SYLLABUS

COURSE OVERVIEW: Our society is an organizational society. We are born in organizations, educated in organizations, and most of us spend much of our lives working for organizations. We spend much of our leisure time playing and praying in organizations. Most of us will die in an organization, and when the time comes for burial, the largest organization of all — the state — must grant official permission.
— Amatai Etzioni, Modern Organizations (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964), p. 1.

People organize to do things that they can’t do alone. Some scholars suggest that the ability to form organizations is one of the greatest of all human accomplishments. Societies and, in fact, ideologies, have prospered or languished based on their ability to organize and get things done. There’s no question that people working together in an organizational setting have accomplished some incredible feats. How have people gotten and stayed together to pull off these organizational deeds, and how does working in an organization affect the individual? These are some of the questions we’ll be exploring during this course.

I hope you will enjoy this course. Please learn as much as you can as you progress through it, as it does help build a solid foundation for the rest of the curriculum within the Public Administration curriculum. It is my pleasure to have you as a student.