Yashar is part of a team that teaches Organization I which is an introductory course in the field of organization and management. The course addresses the emergence of theories and approaches to organization and management of companies and other types of organizations as well as the concept of sustainability. The aim is to expose students to thoughts and ideas on how an organization works, and issues related to management and management of organizations. The course's focus is on developing a theoretical understanding of organizations and how they are designed to function. Students are introduced to what happens in organizations among its members as individuals and in groups in private, public, and non-profit organizations. Additionally, the students are taught guidelines for scientific writing, knowledge development and methodology within the subject.

 

Yashar is also part of a team that teaches Organization II. The course provides an introduction to how the organization is shaped by its environment through norms and rules, and how employees understand their situation and their relationship with the employer. With the help of these perspectives, the course provides an insight into the conditions for governance and change in companies and other types of organizations. The course also aims to show how organizational theory can be used as a basis for analyzes of companies and other organizations, taking into account ethics and the equal value of people. Through project work, where the course's theories and concepts are applied to real organizations, the course thus provides a concrete anchoring of organizational theory in practice. The overall purpose of the course is to deepen the student's knowledge of organizations as social systems.

 

Yashar supervises bachelor's and master's theses on various themes that include leadership, organizational change, organizational legitimacy, strategies for both attracting and retaining employees, water management, political ecology, conflict management, and organizational culture.

Yashar's doctoral dissertation – titled Organizing Refugees – was awarded the '2021 Best Critical Dissertation Award' given by the Critical Management Studies (CMS) division of the Academy of Management. Each year the Division awards the most outstanding dissertation in the field of CMS.

Interests: organizing, sensemaking, refugees, Actor-Network Theory, transdisciplinarity.

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• ORGANIZING REFUGEES

  2020. Yashar Mahmud (et al.).

  Thesis (Doc)

  Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Sweden, Finland, Greece, and Bulgaria during 2015-2019, this study examines one of the greatest challenges of our time—refugees. Refugee flows are not only something chaotic but also something that is organized. In this study, the phenomenon is referred to as organizing refugees: an actor-network that consists of people, their practices, supporting non-human actors, held together by a narrative. Organizing is a verb and implies that something is constantly being made, i.e. refugees are made through interactions between the refugees themselves, other people and non-human actors. Instead of viewing refugees as a means to explain something else, this study takes refugees as a variable that needs to be explained. Accordingly, this research is an investigation of “refugees in the making.”

  Conventional organizational research takes for granted certain approaches of engaging with, seeing, and writing about the “world,” which results in the world (i.e. reality) being kept constant. By employing actor-network theory, particularly Mol's (1999; 2002) version, this study alters the notion of reality and tries to understand the world differently, i.e. as a multiple rather than a plural one. It is a dramatic shift. In this quest, I challenge the conventional organizational theories' idea of changing the epistemological conditions while keeping the reality (i.e. our perception of the world) constant. When something is made and re-made, it gives rise to different ontological worlds - it is not just about different perspectives. The organizing of refugees thus contains different, multiple, worlds - and they interact, although their coexistence always contains more or less frictions, or tensions. It is these tensions that this dissertation focuses on and it is where Mol's version of the actor-network theory is especially useful to understand the organizing of refugees. In other words, this is an investigation into how different practices and different worldviews interact in the making of refugees and what happens in those interactions.

  In this process, Organizing Refugees furthers Mol's (2002) work on multiplicity, analytically generalizes her conceptual tools, identifies—as well as accounts for—new “modes of organizing,” and offers a time multiple approach to advance our understanding of organizing. Moreover, the analysis shows how understanding of the world as multiple creates new ethical and political opportunities for organizing refugees, i.e. what we should do and what opportunities we have to act differently.

  Read more about ORGANIZING REFUGEES

Show all publications by Yashar Mustafa Mahmud at Stockholm University