Block 1: The perspectives .. .so, what is it about then?

Having read the whole perspective book of Block 1, here is the summary of my understanding of what it attempts to address:

The block introduces a selected few topics which either the OUBS or business shools in general consider as important, necessary or interesting for MBA. In no particular order and not in the same wordings and categorisations given in the books, they are:

• Stakeholders management (internal, external, satisficing)
• Organisational behaviour
• Organisational structure
• Organisational culture
• External environment (interfacing with organisations, volatility)
• Internal environment
• Human resource management (HRM) - soft HRM model, hard HRM model, european perspective
• Motivation - Maslow's pyramid of needs and .. two others I don't remember now, damn!
• Job Design
• Performance Management Systems
• Social responsibility of commercial companies
• Management control / accounting
• Profit centre, discretionary cost centre, standard cost centre, investment centre, revenue centre
• Conflict management
• Control systems (mechanistic, organismic, closed, open, integrated)
• Information management
• Knowledge management
• Financial analysis - balance sheet, profit and loss, cash flow statement
• Financial ratio analysis (ROCE, ROI etc.)
• Contingency theory
• Marketing - segmentation, targeting, positioning, shift of power to customers, impact of internet, capitalism, socialism, customer satisfaction

The block attempts to instill the idea of reflecting what ones learn (theories, models, frameowrks) against real scenarios. It also challenges the readers to be critical to the models, theories, frameworks - i.e. why some of them do no work in reality - in some organisations, in some circumstances, in some culture, in some age etc..

There seems to be a strong emphasis (given that it's mentioned many times in the block) that organisations need to look beyond their internal environment and be sensitive to changes in the external environment. Managers cannot be simply reactive, but instead beware of potential disruptions from the external environment --> There is a theory called chaos theory that addresses this.