TENTATIVE SYLLABUS

B AD 84262

Doctoral Seminar in

Competitive Strategic Analysis

Acar – Spring 2010

COURSE OBJECTIVES

This is a doctoral seminar aimed at providing, to management students working in a variety of areas, an insightful understanding of where modern strategic theory appears to be headed.  While the current session is in the form of a seminar in which such colleagues as Drs Datta, Troutt and Giuffrida are actively participating (and Acar is mostly a part-time presenter and moderator), it could serve as a possible template for future doctoral seminar in research-oriented yet diverse academic departments.

COURSE PROCEDURE         

In addition to ad hoc small-group meetings between various seminar participants, plenary sessions will be held on Wednesdays 3:00-5:30 in room A404 BSA.  Due to the research-development aim of this seminar, individual consultation will continue by telephone or e-mail throughout the week, including weekends.  Not only are the students allowed to critique and contribute, they are expressly invited to do so through a class participation grade to reward the seekers of deeper connections (20% of the grade).

GRADING

The students in this research seminar will write two papers.  The first, somewhat shorter paper (20% of the grade), will sketch out the difference between variance and process approaches in management research.  The second, more substantive and polished paper (60% of the grade) will evaluate and critique the use of the CSM approach (that was developed by the seminar presenter) in comparison with both qualitative and quantitative methods available, or else develop a case of appropriate use of it that was not already sketched out by its author.

COURSE MILESTONES

Weeks 1-2       Presentation and discussion of sociometric mapping through diagraphs and adjacency matrices, and some of the classic methodological results of pure graphing methods.

Weeks 3-4       Difference between problem framing and problem solving; strengths and limitations of quantitative ORMS-based approaches in management.

Weeks 5-6       Introduction to the basic concepts in corporate-level and business-level strategic theory, and relationship and differentiation from Organization Theory and its derivatives.

Weeks 7-8       A theoretical presentation of Acar’s CSM and its combination of computational as well as dialectical elements (contrasting it with purely computational methods and purely dialectical processes).

Weeks 9-10     Revisiting the approaches to rushed attempts at explicit optimization, or multi-criteria decision making with implicit optimization, without careful prior problem framing or positioning.

Weeks 11-12   General discussion of using “hard O.R.” approaches entailing taking both objectives and constraints into account, as compared to “soft O.R.” that would be only constraint-based (e.g. Richards) or goal-driven (e.g. Troutt).

Weeks 13-15   Practising research on developing individual student projects or term papers under the guidance of a faculty member as well as the seminar moderator.

Weeks 15-16   Finalizing the research or project term papers and submitting them for grading.

REFERENCE LIST

Because this is a research seminar, the list of references is not predetermined, but will be developed jointly as we progress, building on some initial references to theories of business situation mapping made available to you at the outset of the seminar.  As the seminar progresses, these initial references will be augmented by suggestions coming from any of us.