Advanced Topics in Macro Social Work

This course will provide a quick overview of traditional and contemporary organizational theories relevant to understanding human service organizations. Using multiple theories and perspectives, students will analyze their field placement experiences and behaviors of their organizations, including but not limited to organizational survival and adaptation to environmental changes, power asymmetry/dynamics between service providers and users, relationships between staff diversity and user’s representation opportunity, and informal tactics providers develop to legitimatize their practices while satisfying multiple stakeholders’ expectations. Beyond recognizing how various environmental, organizational, and individual attributes shape human service organizational practices, this course will help students to identify complex and systemic relationships between those factors—feedback structures that reflect underlying assumptions and beliefs behind organization’s and providers’ behaviors. Leveraging lessons from the course, students will propose a plan for improving their field placement organization’s practices—a small but immediate step toward a larger social change.