MA Course 5: Assignments

Last Thurday's session started with an overview of what we have covered so far:

Beginning with Managerialism and the increasing application of private sector theories (few of which were taken up wholescale) into the public sector in the 1970s & 80s (where they were often applied in full with little regard for what had been learned in the private sector). There was a drive to weaken Trades' Unions and increasing emphasis on the right of managers to manage - previously public sector workers were seen as being administrators handling public money on behalf of the public.

We then looked at the structure and types of organisation and the culture of organisations. From this we examined some of the classic and modern management theorists and examined how management and leadership have devolved in the past few years - management now seems to apply purely to middle-management and the theories are very much descriptive whilst leadership is the province of senior managers with "visions". Many theories of management have now become theories of leadership, with the additional book sales that brings ;-).

Having brough the theory together so far we then examined what each of us was planning to do as an assignment. This was very much a chance for us as a group to discuss ideas and the early points definitely seemed to clarify later contributors thinking.

The biggest problem that most of us had was that our ideas were far too broad in scope or that we were trying to answer more than one question. For a 5000 word assignment we need to be particularly focussed. My idea was to examine the relationship between the stated management structure/style and the staff perception. After discussion it was suggested that perhaps the focuss should be shifted slightly along the lines of the work done by Handy to compare staff perceptions of the organisation with their ideal organisation. This would make data collection easier as each returned questionaire contains both parts and the study potentially less prone to other effects by reducing the number of variables. In addition it may be possible to examine how closely the responses match both for staff and managers or by grade.

This was probably the most useful assignment preparation session I have yet had whilst at the UCE. It focussed our attention on the questions of what and how. The agreement seemed to be that this approach helped everyone crystalise their thoughts, from those that had copious notes to slackers like me with a single half-formed idea that came out of a discussion with another member of staff.

Very, very useful: I must remember to update Jim's comments book.