Aims

Intending to develop future professionals' critical thinking and analytical capacity on management practices, and insisting on the necessary critical distance that characterises any university education, the "filière" intends to:
- inform students on practices and main trends concerning the role and place of human beings in organisations
- analyse meaning and relevance of work situations and organisational realities with an understanding of their context
- develop a capacity for action and intervention based on the knowledge of related economic and social challenges.
The "filière" aims at developing reflective approach to management practices and critical understanding on management roles. It associates critical thinking with information on practices in order to go beyond each one of these two aspects taken separately.
It concerns any type of manager who will have to cope with human dimensions within organisations, whatever his/her management speciality, be it marketing, finance, information systems, etc. It also contributes to the development of future specialists in human resource management or future consultants in this field.
In this perspective, the "filière" has a specific operational objective: develop students' capacity to conduct "organisational diagnosis" in various types of organisations, either profit-oriented (SMEs, large manufacturing companies, service companies) or non-profit (NGOs, associations, public administration).
Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, it is oriented towards close interaction between knowledge and action.

Main themes

The "Filière" comprises:
- an introduction course in organisational theory, aiming at developing in-depth analytical capacity on organisation functioning in its multiple dimensions and contexts (power, culture, institutions);
- a seminar in human resource management, intending to develop students' capacity to identify, understand and analyse trends in HRM as well as HR policies and practice;
- a seminar in "clinical organisational sociology", aiming at developing students' capacity to analyse organisations with a specific focus on constraints of organised action and persons' "subjective condition" within contemporary organisation;
- an integrative seminar focusing on managerial implications, based on inputs from the three former seminars.

Content and teaching methods

Methods

The "filière" particularly insists on developing students own reflection capacity and their competency in combining theory and practice by the means of individual readings, fieldwork, individual and group presentations during classes, cases, and professors' lectures. It includes specific phases focused on methodological learning: survey techniques, methods of interview, statistical analysis, content analysis, interpretation and use of data for intervention purposes.

Programmes in which this activity is taught

Other credits in programs