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The seminar module offers a more extensive and more thorough analysis of a topic from within political science. To this end, the seminar module provides an overview and a critical discussion of the literature and the issues relevant for the topic of the seminar.
The objectives for this module are:
1. That students can account for a selection of theories, methods, and facts within the subject.
2. That students can compare the subject's theories, methods, and facts and can identify differences/similarities and strengths/weaknesses of these.
3. The students can independently apply approaches, methods, and data, which is relevant for illuminating a given thesis.
4. The students can assess the fruitfulness of the subject's theories, methods and their fields of application.
At the end of the seminar, the students are expected to be able to:
Managing public organizations is no easy task. Public managers must be able to create and implement systems to control and remunerate employees, but they must also ensure that these systems motivate rather than demotivate the employees. Motivation is a crucial factor because it is an important determinant for organizational performance, since it stimulates effort and effective behaviors among people in the organization. Hence, motivation is essential for the provision of high quality service. Public organizations consist for the most part of professionals, who have specialized knowledge, which makes it difficult for outsiders to manage. It is therefore vital that managers take professional norms and motivation seriously, and utilize these to contribute to society and the individual user. On the other hand, public managers are situated in political hierarchies, where politicians will often interfere and try to set their own agenda on how to provide public services.
The purpose of the seminar is to give the participants better knowledge of the motivation of different types of employees within the public sector as well as compared to the private sector and for the participants to acquire the skills that will make them able to assess the presented theories and methods on motivation related problems in real-world settings. Many political science candidates become managers in the public sector, and the seminar will help prepare the participants for this. Based on both classical and state-of-the-art research on incentives, motivation and norms, the seminar will improve the students' abilities to ensure high organizational performance and job satisfaction in public organizations.
Being a good manager requires knowledge of several aspects of organizational behavior. Therefore the seminar draws on theory from political science, economy, psychology, and sociology, to provide a more nuanced knowledge of what good management is. The seminar is divided into three parts:
Week 1: Incentives and other extrinsic motivation factors:
Week 2: Different types of motivation and the interaction between these
Week 3: Managing professions in the public sector
Applicants must be at Master level
Christian Bøtcher Jacobsen
The assessment method is oral exam.
External examiner/Graded marking.
The seminar module requires active participation of students. At the beginning of the seminar module the lecturer and the students agree on specific "activity requirements" that the students have to fulfill.
The seminar will be discussion based, preparing the students for the oral examination. In the end of each session, we will work with a specific management problem based on the literature and the experiences of the participants and the teacher.
The module compendium consists of about 1,200 pages.
The seminar takes its departure in the book "Understanding and Managing Public Organizations" by Hal Rainey:
The participants will be expected to buy the book and read parts of it before the seminar starts.
Furthermore the seminar will draw on both classical articles as well as the most recent research in the field. Examples include:
