Master’s Level courses
This page provides information on the various Master’s Level courses relating to the specific topics of the MCM.
Fall
7,001: Media and Communication Management (Christian Fieseler & Miriam Meckel)
New technologies are requiring companies to face the task of dealing with changing relationships when it comes to their communications and competitors. Properly understood, companies and organisations have a wide range of strategic opportunities at their disposal within a changing communicative and technological environment that facilitate interacting with their stakeholders, who have in fact become more powerful.
With this as its point of departure, the lecture employs economic, social and technological perspectives to illuminate how communications processes and strategic opportunities for action go hand in hand. At the same time, the lecture deals in particular with aspects of business communication and communicative aspects relevant to the production of goods and services. In addition to the principles of media and communication management, the lecture imparts knowledge about the effects of new technologies on these elements.
7,369: Global Communication and International Affairs (Miriam Meckel & James Davis)
The objective of this course is to explore the emergence of globalised communication in the context of the IT revolution, economic globalisation and the changing international system . The effects of globalised communication on societies and various publics will be explored in the course. Particular attention will be paid to elaborating a conceptual framework for analysing the political and normative causes along with the consequences of these developments. Another focus will be the significant changes occurring in cultural communication (international, intercultural and global communication) as well as in media systems and journalism.
7,030: Information and Knowledge Visualization for Business Applications (Martin Eppler)
This course introduces the principles and current applications of interactive visualisation in the context of organisations and businesses. It offers students the opportunity to delve into a promising field in business informatics and communication management. In addition, the course provides the necessary arsenal of psychological, creative and technological tools.
7,812: Understanding and Managing Knowledge - Individually, in Teams and In Organisations (Martin Eppler)
The course gives students an opportunity to examine communication, management and technology-related topics as integrated challenges and real-life problems. The course focuses on state-of-the-art information technology applications such as knowledge portals or knowledge maps, major trends such as virtual communities and knowledge visualization and the inherent management issues that accompany them.
In order to provide a systematic perspective on these issues, the course relies heavily on key concepts (such as knowledge work) from the applied social sciences and organises these concepts on three relevant levels: the individual, the team level, and the organisational level. In turn, students discover connections between the management of knowledge at the personal level, team level, and throughout organisations as a whole. The course examines the main problems that arise at each level, theories to comprehend the problems as well as current solutions to these problems and their potential benefits.
7,004: Research, Practice, Venture Project, Group11 (Katarina Stanoevska-Slabeva)
Service orientation and SOA, mashups und clouds are the buzz words used to describe the key trends in the field of information processing in business. To provide greater flexibility and agility, companies are more and more making use of resources in the form of services, mashup interfaces or new clouds.
Nearly all business functions can be covered by service packages. Salesforce.com presents one of the best-known examples in the area of customer relationship management. Other providers offer project management or communications services.
Customising one’s products to keep pace with these new trends is an important strategy for all software providers such as SAP. But exactly which services are relevant, how they are used and when they will, in fact, become cheaper has not yet been studied sufficiently.
7,778: Psychoanalitical Thought (Vincent Kaufmann)
Sexuality, culture, religion, economics, art, power, neurosis, perversion, psychosis. Throughout all of the twentieth century, psychoanalytical theory has made important theoretical contributions to each of these subjects, which will be discussed in the seminar.
A psychoanalytical idea of man, contrasting in particular to “homo oeconomicus”, emerges from a coherent theory of the unconscious, sexuality and constitution of subjectivity. Why does this idea of homo oeconomicus fall short? What excludes economic thinking? Why does the subject sometimes exhibit a tendency towards self-destruction? Or, more generally, what must remain repressed within a society so that it may function at all? And finally, how and where does the repressed come to resurface?
The seminar, on the one hand, focuses on the classics of psychoanalysis (the works of Sigmund Freud) while on the other hand on some of the most important contributions and deviations from Freud’s theoretical model (Georges Bataille, René Girard, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze).
7,708: Digital Technologies and Society (Izabela Mierzejewska Bozena)
Each new communications medium or information technology seems to restore the belief that it will change people's perceptions and, thus, alter our social reality. Print, photography, telephone, radio, film, television and cable in their turn provoked remarkably similar predictions. Today, similar prognostications have been made about the Internet, mobile phones, wireless networks and so forth. But how do we know if digital media is actually changing the nature of society? Do we truly live in an “information society”?
This course explores the political, economic and cultural dimensions of the complex relationship between new media and society. The ways in which new media have been used by various communities in specific historical contexts from the early years of the printing press to the age of the Internet will also be explored. Drawing on historical, theoretical and popular writings, topics including the history of media technologies, globalisation, digitisation and media convergence, concerns about privacy, piracy and security in the information age will be discussed. The objective is to critically understand how new media are embedded in the various facets of our everyday lives.
Spring
8,062: Customer Value in the Media and Communications Industry (Christian Fieseler & Katarina Stanoevska-Slabeva)
The media and communications industries are experiencing a time of radical change: Well-established value added chains are being reconfigured while media, computer and telecommunications companies are merging or converging. The new media industry that has emerged is becoming more important when compared to other branches of the economy and has the potential to become the driving force of growth in the 21st century. The seminar seeks to demonstrate to students the tension between changing media products and the expectations of customers or users and to provide them with the appropriate strategies for managing these.
The lecture is structured in three blocks. The first part presents concepts which serve as a foundation for principles explored in the content of the course. Building on this foundation, the second block explores the particularities of the “TIME” sectors and the world in which customers find themselves. Guest speakers from the various different sectors provide a direct impression of the their company’s unique challenges and problem solving approaches. In the third block, the previously mentioned transformations are examined from the perspective of communications agencies. Students can apply what they have learned in case studies and actual exercises.
The Might (and Mess) of Visual Metaphors: Bridging Worlds in Management through Imagery (Martin J. Eppler)
Can corporate culture be better understood when viewed as an iceberg (as theorised by Edgar Schein)? Can decision making better be described as a “garbage can” (Cohen, March und Olsen)? Is communication a labyrinth with a great many dead ends? Can a growth strategy be represented in the form of a tree? These are just a few of the questions which this course addresses. After all, not only philosophy avails itself of visual metaphors (from Plato's cave allegory to Popper’s container model); rather, managerial knowledge also makes use of fanciful, visual renderings.
This lecture series addresses the substance of management in a different way for once, namely as visual metaphors. We delve into the lively world of self, team and corporate management and experience how simple visual metaphors structure and help us to understand complex management theories, models and problems. These examples are accompanied by theoretical thinking on the essence of metaphors, images and their mechanisms as well as risks. On the other hand, the course also examines practical problems on the aesthetic realisation of visual metaphors. The course thus provides both theoretical background knowledge as well as practical guidelines for using visual metaphors when communicating complex knowledge.