PhD in Business Administration
Forging New Knowledge
Become an internationally respected scholar by working alongside leading market, management, and economic scientists to develop your own unique research catalog. Our tailored PhD program helps you become part seer, seeing questions and opportunities others do not, and part detective, sleuthing-out how organizations and markets do, and might someday, work. Mixing such creative and critical thinking will empower you to forge new knowledge that informs business and society. And more broadly, your discoveries will help ignite imaginations; those ethereal visions that take us places we never thought possible, yet so often find critical:[1]
Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination
embraces the entire world . . . It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific
research.
Albert Einstein [1931, Cosmic Religion and Other Opinions and Aphorisms, p. 66, Dover edition]
[1]Pro-Tip: To help you hone the inductive and deductive thinking skills needed for your PhD program, try reading mysteries such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.
YOUR CAREER OPTIONS
We prepare you for various careers that lie at the crossroads of critical and creative thinking together with specific areas of expertise. The most prominent of these careers lie in academia, where you, as a professor, mix teaching and research. However, other career options exist as well, such as those of business consultant, government agency officer or researcher, and author, knowledge-economy careers that are sometimes combined. As examples, you might become a financial analyst at a large bank or the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), or you might become a consumer protection expert at a marketing firm or the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Several of our professors, for example, supplement their academic careers with business consultancies (e.g., Professor Stock in supply chain management), book authorships (e.g., Professor Mithas in digital business strategies), or expert witness work (e.g., Professor Heath’s investigations into potentially deceptive business communications).
Yeseul Kim, winner of the prestigious 2022 Association for Consumer Research-Sheth Foundation Dissertation Award. Her dissertation examined how feeling like a minority impacts consumer preferences for different types of digital interfaces. Professor Kim now serves on the faculty of the University of Sussex in Brighton, England.
An Apprenticeship Within an
Urban Research University
We immediately welcome you into our research community as a scholar-collaborator; essentially an apprentice. You work closely with our world-class faculty to tailor a program to your interests, and then dive into your research while building your knowledge bases and developing the rigorous thinking necessary to thrive within the academic community. And all of that is done within a supportive research culture that includes our student-centered faculty and our student-run PhD Student Organization, both of which produce a camaraderie that lasts well beyond graduation (e.g., the meet-up below of current and former students (plus Professors Biswas and Heath) at the 2023 Association for Consumer Research Conference in Seattle). Our supportive environment, moreover, includes the opportunities provided by our Urban Setting, whose countless real-world businesses, organizations, and professionals help enrich our research.
Your Immediate Opportunities
If these sorts of experiences and opportunities appeal to you, please visit (1) our short four-question PhD Student Welcome Quiz, which is partially for fun, partially for instruction, and completely anonymous, and (2) one or more of our core PhD areas:
Accounting
For more detail on our faculty beyond the references made to them at our Accounting page, please visit Lynn Pippenger School of Accountancy and the faculty pages included there, being sure to examine the curriculum vitas
of the research faculty, meaning the assistant professors, associate professors, and
professors who are regularly publishing in major journals.
Finance
For more detail on our faculty beyond the references made to them at our Finance page, please visit Kate Tiedemann School of Business and Finance and the faculty pages included there, being sure to examine the curriculum vitas
of the research faculty, meaning the assistant professors, associate professors, and
professors who are regularly publishing in major journals.
Information Systems
For more detail on our faculty beyond the references made to them at our Information Systems page, please visit School of Information Systems and Management and the faculty pages included there, being sure to examine the curriculum vitas
of the research faculty, meaning the assistant professors, associate professors, and
professors who are regularly publishing in major journals.
Marketing
Here you will find an overview of our marketing concentration plus a link to our featured
research faculty and their research. You can also visit the School of Marketing and Innovation with its links to the more general faculty pages.
Further Information
Finally, we are as eager to attract high-quality scholars as we are to conduct and publish our research! So if there is anything else we can do to help, PLEASE JUST ASK! We are happy to chat in person, meet online, email, phone, etc., and happy to put you in touch with our current or former doctoral students.
Many thanks for your time and consideration, and all the very best for writing an exciting new chapter in your life! The Muma College PhD Team