Cascading Organisational Change
• The fog of change
• Legitimating change, Leadership
• Changing market position and organisational consequences
• Organisational blueprints and employment relations

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• Advanced understanding of the principles governing the behaviour of organisations, different aspects of their strategies, and the predictable consequences of these strategies on the viability of organisations, with particular attention to the consequences of organisational status and identity.
• Critical understanding of the importance of market position, niche width and fragmentation of organisational niches.
• Critical appreciation of the level of empirical support available, ranging from anecdotal evidence to dependable statistical proofs.
• Advanced understanding of degrees of relevance of managerial issues that will assist in prioritising, both in evaluation and planning.

Subject-specific Skills:

• Ability to consider complex managerial tasks and evaluate complicated situations from a consistent and homogenous perspective.
• Ability to identify change opportunities, minimise the direct and indirect costs of reorganisations, and analyse the role of leadership in change management.
• Ability to distinguish between empirically justified theory and managerial wisdom, and the recipes of management gurus, in the areas covered in the module.

Key Skills:

• Written and oral communication; planning, organising and time management; problem solving and analysis; interpretation of data; computer literacy

• Learning outcomes will be met through a combination of lectures, seminars, and presentations and discussions on case studies, supported by guided reading. The summative assessment will be a comparative analysis of two or more cases to test students understanding of relevant concepts and skills and their ability to apply these to the analysis of relevant issues in different contexts.

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