Program Description

The doctoral Program in Management and Organizations and Sociology combines the Department of Sociology's emphases on social organization, inequality, and comparative historical studies with the Department of Management and Organization's focus on complex organizations. The two areas are intricately tied because organizations play a key role in stratification, social change, and collective behavior, while at the same time are shaped by larger sociological and historical processes. The program is designed for students who want to gain a disciplinary base in sociology while focusing their doctoral research on organizations and their environments. The advantages of this training are that it combines the competencies of both departments, facilitates student access to faculty and department resources in a way that would be difficult through an informal sampling of courses, and provides students with an expanded choice of career and research options in professional schools and schools of arts and sciences.

 

The rich intellectual heritage of the sociology of organizations and strategy change include building and testing theory about organizations, their members and their management, organization-environment relations, and organizing processes. Theoretical advances in the sociology of organizations and social collectives have included strategic choice theory, resource dependence theory, organizational ecology, institutional theory, and network theory. More recently, we have become a home for critical, feminist, cognitive, and postmodern theorists. We encourage new theory development and the application of the existing theory base to emerging and continuing theoretical challenges related to strategic alliances, new technology, organizational restructuring, governance and control, diversity, law, social movements, the social organization of competition, and work, occupations, and family. The program celebrates theoretical activity, methodological pluralism and linkages between theory and practice.

 

Each student's individual program is set up collaboratively with faculty advisors from the two departments and is designed to be completed within four to five years.

 

Applicants should contact the program or see Web sites http://www.cas.northwestern.edu/sociology/graduate/index.html and www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/doctoral/programs/management.htm to learn about program-specific requirements for admission.