Management (MPhil / PhD)

OUR RESEARCH CULTURE

Ideally, you should choose do a PhD in a department with fellow students doing research that is comparable to yours, and staff members who are specialists in areas related to your studies and in the methods you will be using.

Like most university departments of business or management, we are a multidisciplinary group of social scientists. The theories used by the various staff members and research students come from various academic disciplines: principally, but not limited to, sociology, psychology, anthropology and economics; correspondingly, we employ a range of both quantitative (i.e. statistical) and qualitative research methods.

We believe that the questions posed, and the methods used, by different social science disciplines can jointly contribute to a better understanding of the social world, including the problems of business and management; through our first-year research methods courses and our ongoing series of seminars, we encourage you to become familiar with a wide range of methods and research programmes. We believe that participation in this multidisciplinary research setting can help you become a better researcher.

But to do a PhD is also to become a specialist. You will need to specialise, and to find your community of specialists. That community typically begins with your principal supervisor and second supervisor, and perhaps a few other members of the department staff and research students who are working on related topics or who are using the same methods as you.

Within our Department there are several clusters of specialisation, most of them fitting within the following categories:

• International business; international business and innovation; international business and economic development
• Innovation: university-industry linkages; innovation policy; innovation measurement; technology management; local and regional economic development and regeneration
• Marketing, in particular brand management, digital marketing, consumer behaviour, and services/retail marketing
• Work: comparative employee and industrial relations; skills; labour markets in sport; executive pay; workplace learning
• Comparative corporate governance; corporate social responsibility
• Corporate finance; financial management; accounting
• Strategy as practice, organisation theory, information systems strategy, social networks
• Sport business management; the business and regulation of football; sport labour markets

TRAINING AND METHODOLOGY

As a research student, you will follow an intensive research training programme during your first year of full-time study (first two years of part-time study). You will have the opportunity to present research papers in the research student seminars series.

Unless you already hold a Master's degree approved by the Economic and Social Research Council for research training purposes, you will need to follow an intensive research training programme during your first year (full-time) or over two years (part-time), organised in collaboration with other Birkbeck and University of London departments which offer research degrees in the field of management.

As your work develops, you should also be developing a network of others who work in the same areas: researchers in other departments at Birkbeck, and at other institutions, near and far. Central London is, of course, the home of many of Britain's, and the world's, leading universities: there is no better place to build such networks.