Doctor of Management/ Master of Arts
A part-time professional research degree offered by
The Complexity Research Group
at the
Business School of the University of Hertfordshire
Taking a complexity perspective on management and leadership, continuity and change in organisations
1 About the programme
The Complexity Research Group at the University of Hertfordshire has an international reputation for its work on the implications of complexity theories for organisations. We offer a unique part-time D Man/MA which takes a complexity perspective on management, continuity and change in organisations. This is a professional doctorate, i.e. one which encourages practising leaders, managers and consultants to take their work as an object of study, and which has equivalent status to a traditional PhD.
By taking a complexity perspective we mean drawing on insights from the complexity sciences and the social sciences where they deal with complexity in human terms. In order to understand the implications of taking up this perspective for their own research, participants in the programme will be expected to take their every everyday experience in organisations seriously, to read widely in sociology, philosophy, group analytic and organisational theory, and to engage in lively group discussions. The work of doing research is a rigorous combination of reflection, reflexivity, reading, discussion, writing and rewriting.
Students who succeed in the programme are capable of pursuing a research question directly arising from their experience at work over a three year period, and will be able to write an academic thesis based on their research. In order to be awarded a doctorate, students will need to defend their thesis successfully before examiners. In order to do so they will have developed a critical understanding of the work of the Complexity Research Group, and will be able to discuss its relevance for their own work by comparing and contrasting the perspectives they learn with other critical and more orthodox theories of organising.
2 The history and achievements of the programme
The Doctor of Management programme started in 2000, attracting practising leaders and managers from a range of organisations in many countries. Since 2002, the programme has produced 51 graduates with 39 of these at the level of Doctor of Management and 11 at the level of Master of Arts by research. Graduates and current participants come from the USA, Canada, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, Israel, New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland and the UK. They are employees of public and private sector organisations and are also self employed consultants to organisations.
3 Why come on this programme?
There are relatively few professional research degree programmes, particularly ones that emphasise a reflexive, reflective approach in which the candidates’ work is their research. This programme offers the opportunity of completing high level doctoral research in three years, provided that students become increasingly able to engage actively in the research community, can read widely, discuss critically, and reflect on their own ways of thinking and acting. It is possible to stop at the research Masters’ level after two years, and students may be advised to do this if, after an 18 month review, there is mutual agreement that an MA is a more suitable option.
There is an unusually high and in depth level of supervision provided by the faculty. The experience of the programme is personally developmental and it focuses attention, which we find necessary if one takes a complexity perspective, on the experience of group dynamics and the psychological dimensions of social interaction in organisations. One way of focusing on this is for participants to be prepared actively to explore their own participation in the programme. The method involves taking one’s own ordinary experience seriously, which will above all mean challenging one’s ways of thinking. Because it focuses on the participant’s current work it is immediately beneficial to the organisation.
4 Who the programme is for
The programme is for experienced leaders and managers, as well as internal and external consultants, who are interested in questioning, reflecting upon and developing their current work, particularly how they think about what they are doing. Being experienced does not necessarily imply seniority, and previous candidates have included middle managers looking to become better qualified, consultants working in and for a variety of organisations, as well as senior executives seeking to make better sense of their participation in the workplace. Previous programme participants have comprised:
· a number of Chief Executives – for example two graduates are CEOs of hospitals in the USA and one is CEO of a large UK charity.
· two university professors in Ireland and Canada,
· two Nurse Directors on NHS Boards
· a CEO of a major Division of the Dutch Railway system.
· Self-employed consultants, or consultants employed internally within organisations
5 What we expect from you and what we mean by research
The personal challenge of the programme
This is not a taught programme, but one in which participants formulate and pursue their own particular inquiry together with others. The work of the programme will involve participants in exploring their experience of their work and how they think about it both in discussion and in intensive reading and reflective writing.
All participants are required to participate in four three-day residential meetings a year in which the faculty of the DMan participate fully. Attendance at all programme sessions is a requirement. The residentials are held over a weekend and last from 3pm Friday to 3pm Monday. These provide opportunities:
§ for experimentation and exploration of the self-group relationship
§ examination and discussion of conceptual material
§ integration of learning through reflection, leading discussions and sharing experience
§ supervision of the iterative cycle of writing the dissertation in learning groups
Projects exploring the experience of work are a major aspect of its experiential nature. During residential programme meetings participants come together both as one large group and in smaller supervised learning groups. The purpose of these smaller groups is to provide supervision to support participants in completing projects which build up into a dissertation. This is the core of the research and will involve considerable writing and rewriting as each person’s line of inquiry deepens. Participants will need to engage critically and constructively with each others’ work. Between such meetings there is extensive support from a specified member of the faculty via phone conferencing, current technologies such as Skype, and email and any future technologies may prove helpful.
Prospective participants need to consider how they will incorporate these additional demands into their normal working and social lives. Working with organisational change cannot be separated from personal change. Questioning how one thinks is both intellectually and emotionally challenging.
What we mean by research
By drawing on insights from the complexity sciences we have come to understand the process of organising as complex, responsive processes of relating in local interactions which produce population-wide patterning. This is in contrast to what we would term the dominant theories of organising which concentrate instead on the rational and predictable aspects of human experience, leading to attempts at programmatic, large-scale management of change. This programme focuses attention on how wide-spread change emerges as people interact locally in everyday situations.
Each participant’s research is at the same time his or her daily work. Participants are required to reflect on narratives of what they do each day in the normal course of their work in order to make sense of what they actually do. This requires them to formulate an argument about some aspect of their work in a critically aware way, locating how they are thinking in relevant discourses, traditions of thought and their literatures. The contribution they are required to make is to understanding and knowledge, and to practice.
This is very different to research on, or about, experience. In avoiding the splitting of theory and practice, and of emotion and intellect, particular attention is paid to understanding change as shifts in our experience of ourselves and of our patterns of relating to each other. As an integral part of the research, the programme itself also provides an opportunity to reflect on our own processes of working together and the insight this might provide on organisational life. Particular attention is paid to habit and spontaneity, cooperation and conflict, and power as paradoxically enabling constraints in relationships. Participants join small learning groups supervised by a member of faculty.
6 How project work leads to a thesis
All participants are required to complete the following Project Work over the course of 3 years.
· Project 1, which is a narrative account of the influences and experiences that inform the participants’ current practice in organisations which is reflectively woven together with the sense they are making of what they have read and heard on the course since beginning their research.
· Research Proposal, which is a statement after 6 months of the participant’s research question and the area of organisational experience and supporting literature that the student intends pursuing for the remainder of the programme.
· Project 2, which is a sense making exploration of some key processes and themes in the participant’s current practice, which have been identified in the research proposal, and which begins to make greater sense of the literature.
· Project 3, where the participant is required to demonstrate an increasingly complex understanding of experiences of organisational change to which the participant has contributed as a manager, leader or consultant and which situates the participant’s thinking in relation to other approaches to understanding the issues raised.
For the MA: A synopsis of the 3 projects identifying the themes running through the work and critically appraising the methods and practices employed in the research. The coherence of the research projects must be clearly demonstrated.
For the DMan: Project 4 is a further account of organizational change that demonstrates the ability to explore one’s practice, informed in increasing depth by a coherent theoretical base and awareness of broader issues raised by this practice.
For the DMan: A synopsis and critical appraisal of the 4 projects identifying the themes running through the work, addressing the question of method and critically appraising theories and practices employed in the research. The coherence of the research projects must be clearly demonstrated and the contribution made to knowledge and professional practice must be identified. This is the final step in three years’ of intense work in which the participants have gradually developed risk-taking and spontaneity in the first order reflexivity of academic research and have become able to articulate a rhetorically strong voice in the conflictual dynamics of organizational reality.
7 Publishing the work of programme participants
The research community of the programme has been well placed to generate material and insight into the everyday practices of actual organisational life. The programme is building up a body of knowledge about what managers and leaders actually do at the micro level. This research has been published in a series of edited volumes containing the work of graduates from the programme called Complexity and Emergence in Organizations, published in London by Routledge. Titles so far published are:
· A Complexity Perspective on Researching Organizations: Taking experience seriously, edited by Ralph Stacey and Douglas Griffin;
· Complexity and the Experience of Leading Organizations, edited by Douglas Griffin and Ralph Stacey;
· Experiencing Risk, Spontaneity and Improvisation in Organizational Change: Working live, edited by Patricia Shaw and Ralph Stacey;
· Complexity and the Experience of Managing in the Public Sector, edited by Ralph Stacey and Douglas Griffin.
· Complexity and the Experience of Values, Conflict and Compromise in Organisations, edited by Ralph Stacey and Doug Griffin.
An appendix on the website http://tinyurl.com/35yl89x gives a list of the theses completed by those who have graduated.
8 Timing, costs and entry requirements
New participants are admitted to the program every six months in April or October.
Dates of the residential units over the next three years will be: 20-23 January 2012; 20-23 April, 2012; 6-9 July 2012; 12-15 October, 2012; 25-28 January 2013; 19-22 April 2013; 5-8 July 2013; 11-14 October 2013.
The fee is GBP 8,000 per annum. This does not include accommodation and conference facility costs so that participants can expect to incur costs of about GBP 2,000 per annum for accommodation and of course travel costs to a meeting venue near London. A discount of £1,000 per annum is available for those who have to pay 50% or more of the fee from their own private resources.
Applicants should: be competent and fluent in the English language, both spoken and written; normally have a first degree, or equivalent; have at least five years of practical experience of organisational life in a managerial or consulting role; continue working in or for organisations throughout the programme.
9 The Faculty Members
Dr Chris Mowles is the Programme Director of DMan Programme run by the Complexity Research Group, and an independent consultant. In his consultancies he has worked with the British, Dutch and Chinese governments, the UN, the NHS and leading international NGOs. He has held senior positions in organisations in the private, public and not-for-profit sectors.
He is the author of Rethinking Management: Radical insights from the complexity sciences (Gower: 2011); Conflict and Compromise in Aid Agencies, in Stacey, R. and Griffin, D (eds.) (2008) Complexity and the Experience of Values, Conflict and Compromise in Organisations, Routledge: London; Post-foundational Development Management: Power, Politics and Complexity, Public Administration and Development, (2010) Volume 30, issue 2, 149-158.
Current research Interests: ethics, management, strategy, complexity, development management
Professor Douglas Griffin, visiting Professor at the Business School of the University of Hertfordshire, is a member of the Complexity Research Group and an independent consultant. Doug is an American and resident of Germany and has worked in a number of especially European countries as an independent organization consultant over the past 25 years and additionally been employed in positions of strategic personnel development in globally operating companies in Europe.