Understanding Organizations and Leadership Through Advances in Computational Social Science

Introduction

Are you curious about how we can better understand organizations and leadership through recent methodological advancements in psychology and sociology? Are you interested in learning about novel sources and applications of psychological and organizational data (e.g., location tracking, sensors and monitors)? Do you want to have a professional edge by understanding how we can improve institutions and organizational systems by integrating recent methodological advancements in the social sciences? Welcome to the intersection of Organizational Research, Social Science, and Methodological Advancements: Understanding Organizations and Leadership Through Advances in Computational Social Science.

In this course, you will learn how we can better understand organizations, leadership, and psychological phenomena by applying the young field of Computational Social Science to these topics. In doing so, we can help solve psychological, socio-cultural, and organizational problems through novel data methods and technologies. With rapid advancements in computation, scientists and organizations are no longer beholden to basic strategies, limited data, and basic analysis tools. Recent computational advances allow us to apply new methods and techniques to understand things like institutional frameworks, organizations, leadership, and human behavior, with the ultimate aim of providing solutions to societal and organizational problems.

Please note that the course aims to provide a broad overview of how organizations, leadership, and psychology can be informed by recent methodological advances (e.g., social networks, natural language processing) rather than an in-depth study on any specific method. It is not a data science or coding skills-based course.  

I look forward to teaching you how we can better understand organizations, leadership, and psychology via advances in the field of Computational Social Science.

Prerequisite: None. Coding or data analysis experience is not required. This is an overview course of how organizations, leadership, and psychology can be informed by CSS. It is not a data science or coding skills-based course.

Course content

The course covers the following topics                                  

• The structure and dynamics of social systems.
• Social cognitive processes, including phenomena like social contagion and wisdom of crowds.
• Understanding organizations and groups in terms of modern computational methods, including social networks, natural language processing and artificial intelligence and machine learning. 
• Novel sources of data (e.g., geo-location, sensors) in organizations.
• The ethics of data privacy in organizations and beyond.