The course aims to provide you with an overview of what research and science are, what it means to become an academic scholar and a practical approach on how to do scientific work. It begins with a series of sessions on the classical philosophy of science where we discuss some fundamental questions about research, including what science is good for and what can it achieve; why we need theory and how to build it; how theory can be grounded in empirical observations; why scientific communities are important and how to deal with them. This should help you to get a better understanding of what science and research are all about. This is followed by workshops on the practical consequences. The students work through the practical stages of their own research such as setting out the theoretical background to the Ph.D., choice of a research question, and method.

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Furthermore, the course provides additional room for a focused discussion with regard to the concept and importance of theory in business research. Thus, the course offers PhD students hands-on tools to build theory and insights into the instruments and concepts of validating theory. As such, we offer students guidance to link research questions to theory, for defining constructs, thinking through relationships and processes that link constructs, and deriving new theoretical models (or building on existing ones) based on those relationships. We seek to illustrate how to use analyses as well as grounded and emergent approaches to theory construction. Students are enabled to develop ideas from across theoretical and analytical levels as well as from neighboring research fields. An explicit aim of the course is to provide students with a deeper appreciation of theory-building in order to support them in crafting effective research papers and grant applications.