LFU:online

This course introduces PhD students to existing research and current theoretical debates in the rapidly evolving field of organization theory and strategy in the context of wicked societal problems and grand societal challenges, e.g., climate change, societal polarization, economic inequality, and the raise of artificial intelligence. Students will be provided with key research areas, fundamental research topics, and solid theoretical foundations that offer suitable lenses for studying contemporary questions related to wicked societal problems from an organization theory, strategy, and decision-making perspective. Accordingly, in the course we will discuss seminal papers centered around various theoretical perspectives that relate to these complex societal problems, or more general, to complex managerial decision-making, strategic, organizational, and decision-making questions. Students will be motivated to identify gaps in current research and develop own research questions.

This research seminar is centered around the question of how management and management research can deal and help with the complex societal problems we are facing today. Examples include climate change, societal polarization, economic inequality – and the most recent issue: the raise of artificial intelligence. From a management research perspective, all these challenges share a common ground: they are so-called wicked problems, i.e., ill-structured with regard to means-end causalities, uncertain and dynamic with regard to desired and undesired outcomes, and they typically require collective efforts of multiple, yet diverse actors to tackle and address them. These characteristics raise difficult, but interesting questions from an organizational, strategic, and decision-making point of view. Examples include: What are effective governance arrangements to facilitate multi-stakeholder cooperation and value creation? How can we formulate and frame complex societal problems to make firms and other organizations to buy in? What implications do these societal problems have for organizing and strategizing at the firm level? How do these problems shape the role of firms in society and which emerging forms of organizing might help us dealing with these problems? How can organizational purpose help in managing, for example the complex challenges tied to AI – or does AI (and other challenges) also require us to consider how organization as the key economic forms of cooperation will need to transform?

Paper discussions, discussion of work-in-progress, potentially guest speakers: Through a series of interactive seminar sessions, this course enables PhD students to critically engage with seminal research papers as well as novel research projects. In each session, we will jointly discuss specific research papers, typically 2 papers in each session. Students will be assigned to specific papers to lead the discussion. If possible, we will have invited guest speakers to share and discuss their latest research projects or working papers with you. The seminar is open for students who completed "SE Methodologische Grundlagen für Dissertationsprojekte".

Quality of paper discussion, written memos, participation in class