Sociology’s Role in the Teaching of Organizational Behavior in Higher Education. The Case of Hospitality Management

Teaching in universities, especially in management schools, is today orientated to solving-problems and operational skills’ development, short-term productivity gains and to a vocational perspective. This represents an impoverishment of a deeper learning, an obstacle to the development of competences in a broader and integrative sense and the absence of a critical thinking practice. These are important tools to enhance in students and future managers, as specific social actors, abilities to act in a conscious, autonomous and long-term efficacious manner in society. This essay’s objective is to problematize the role that sociology could assume in the overcoming of that impoverishment, namely within the curricular unit of organizational behavior in two ways. First, teaching the social and macro dimensions that contribute to explain organizational structuring and behavior. Secondly, enhancing reflexivity and contextualization on the practices and discourses of all social actors involved and disassembling the dominant ideological, naturalized and simplistic individualized view on the reality of labor, employment and organizations. This is especially relevant in hospitality management studies because the dominant discourse about hospitality organizations hide, under a hegemonic paradigm of naturalized and individualized explanations, the macro-social dimensions of its organizational culture, work conditions, employees’ behaviors, management styles and market labor.