The Master in Culture, Organization and Management (COM) is one of the courses offered by the Faculty of Social Sciences of the VU University. This Master course fills the knowledge gap with respect to the cultural dimension of management and organizations and provides the necessary skills to research and describe this dimension. It mainly concerns the link between organizational-political and cultural processes, which do not only take place within the formal structure, or the ‘system’, of the organization, but also extend to the largely informal networks within and between organizations.
Halleh Ghorashi is lecturer of the course Culture and Identity in Organizations at COM. The aim of the course is the development of insight in identity related processes of (in)equality and in- and exclusion in organizational life. This course provides students with the analytical instruments to analyze and assess ‘what is going on’ in organizational settings in which identity and diversity, as reflections of societal developments, prevent people from full participation. It encompasses such issues as ethnicity, gender and age, as well as issues related to positions, power and politics. The course reviews the historical evolution of the “management of diversity”, current policies and new developments and perspectives. Specific attention is paid to contextualizing aspects of “sense-making” in organizational life: time-space relations, the importance of organizational language and the relevance or irrelevance of the network society.