Dear all,
The Amsterdam Business School, University of Amsterdam, invites registrations for the 2025 edition of the PhD course "Sustainability in Management Research".
More details about the course and the registration process are available below and here.
The deadline for registrations is Friday, January 10, 2025. The course will take place between January 27-31, 2025.
Should you need more information, please do not hesitate to contact us by sending an email to v.g.scalera@uva.nl.
Best regards,
Arno Kourula and Vittoria Scalera
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Amsterdam Business School, University of Amsterdam
Ph.D. Course "Sustainability in Management Research"
Coordinators: Prof. Dr. Arno Kourula & dr. Vittoria G. Scalera
Contact hours: 18 hours
Total student workload (contact plus out of class): 18 hrs class time + 94hrs additional student workload= 112 hours
ECTS: 4 ECTS
Schedule and location:
9.30-12.30
14.00-17.00
- Wednesday, January 29, 2025
9.30-12.30
14.00-17.00
9.30-12.30
14.00-17.00
Address: Building REC M, Plantage Muidergracht 12, 1018 TV Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Registrations and price: Registrations for the course are open until Friday, January 10, 2025. You can find more information at https://abs.uva.nl/research/phd-research/courses-for-phd-candidates/courses-for-phd-candidates.html#Sustainability-in-management-research--January-2025.
External PhD students not affiliated with the UvA, RMS, or VU need to pay a registration fee to enroll in the course. Participants are expected to make their own travel and accommodation arrangements.
Learning goals: By the end of this course, students should be able to:
- Understand the rationale, opportunities, and challenges for sustainability research in the management field
- Describe appropriate theoretical approaches and research design to study sustainability-related research questions in the management field
- Recognize the appropriateness of different methods and their tradeoffs in addressing sustainability-related research questions in management research
- Gain insight into doing sustainability research, including data collection, analysis, and reporting of such research
- Describe the challenges associated with publishing sustainability strategy research and how to overcome those challenges
Teaching method and contact hours: Paper discussion and presentations, lectures, and invited speakers.
Course summary: This course is intended to provide graduate students with an understanding of the key topics related to sustainability research covered in the field of management. The key objective of the course is to uncover the opportunities and challenges of sustainability research in management by evaluating the classic key pillars and looking at current and future research avenues. Students will be provided with an overview of core thematical issues, theoretical approaches, and most appropriate methodologies to address the social and environmental grand challenges and integrate sustainability into organizational strategy formulation and implementation. At the end of the course, the students will be able to identify a roadmap for future work in sustainability research by gaining an understanding of assumptions, theories, and methods underlying sustainability research in the management field.
Assessment: Research proposal inspired by at least one of the session topics (70%) + in-class presentation of assigned papers (30%).
Conditions to pass the course:
- The score for the final essay must be 5.5 or higher
- Attendance is mandatory for at least 5 of the 6 sessions
- Students who miss more than one class will not be allowed to hand in a final essay
- In the case of a resit, only the final essay can be retaken. The grade of the in-class presentation will remain valid also for the resit.
Course material: The course material will mainly consist of journal articles covering both the classic and most recent sustainability research in the management field. The course material will also feature presentations from external speakers. The analysis of this material will enable the students to appreciate the theoretical and empirical work in the field as well as understand what it takes to publish sustainability research and where the field is going.
The course material will be available via a shared folder accessible to all participants
Class format: The course will be taught using a seminar style. Students share responsibility with the instructor for discussing the readings and identifying key points for discussion. Students are expected to complete all required readings for the session and come prepared to discuss them in each class. The format for the class will usually entail some introductory remarks by the main lecturer(s), followed by a group discussion of the analysis of the papers. The analysis of the papers will be focused on the research question(s), conceptual framework and hypotheses, methods, sample and measures, strengths and weaknesses, main conclusions, contributions to the literature, and relationship to other topics and disciplines. For each reading, one small group of participants will be the discussion leader and will provide a summary and developmental review of the paper, as appropriate. This review, as well as the class discussion that follows, should go beyond offering a summary of the paper to relate it to other research, underscore implications for the field, critique it, and identify questions that may follow.
The last session will be in the form of a workshop where speakers will present a research agenda of current and future topics in sustainability research.
Overview of Sessions
Session 1 – Institutions and organizations in sustainability (Session leader: Arno Kourula)
Topic selection: Institutional theory, non-market strategies, planetary boundaries
External speaker:
Prof. Andreas Rasche, Copenhagen Business School (*online)
Session 2 – Stakeholder and strategy perspectives (Session leader: Arno Kourula)
Topic selection: stakeholder theory, grand challenges, systems thinking
External speaker:
Prof. Flore Bridoux, Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University
Session 3 – Sustainability in international business (session leader: Vittoria Scalera)
Topic selection: Ethics, CSR, and social responsibility across countries, informal economy
External speaker:
Prof. Marcus Møller Larsen, Copenhagen Business School & BI Norwegian Business School
Session 4 – The business case vs. society centric Corporate Social Responsibility (session leader: Arno Kourula)
Topic selection: Corporate Social Responsibility, sustainable behavior
External speaker:
Prof. Christopher Wickert, VU Amsterdam
Session 5 – Sustainable firm innovation and strategies (session leader: Vittoria Scalera)
Topic selection: Environmental strategy and performance, sustainable business models, sustainable innovation
External speaker:
Prof. Florian Lüdeke-Freund, ESCP Business School (*online)
Session 6 – Workshop on current and future sustainability research
Three one-hour sessions featuring two presentations on current research projects and thematic roundtables led by each speaker.
Confirmed speakers:
- dr. Yuval Engel, Amsterdam Business School, University of Amsterdam
- dr. Panikos Georgallis, Amsterdam Business School, University of Amsterdam
- dr. Ana Mićković, Amsterdam Business School, University of Amsterdam
- dr. Sadaf Mokarram Dorri, Amsterdam Business School, University of Amsterdam