Program in Business Administration

About

The SSE PhD Program in Business Administration (240 ECTS) prepares our graduates to be successful researchers or to advance in their chosen careers.

The program has a history of over 50 years, and today over 10 PhD degrees are awarded each year in Business Administration. Our overall purpose is to give the doctoral student a deepened and broadened theoretical and methodological knowledge, alongside the experience of having completed a substantial piece of original scientific work.

The doctoral program fosters close interaction between students and faculty, and every doctoral student belongs to a research group specializing in a particular field of research. Our 20 full professors who are active in the area of Business Administration are excellent teachers who keep up-to-date in their disciplines through research and publication.

The conferral of the PhD in Business Administration signifies that the candidate has attained expert competence in a major field of study.

We offer program research areas in:

•Accounting and Managerial Finance
•Management and Organization
•Marketing, Strategy, and International Business
•Asian Economy and Business

Content

The 240 ECTS credits of the PhD Program in Business Administration are divided into a course component (90 ECTS) and a dissertation component (150 ECTS). A specially designed course program, Stockholm-Uppsala Business Studies (SUBS), is run jointly with Uppsala University and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and offers four mandatory courses (30 ECTS) in the first semester of the program.

Courses

• The Research Process (Mandatory SUBS course)
• Quality of Statistical Data (Mandatory SUBS course)
• Perspectives on Science and Research (Mandatory SUBS course, Uppsala University)
• Qualitative Methods (Mandatory SUBS course, Uppsala University)
• Entrepreneurship as a Research Field   
• Quality of Statistical Data
• The Research Process   
• Experiments with Humans   
• Accounting in Inter-organizational Relationships
• Quantitative Methods and Analysis  
• Organization Theory: Classic & Contemp. Approaches   
   

The remaining 60 ECTS are acquired in Specialized Courses, which are given at various departments and institutes at SSE, or other universities, and in many different forms. Which courses to take is jointly decided by the doctoral student and his/her Primary Supervisor.

The subject matters and forms of these courses vary from year to year in response to demands from doctoral students as well as to the changes in research interests.

You will be supervised by one SSE faculty member (primary supervisor) from the beginning of the program. After you have submitted a dissertation proposal in the second year, you will work with a supervision committee of 3-4 professors to complete your PhD dissertation. Research and conference travel is encouraged within the program.

To be eligible for admission, we require the following:

• Proven academic record. We require a) a university level degree, b) at least three semesters of business administration courses (90 ECTS) including a thesis worth at least 15 ECTS, and c) one year of Master level studies or the equivalent.
• Parallell enrollment: If you are a first-year Master student at SSE you can apply and be admitted to the SSE PhD Program in the second year of your MSc studies, through the MSc-PhD parallel enrollment scheme. When admitted to the doctoral program, you begin the following fall Semester in the PhD Program instead of continuing your second year studies within the MSc Program.
• English proficiency. If your native language is not English, and your undergraduate or graduate degree or its equivalent is not from an institution at which English is the language of instruction, then we require a Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) or International English Language Testing System (IELTS) score.
• Relevant research interests. SSE only makes offers to students whose interests fall within the research areas in which our faculty have the capacity to supervise.  Please note that in some very popular areas of study there may be limited supervision capacity

We are looking for academic excellence and for students who are well prepared for a PhD program in business administration. Most of our students have a master’s degree in business administration or economics, or from related fields such as engineering, mathematics, psychology, and sociology (depending on the student’s PhD interests).