A study companion for MBA Weekend 2025/2027 — built to help you ask better questions, not to give you panaceas.
Other MBA subjects teach you frameworks, ratios, models, and "best practice." CMT does the opposite. It asks you to step outside your office and look at management, organisations and society from the outside in — through philosophy, sociology, and critical theory.
The course will not provide answers in the form of a toolkit. It will not give you "off-the-shelf" solutions for the problems you face at work. What it offers is a spectacle — a way of catching a glimpse of the bigger picture that quietly shapes everything happening inside your organisation.
Done well, this course will make you a more useful manager, a more honest thinker, and a much harder person to fool with corporate slogans. It will also make MBA exam-answers easier to write, because once you can see the lens, you can use it.
Critically understand the main philosophical themes associated with Contemporary Management Thought.
Explore and dissect everyday realities of management with a new set of conceptual tools.
Reflect critically on management issues with an understanding of the socio-political context — and come up with alternative ways of doing things.
Topics 1 – 6 are open. Click into any of them — your full notes are inside. Topics 7 – 11 will open as the trimester progresses.
Sociological imagination as a thinking frame. Wittgenstein, the factory gate, and why managers cannot see what they cannot frame.
→Paradigms and the sociology of organisations. Burrell & Morgan; Hatch & Cunliffe — modern, symbolic and postmodern perspectives.
→Why growth economics keeps failing the planet. Sufficiency lifestyles. The myth of sustainable consumption.
→Critical perspectives on the firm. Class, labour, exploitation, alienation — and what Marx still has to say to the modern manager.
→Identity as a project. Bauman's tourist. Lifestyles as fragments. The end of grand narratives in business.
→Harvey on creative destruction. Market logic colonising every domain. Neoliberal ideology inside the modern workplace.
→The colonial past lives inside present-day organisations. The gaze of the Other. Neocolonialism as organisational identity work.
Gender as a structural feature of work, not a personal trait. Inequality, institutions, organisations. Time's up.
Invoking indigenous wisdom. From onion to ocean — paradox in national cultures. Hybridity and kinship inside organisations.
Group report submission & presentations. One of five assigned perspectives — Marxist, Postmodern, Neoliberal, Postcolonial, or Feminist.
Synthesis. Final exam preparation. Bringing the lenses together.
This is an open-book exam. Memorising definitions will earn you almost nothing. What will earn you marks is application — using a perspective to make sense of a real organisation, ideally a Sri Lankan one.
Report (30 marks) · 1,500–2,000 words excluding references · hardcopy due Week 10 · APA.
Presentation (20 marks) · after Session 9 · all group members must be present.
Each group is assigned one of five perspectives and must analyse a Sri Lankan organisation/s through it. Interviews with people in the case organisation are strongly encouraged for richer detail.
Open-book examination. The pattern across 2018–2024 papers is consistent: answer 5 questions out of 7 (sometimes split into two parts with a minimum from each).
Every question demands real examples — usually Sri Lankan, often personal. The marker tests critical thinking and reflection, not recall. Open book means you bring everything; the test is whether you can use it under time pressure.
The exam shape has been remarkably stable. The same lenses keep appearing — the Sri Lankan context simply updates (COVID, IMF, economic crisis, etc.).
→ Consumerism — almost always one question. Recent angles: sustainability, sufficiency lifestyle, post-COVID consumption, Eckhardt on the "myth of sustainable consumption."
→ Neoliberalism — almost always one question. Recent angles: gig economy, IMF reform, hegemonic discourse (Harvey), accumulation by dispossession.
→ Marxism — every year. Usually framed around "are managers a class?", alienation, class conflict, exploitation under participatory management.
→ Feminism — every year. Glass ceiling, gendering of organisations, women's experience, parental leave policies as feminist or not.
→ Postmodernism — every year. Identity, lifestyle, hybridity (Bhabha), "is Sri Lanka a postmodern society?"
→ Postcolonialism — every year. The gaze of the Other, multinational organisations, neocolonialism, defamiliarising.
→ Paradigms / Theorising — a meta-question almost every year. "Your ability to provide solutions is limited within your paradigm." This is where Topic 1 directly earns you marks.
Open Past Papers + Model Answers ↗