Business Heroes and Business Barbarians. How to learn from them ? What to avoid ? 2600-BBB-OG

1. The course is devoted to the use of organizational history as a source of experience and inspiration in the field of sustainable management for today's entrepreneurs, managers and employees of various companies, both in the strict business sense, as well as from the public and non-for-profit sector.
2. Shows - on specific cases - the possibilities of analysing organizational traditions, especially of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries (as well as older ones) and "translating" these traditions into specific organizational practices, which could be competitive in the present day, and serving sustainable development at the same time.
3. In the introductory part of the course, the difficulties with using history in contemporary management will be explained, the perspective of organizational history and organizational historiography, ways of avoiding the error of presentism and the concept of "organizational memory" as a "bridge" between history and management practice will be presented.
4. The main part of the course will be filled with specific business practices carried by organizational history, with particular emphasis on Polish and other: "classic" (American and Western European) experiences, as well as those from outside the "centres" of business history.

Course coordinators

Mieszko Lech

Type of course

general courses

Mode

Remote learning

Prerequisites (description)

Lecture based on the case study method, conducted with the participation of descendants of well-known families of entrepreneurs in Poland and the authors of studies on the organizational history in Poland and on a global scale, partially carried out in the field, in places related to the business tradition. The classes will be developing by lectures, movies and podcasts, discussions, study visits (real or virtual) in selected places related to the organizational tradition in Warsaw, and possibly also in other cities, as well as project team work (carried out mainly as students' own work) in order to create contributions to the social organizational history seen from a personal and local perspective, constituting a "bank" of good practice for the present. Lack of prejudice towards history or the desire to confront the prejudices is an asset, the course corresponds to the organizational sociology and psychology in business as well as organizational behaviour.

Learning outcomes

Student is able to critically analyse historical data in the field of entrepreneurial traditions, he/she can reconstruct these traditions, extract good business practices and use them in the current business activity

Assessment criteria

The assessment covers the preparation of family histories or local traditions of entrepreneurship from the perspective of the participants' biographies, a project on the use of tradition to optimize organizational activity today and / or various forms of promoting the memory of historical experience as a current managerial competence

Bibliography

Basic reading:
Tarasiewicz, K. (2013). Zapach świeżej kawy [The smell of fresh coffee], ed. Ochinowski, T. Warszawa: PWN.
Supplementary reading:
1. Maclean, M., Clegg, S. R. and V. Cha Harvey, V. Ch. (ed.). (2020). Historical Organization Studies. Theory and Applications. Routledge.
2. Ochinowski, T. (2016). Jak rozmawiać z przeszłością, by wzbogacić komunikację w teraźniejszości, czyli o pożytkach z historiografii organizacji [How to discuss with the past to enrich communication in the present, i.e. about the benefits of the historiography of the organization]. In: Kostera, M. i Nierenberg, B. (ed.), Komunikacja społeczna w zarządzaniu humanistycznym [Social communication in humanistic management]. Kraków: 2016. Wyd. UJ, p. 187- 202.
3. Ochinowski, T. (2019). Raz na górze, raz na dole. O badaniu koniunktury w Polsce [One time upstairs, one time downstairs. About the study of the business cycles in Poland], seria: Monografie. Warszawa: 2019. Polski Instytut Ekonomiczny.