General Description

DOME trains scholars from the field of business administration and related social sciences to conduct research on management and human and social behaviour within complex and knowledge-intensive, innovative organizations from the private and public sectors.

Offered jointly by leading Danish universities with PhD education in organization and management theory, the programme combines theory and methods from the fields of organization and management, sociology, psychology, innovation theory, and entrepreneurship. Students will focus their research on either the micro (i.e. psychological, interpersonal) or macro (i.e. sociological, organizational) level.

First and foremost, the programme prepares students for careers as researchers and teachers at universities and research institutions, as well as in the global consulting industry, and as analysts in large and complex organizations.  

Knowledge in organizations

While there has been much debate about the organizational challenges and problems of the 'knowledge society', less attention has been given to understanding the more fundamental human and social processes resulting from this development. This programme has a strong focus on how knowledge is created, exchanged, distributed, measured and managed in organizations. A typical approach to knowledge has been to model the various kinds of organizational knowledge as sets of discrete entities, generally called 'stocks' or 'assets'. Contrary to this rather static and property-based conceptualization, an alternative has been proposed which suggests that the knowledge produced by organizations is dispersed and processual. Both traditions will be covered by the programme. The concept of knowledge, however, is essential to organizational renewal, and remains intimately related to management. While management knowledge tends to be somewhat preoccupied with normative aspects of cognition and knowledge application, knowledge management is seen as a subset of the broader category of organizational learning. The rationale for focusing on organizational learning is that cognition and behaviour are inextricably linked and cannot be addressed separately, since cognition affects action and vice versa.

Innovation in organizations

Over the last three decades, innovation theory has given us important insights into innovations across a variety of industrial sectors, and demonstrated interesting correlations between both internal and external factors. These insights are based on a rather mature theory that has proven well suited to determining the motives and behaviours of innovators subscribing to the principle of closed-source innovation. However, it is seriously flawed when applied to situations where the innovator does not automatically choose to protect the knowledge behind the innovation, e.g. in the case of open innovation or when the innovators are part of informal collectives such as organizational communities. This programme deals with the latter situtations. Theory on innovation and entrepreneurial activities has developed models and frameworks to account for the rise and fall of new firms and of the socio-psychological profiles of entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, innovation and entrepreneurship theory generally takes a 'one-size-fits-all' approach to the birth of new organizations, assuming that all new ventures are alike. Similarly, there has been an overemphasis on creating new organizations from scratch rather than revitalizing existing ones and/or creating new ones from existing organizations. Most theory has also focused on manufacturing, while the service sector has been ignored. The programme will cover the organization of innovation in the service sector.

Design of organizations

This research includes general organization theory, with a focus on organizational change and renewal processes and different designs, using descriptive, normative and simulation approaches, as well as applied laboratory or experimental approaches. It also includes a growing interest in addressing an apparent paradoxical co-existence between rapid and/or radical processes of organizational change on the one hand and stability-seeking and institutionalized forces on the other. This paradox is addressed in its historical context. Designing, or oven defining, organizations is becoming increasingly difficult as the boundaries of the organizations, i.e. the line between what is inside the organization and what is outside, are becoming more and more blurred. In the service industry, the division between internal and customer-related functions is an important challenge, and is important not only for understanding choice of design but also for understanding innovation and collaboration. Thus, there is also a strong focus on intra- and interorganizational collaboration, ranging from formal and contractual arrangements to loosely coupled and trust-based networks.