Organizational Studies

On this page:

• About the concentration in Organizational Studies
• Meet our students
• Courses
• Careers related to Organizational Studies

About the concentration in Organizational Studies

The Organizational Studies concentration provides you with the critical and interpersonal skills required to work effectively in any professional context. Through integrated and applied courses in writing, speaking, and group dynamics, you learn to identify your communication goals, understand your audience, and adapt your messaging and strategy to achieve a successful outcome. To meet the challenges of today’s complex work environments, you also develop the skills to build and work effectively in a variety of teams, both in physical and virtual professional environments.

The concentration in Organizational Studies prepares you to:

• Apply approaches and strategies that support your personal and professional development
• Partner with others to build employee engagement
• Integrate the strategies of human flourishing into personal and professional settings
• Enrich your own life and the lives of others in your community
• Assess audience and purpose to achieve specific communication goals
• Analyze audiences, scenarios, and contexts to effectively shape messaging
• Develop effective rhetorical strategies and skills to persuade audiences—through visual, written, and multimedia communication
• Draft and revise work for precision, clarity, and power
• Develop empathic and analytic skills to integrate and build upon others viewpoints and perspectives
• Learn how readers, writers, and designers approach multimedia texts as complex entities that integrate language, image, sound, and gesture to produce coherent and engaging messaging
• Explore how to engage the senses to convey information effectively through social media
• Understand how to present complex information to an audience through effective visualization
• Understand current anthropological research on the culture of teams, corporations, and organizations
• Explore the effects that modern corporations have on their surrounding environments, with attention to local, regional, national, and global effects
• Develop an understanding of theories of organizational culture, and how to apply those theories in specific professional and organizational contexts
• Recognize underlying social and cultural influences on different teams
• Use research from anthropology, communication, and other social science fields to identify the variables that underlie communication in virtual, internet-mediated spaces, and apply the research to create strong collaborative professional relationships even when working remotely

Courses

Students in the Bachelor of Applied Arts and Sciences degree will choose a concentration to tailor their undergraduate education to specific personal and professional goals. Courses within each concentration may be taken in any order unless prerequisites are specified.

Students must complete foundational courses for the Bachelor of Applied Arts and Sciences degree. In addition, students in this concentration focus their studies by completing a total of 12 courses (12 c.u.*):

• 4 courses from the Applied Positive Psychology course block

• 4 courses from the Organizational Studies course block

• 2 courses from the Professional Writing course block

• 2 additional courses with input from an academic advisor or transfer in 2 additional courses

Course options

Applied Positive Psychology course block

• APOP 1000: Introduction to Positive Psychology
• APOP 1200: Human Flourishing: Strengths and Resilience
• APOP 2000: Positive Psychology at Work
• APOP 2200: Flourishing with Others: Building Thriving Relationships
• APOP 2700: Flourishing and Well-Being in Resilient Communities
• APOP 2900: Understanding the Science of Positive Psychology
• APOP 3400: Flourishing through Creativity and the Arts

Organizational Studies course block

• ORGC 1600: Introduction to Team Culture
• ORGC 2010: Virtual Collaboration
• ORGC 3010: Anthropology of Organizations
• ORGC 3300: Building Influence Across Cultural Boundaries in Organizations

Professional Writing courses

• PROW 2000: Writing with Data
• PROW 2010: Designing Effective Presentations

Dialogue, Ethics, and Social Good courses

• DISG 1600: Race and Ethnicity in Organizations

Courses are subject to change.

Careers related to Organizational Studies

Understanding the cultural dynamics of an organization, communicating effectively across teams and applying your expertise in a variety of professional settings are necessary qualifications in today’s modern workplace. Career options include:

• Management consultant
• Communications officer
• Reporter and correspondent
• Project manager
• Human resource manager