Why every other topic in this course depends on the move you make in this first seminar — learning to see your own paradigm.
You came to this MBA expecting a toolkit. The first seminar warns you — there isn't one, and pretending there is one is part of the problem. Topic 1 is not really a topic so much as a reframing of what management even is, and a quick introduction to the thinking frame that runs through every other session of the course: sociological imagination.
By the end of Seminar 1 you should be able to: explore the phenomenon and meaning of being a manager in the contemporary world; identify alternative perspectives for understanding management, organisations and society; identify the approach the course is taking; and use sociological imagination as a thinking frame.
The seminar opens with deceptively simple questions: what does it mean to be a manager? What am I supposed to do? How do I learn it? What are my challenges? And will this MBA actually help?
Then it shows you two famous answers that flatly contradict each other — and asks you to notice that you have probably never been asked to choose between them.
These are not just quotes — they are entire worldviews compressed into a sentence. One foregrounds the customer and broader society. The other foregrounds shareholder profit and treats the rest as rules of the game.
Which one is your organisation actually run on? Which one does your MBA implicitly teach you? Most of us live inside Friedman's logic without ever having decided to. That is what this course is trying to make visible.
The seminar uses Wittgenstein's famous duck-rabbit drawing (1953) to make a single, foundational point: the same data can be seen as two completely different things depending on the frame you bring to it. You don't see reality. You see your interpretation of reality.
This is not a philosophical curiosity. It is the foundational move of the entire course. Every perspective you will be taught — Marxism, Neoliberalism, Feminism, Postmodernism, Postcolonialism, Indigenous Thinking — is a way of training your eye to see something the dominant frame normally hides.
The seminar walks you through three everyday managerial concerns and asks you to look at each one differently. These are not random — each one opens a door to a major perspective that the course will later spend a whole session unpacking.
Efficiency is good. More productivity is more progress.
We work because we have to. Motivation is an HR problem.
We treat everyone equally at work and in society.
Scenario 1. Hidden under "efficiency" you'll find labour intensification, surveillance, deskilling, and the question of who captures the gains. The cleaner who finishes twice as much for the same wage is "efficient" only from one direction.
Scenario 2. Hidden under "motivation" is the production-consumption loop. We overwork to overspend. As the seminar's BMW slide put it bluntly: "Men of wealth are no longer surrounded by other human beings, as they have been in the past, but by objects."
Scenario 3. Hidden under "equal opportunity" is objectification. Think of Fair & Lovely / Glow & Lovely — Unilever literally selling the equation fairness = worth. Women appear, in advertising and in everyday consumption, not as agents but as objects to be improved upon.
This is the most quotable line of the whole seminar — and possibly the most exam-friendly. Translation: stop looking only at your office. The reasons your organisation runs the way it does are mostly outside it — in colonial history, in economic ideology, in patriarchal culture, in consumerist demand.
If you only analyse the inside, you will keep solving the wrong problem. The "factory gate" is the boundary of vision that managers usually do not cross. CMT is the practice of crossing it on purpose.
The seminar makes a sharp diagnostic point. Most managers — and most management research — are stuck inside a single perspective. Usually a functionalist / positivist one, which assumes:
Everything in an organisation has a function. Everything important can be measured. Reality is "out there" waiting to be discovered. There is one correct answer; the manager's job is to find it.
From inside this paradigm, two predictable things happen:
One. Individuals focus their attention on situations and actions whose larger purpose is unclear to them. You end up busy with KPIs without ever asking what they're really for.
Two. People become falsely conscious of their own social positions (this is a phrase borrowed from Marxism). They cannot see how their own conditions are being produced by structures they participate in.
If you can't see the system, you can only respond to its symptoms. That is why a single perspective — no matter how rigorous — eventually fails as a management lens.
The seminar is unusually honest about what it does and does not promise. Read this carefully, because it explains why exam questions never have a single correct answer — you are being marked on the quality of your seeing, not on whether you arrived at the "right" verdict.
What it gives you instead is a spectacle — a way to catch a glimpse of the bigger picture that quietly shapes, changes, and reproduces organisational events, processes, practices and discourse. It also gives you the ability to read the interplay between macro forces and micro events in any organisational situation.
"Sociological imagination" is the term you must walk out of this seminar understanding. It is borrowed from sociology (C. Wright Mills, popularised here via Duarte 2009) and it names a specific cognitive ability: connecting your personal, micro-level experience with the structural, macro-level forces that produce it.
The course unpacks it through three cognitive skills. Internalise these three — they are the actual content of the course.
Finding your own way. Using previous learning to review, analyse and evaluate your own experience.
When you read about, say, neoliberalism in a few weeks, can you stop and recall something specific from your own workplace that fits? If yes, you reflected.
The ability to evaluate information and propositions presented as "true," and to form judgments based on evidence rather than authority.
When a CEO says "our people are our greatest asset," can you ask whose people, by what measure, and what their wage growth has actually been? If yes, you thought critically.
"Our ways of being in the world." This is the hardest of the three. Reflexivity asks you to turn the lens back on yourself.
Can you notice that you tend to see every organisational problem as a "process problem" because of your accounting / engineering / HR background? That noticing — that is reflexivity. You are auditing your own lens.
These three together = sociological imagination. The rest of the course is essentially: here is a perspective, now use Reflection, Critical Thinking and Reflexivity to work with it.
Duarte (2009, p. 73) gives the seminar its only practical drill. The instructions are simple: take any ordinary object — a tie, a cup of tea, a smartphone, a tube of face cream, a pair of jeans — and analyse it through four layers.
What is this object? How is it made? What's it made of?
Who has access to it? How does it sit in your life? Who benefits, who suffers?
Where else does this object exist? How does it affect people and environments elsewhere?
When did it appear? Why? How has it changed over time?
Try it now on something within arm's reach. The exercise feels trivial for about ninety seconds, and then it becomes uncomfortably revealing. That discomfort is the point — it is sociological imagination kicking in.
Dried Camellia sinensis leaves, processed and packed in branded sachets, exported to global markets under a Royal Warrant.
A middle-class status drink in the UK; an everyday refreshment in Sri Lankan households; the country drinks what it grows, but the brand on the box is rarely Sri Lankan.
Most tea pickers are Tamil women on daily wage in central highland estates. The leaf travels roughly 8,000 km from estate to London packing house, accumulating value the picker never sees. The packaging is designed for a consumer who has never met her.
1840s British colonial planters cleared mountain forests and brought Tamil labour from South India. The racial, economic and geographical structure of the central highlands today is a direct inheritance of that colonial moment. The brand you reach for is the descendant of that supply chain.
One ordinary cup tells you about colonialism, gender, class, global capitalism and environmental change — all from one object you barely noticed. This is what sociological imagination actually does. Practise the exercise — it is the single most useful drill in this course.
The rest of the trimester is a tour through the lenses that let you do this kind of analysis on demand. Each one will get its own session and its own readings. For now, just notice that each is a frame for seeing something the dominant management view misses.
This is the single highest-yield piece of intelligence about CMT exams. Look at how often the same question, in slightly different words, has appeared across the past papers.
"The capacity of providing solutions to business/life problems is limited by one's own paradigm." Drawing examples from your life/business/any other relevant context, explain how paradigms could affect your ability to make decisions and provide solutions.
"Your ability to generate creative and context-specific solutions to organisational/life problems are limited within your paradigm." Elaborate how paradigms could shape your ability to make decisions and provide solutions by providing examples from your life/organisational context.
"The Socio-economic crisis in Sri Lanka highlights the failure of conventional management practices and thinking … Alternative thinking and paradigms are critical to understand the crisis and provide effective solutions." Critically evaluate this statement using your knowledge of sociological paradigms.
"Organisational theories enable the understanding of organisational realities sufficiently even though there may be contextual differences." Do you agree? Justify your answer using your knowledge about the theorising process.
"The functionalist paradigm is dominating the modern management theories and practices." Elaborate this statement drawing on the analysis of sociological paradigms.
"Theories limit our understanding about organisation realities." Critically evaluate this statement using examples of theories and organisation realities of your choice.
"Organisational phenomena can be fully understood using relevant theories." Critically evaluate this statement using relevant examples and knowledge of theorising.
Using your knowledge of theorising, analyse and develop the process of building a theory on a contemporary organisational phenomenon of your choice.
From the way these questions are framed, the marker wants evidence that you understand:
· A paradigm is a worldview / frame of reference — the Wittgenstein duck-rabbit point.
· Paradigms are partial — they make some things visible and other things invisible.
· Managers operate inside paradigms whether they know it or not.
· The default paradigm of management is functionalist/positivist, which is exactly why it misses class, gender, history, ideology and culture.
· A Sri Lankan or personal example is almost always required — generic textbook examples earn very little.
Topic 1 also feeds answers on these recurring questions, indirectly:
The "indigenous + postmodern shaping thinking" question (2021 Weekend Q3) — Topic 1's three cognitive skills are exactly the toolkit you use here.
Questions that ask you to "critically reflect" — wherever you see those words on the paper, you are being asked to perform Reflection, Critical Thinking and Reflexivity in writing.
Source of the three-skills framing (Reflection · Critical Thinking · Reflexivity) and of the ordinary-object exercise on p. 73. This is the single most important reading for this seminar. Read it twice.
An editorial-style critique of what "management" has come to mean and who it serves. Useful background for any answer about the purpose of management or the limits of mainstream management theory.