The Organizational Management and Management Technology research area looks to analyze the phenomenon of management from different perspectives and the ways in which it manifests itself. This research area is structured in three major thematic fields that guide teaching, research, and extension activities. They are knowledge management, innovation, and international management; public management; and organizational management.
Thematic Fields
Knowledge Management, Innovation, and International Management
This thematic field covers the organizational phenomena related to knowledge management and innovation. Knowledge management addresses the process through which the members of an organization acquire, store, and retrieve information. Research in this area focuses mainly on the transfer of tacit and explicit intra-organizational and inter-organizational knowledge (between multinationals and subsidiaries, subsidiaries and local businesses, the private and public sectors, etc.) and on the identification of organizational and individual factors that interfere in the knowledge transfer process. Innovation addresses processes that create new ideas and convert them into new products and/or services that add value to the organization and to society. The topics studied are the development and dissemination of new technologies, institutional and/or organizational incentives for innovation, and social and organizational impacts of innovation. The main topics include comparative studies between countries; structures and processes of knowledge management in organizations; transmission of knowledge; and cultures and environments for innovation.
Public Management
In this thematic field, we focus on the issues that are relevant to contemporary public management. The first is innovation in public management, which deals with citizen participation and the modernization of administration. The second is public policy management, where we investigate the way in which policies are developed and implemented, and their processes and results are evaluated. Third, public governance examines the ability of governments and public administrations to implement action-based initiatives with actors in the private sector and in civil society, driven by public purposes. This is where issues related to decentralization, hybrid deliberative spaces, partnerships, and other strategies that involve public and private sector and civil society actors are discussed. Finally, the management and performance of civil society organizations is addressed; we seek to understand their management processes and how they are organized to achieve their goals. Where appropriate, we investigate their relationship with government actors.
Organizational Management
Management is a complex, multifunctional, and multidisciplinary activity, which must be treated through the lenses of several theoretical and epistemological approaches. Therefore, we investigate the issues faced by for-profit and not-for-profit organization managers and researchers in different sectors and from organizations of different sizes and activities. We examine topics such as decision-making process; power; organizational strategies, structures, and processes; management and governance of different types of organizations; succession, professionalization, and governance of family businesses; higher education organizational management; the management of organizational culture; intercultural comparative studies; comparative analysis of public, private, and mixed economy organizations; organizational architecture; and new and old organizational arrangements and management models.
The Research Units that support this research area are:
- Unit for Public Management Studies (NEGP)
- Unit for Organizational Management and Management Technology Studies (NEG)