Can you help me understand this Political Science question?
Guidelines
The idea of this project is to encourage students to explore organizational change and gain some understanding of this complex phenomenon with its economic, managerial, political, cultural and psychological aspects.
Keeping in mind that young people rarely have considerable first-hand experience with organizations, we suggest students to explore the organizational experience of other people they are in touch with. Each student has to interview three persons in different age groups – a young person (age 20-30), a person in active working age (30-60), and a retired person (age 60+). You can recruit your respondents among your own family or you can choose to address other people. Ask them to tell you the story of their working life and what they find most important about the organizations whey are, or were, members of, and record what they have to share.
The aim of this tiny piece of research is to compare the stories of the working life of three generations and trace the changes that have occurred in the organizational environment in the course of time. The easiest way to so that is to identify similarities and differences in the three narratives you will get. However, you can choose to explore a specific aspect of organizational life – for instance power distance in the organization (how the employees relate to their superiors and vice versa, etc.) or the flexibility of organizational roles (to what an extent the role holder is free to define and change the parameters of his or her role, etc.) While listening, be careful about issues of special concern for the story teller and feel free to ask additional question. You can use your knowledge and skills on qualitative research methods, gained in the my previous course.
Do not forget to ask how often the respondent has changed, of intends to change, his or her job, and why – work mobility tells a lot about organizational cultures, personal life strategies and the cultural environment as a whole. Do not forget to inquire about the respondent’s views about organizational change, either. Of specific interest is their understanding about the manageability of organizational transformation – have they witnessed considerable changes in their organizations, what sort of changes, and what was their own contribution to these. And most important – what is the explanation about the changes the people have gone through and/or participated in: do they perceive them as a result of an intentional, guided process, or as something unmanageable that just occurs in organizations.
NB: Scope of the essay: min 1500 max 3000 words!!!!