McCone 114
Monterey, CA 93940
Email Address
kglenzer@miis.edu
Phone Number
831.647.4149
Kent Glenzer
Associate Professor in Organizational Behavior and Development, MPA/MBA
I believe:
All of us working for social justice and human rights need to act more structurally, with more historical awareness and collectivity.
What excites me:
Expertise
Organizational and institutional fields; political culture and power; evaluation; nonprofit management and organizational behavior; rights-based approaches; research methods; program strategy and assessment; ethnography of development and development agencies; neoinstitutional organizational sociology; process facilitation; management and leadership development.
Recent Activities
I have collaborative and/or consulting relationships currently with Oxfam, CARE, Firelight, and Emory University’s Masters Program in Development Studies. If all goes well, I’ll be consulting in 2012 on a project focused on building a strategic measurement framework and system related to civil society development in China and on climate change adaptation monitoring, evaluation, and learning processes in a number of countries around the world.
Education
Kent did his undergraduate work in journalism at Northwestern University, his Masters at Cornell University, and Ph.D. work at Emory University. His doctoral research focused on democratic decentralization in sub-Saharan Africa in the late 1990s and early 2000s. His dissertation was a historical ethnography of the intertwining of local and non-local notions of rights, democracy, the citizen, and the state from 1818 to the 21st century in Mali’s inner Niger River delta.
Careers in Strategic Planning and Management
Students working with me will be well prepared for consulting on or full-time positions in program/project monitoring and evaluation, strategic planning, project and program management, and facilitating organizational change processes. You might find yourself in the human resources department of a large international NGO, as a learning or staff/management development specialist. You might find yourself the manager of a civil society strengthening project in sub-Saharan Africa financed by a philanthropic foundation. You might find yourself part of a team contracted to evaluate a program or project of Oxfam or CARE.
Publication
Major publications from this research included “La Secheresse: The Social and Institutional Construction of a Development Problem in the Malian (Soudanese) Sahel, c.1900-1982,” in the Canadian Journal of African Studies (2002), “State, Donor and NGO Configurations in Malian Development 1960-1999: The Enactment and Contestation of Global Rationalized Myths in an Organizational Field,” in Globalization, the Third World State and Poverty-Alleviation in the Twenty-First Century (2001), "We Aren’t the World: La production institutionnelle du succès partiel," in Niger 2005: Une catastrophe si naturelle (2007), and “Development, Participation, and the Ethnography of Ambiguity,” in the Journal of Agriculture and Human Values (2011). Kent’s publications on international organizational behavior and effectiveness include, “Leading learning and change from the middle: Re-conceptualizing strategy’s purpose, content and measures,” in Development in Practice (2001), “What If We’re Not NGOs? The Opportunities Ahead for International Nongovernmental Organizations,” in Development Outreach Magazine (2011), and “Addressing Root Causes of Economic and Social Injustice: Considerations of Concept, Strategy, and Measurement from Oxfam America’s Rights-Based Programs,” in Measuring Impact; Making Progress (forthcoming).
Courses
Courses offered in the past four years.
▲ indicates offered in the current term
▹ indicates offered in the upcoming term[s]
IMGT 8501 - Intl Organizational Behavior ▹
International Organizational Behavior uses a global perspective to focus on interactions among individuals, groups, organizations and cultures in management practice and business conduct.
The course uses lecture, team assignments, class discussions, individual assessments, guest lectures, multi-media material, and cross-cultural team simulations. Course topics include: the global business environment, culture and value orientations, vision/mission, organizational structures, leadership, management style, motivation, team work, negotiation, communication, organization change, ethics and social responsibility. These topics are treated from an international and comparative perspective.
Fall 2011 - MIIS, Spring 2012 - MIIS, Fall 2012 - MIIS
IMGT 8508 - Power,SocialChange&Organizatns ▹
IPOL 8508 - Power,SocialChange&Organizatns ▹
This case-based course will look at structural social change and the odd bedfellows, unlikely coalitions, and quirky collaborations that such change requires. The course will focus on macro social change – national-level improvements in the lives of excluded, marginalized, and endemically impoverished groups – and identify the factors that make such change possible. Included in the course will be long looks at Rwanda, Mali, China, Costa Rica, Botswana, Brazil, Bangladesh, and Mozambique. Students will acquire strategic thinking tools that promote and foster unusual and innovative partnerships to address knotty and complex social problem. Students will also learn and then improve upon a structured methodology to analyze and identify leverage points for change in complex adaptive systems. Behind these tools will be a persistent ostinato that challenges student’s ideas of what power is, how it works, and what it means, connecting power to culture in ways often ignored – or at least marginalized – by high-level development decision makers.
Fall 2012 - MIIS
IPOL 8527 - Public Policy & Social Change
This class will prepare students to do policy analysis and advocacy with strong emphasis on social justice and equity. Students will acquire skills and knowledge essential for engaging in policy development and change. A particular concern of the course will be how leaders within social change organizations make decisions about such engagement. The course uses a case-based approach to explore the complexities of policy systems, processes, and outcomes.
Spring 2012 - MIIS
IPOL 8566 - Ecology of SCOs
Ecology of Social Change Organizations focuses each semester on a single organization, and on its current, real-world challenges. Each week, working professionals from the organization will come to campus to discuss these issues. A number of different faculty – each brought in to match the organization’s challenges w/ their expertise – will cycle in session by session to help frame the issues and workshop possible solutions or ways forward. The overall goal of this one-credit course is two-fold: first, to bring a holistic perspective on managing social change organizations, whose leaders work in contexts where implementing the “best practices” for, say, human resources can actually conflict with “best practices” in other organizational domains. Second, the course is meant to continuously focus on the organization’s wider institutional environment, which frequently places both constraints and unforeseen opportunities in front of managers and leaders. This Spring’s organization is the Firelight Foundation, a Santa Cruz based outfit focused on what it calls a “high leverage” approach to helping African communities deal with HIV and AIDS.
Spring 2012 - MIIS
IPOL 8644 - Sem:ProgramEvaluation for SCOs
This course will introduce different aspects of Program Evaluation in the first half of the semester. In the second half, students will conduct an evaluation in the field. Students will evaluate selected programs in organizations in the Monterey Bay area. The goals of the course include: a) understanding the process of evaluation; b) gaining familiarity with evaluation concepts, techniques and issues; c) choosing among different alternatives for conducting development evaluations, including data collection, analysis and reporting; and, d) designing an evaluation. We will have specific sessions on the following topics: a) evaluation models; b) new development evaluation approaches; c) impact, descriptive and normative evaluation designs; d) data collection and sampling; e) data analysis and interpretation; e) building a performance-based evaluation; and f) political, social and economic contexts of evaluation.
Spring 2012 - MIIS
IPOL 8685 - Sem:Advanced Evaluation ▹
Special Topics in Evaluation locates itself within current debates about “impact evaluation” in social development. The’00s witnessed the rise of heated debate about evaluation, impact, rigor, and the production of knowledge. Far from merely academic or philosophical puffery, these debates are influencing policy, strategy, fundraising, hiring, and organizational behavior of donors, NGOs, governments, and private sector agencies. The broad goal of this seminar is to give students hands-on experience applying a core set of evaluation competencies while, at the same time, equipping students to understand how recent paradigmatic debates may be changing ideas of those very competencies. <B>
The seminar, therefore, will cover competencies such as developing logic models, hypothesis generation and testing, operationalizing concepts, kinds of indicators, evaluation designs, budgeting, and matching methods to questions and to the expectations of stakeholders. We will then move from core concepts and competencies to seeing how they inform some evaluation methods/approaches that are controversial yet (may) solve certain measurement challenges that have plagued social development. Specifically, we will look at evaluative practices – and concrete cases – in relation to:
• randomized controlled trials (RCTs)
• social return on investment (SROI)
• participatory numbers (“parti-numbers”)
• qualitative comparative analysis (QCA)
• portfolio or sector-wide evaluation
• collective impact assessment
• Comparative Constituency Voice (CCV)
• “watchdog” agencies‟ assessment of nonprofit organization‟s program quality and results
Fall 2011 - MIIS, Fall 2012 - MIIS
