PhD Courses in Denmark

Course Coordinator: Associate Professor Florence Villeséche, Department of Business Humanities and Law

Faculty

Associate Professor Michael Pedersen
Department of Business Humanities and Law

Associate Professor Florence Villeséche 
Department of Business Humanities and Law

Assistant Professor Nicole Ferry
Department of Management, Society and Communication

Associate Professor Eric Guthey
Department of Management, Society and Communication

Associate Professor Sverre Spoelstra
Lunds University

Prerequisites

The participants are expected to submit a 5-page description of their full PhD project one week before the course. The student papers will be discussed in small groups in a feedback session during the course. The students are therefore required to read each other’s papers before the course starts.

Content and objectives of the PhD course:

This course offers an overview of current debates and themes in the field of leadership studies, including a broad range of perspectives, ranging from transformational, shared, and distributed leadership, leadership and ethics, discursive leadership studies, critical perspectives, and leadership development, among others. In particular, the course aims to focus on existing and potential interfaces, connections, and frictions between leadership studies and other fields within organization studies.

The course will be divided into 2 themes a day, that is, 8 themes in total plus feedback sessions discussing the students’ projects and a final session on the future of leadership studies:

• Theme 1: Overview and history of leadership studies

• Theme 2: Shared, distributed, complexity & relational leadership

• Theme 3: Leadership and being 

• Theme 4: Leadership and digitization

• Theme 5: Leadership and well-being

• Theme 6: Diversity, inclusion and leadership

• Theme 7: Power, responsibility and leadership 

• Theme 8: Leadership development

Teaching style

The course is organized as a 5-day on-site learning experience. The pedagogy includes teacher and student presentations, break-out sessions, “PhD troubleshooting” sessions (a half-day session focused on the specific problems or challenges that the participants encounter in their PhD work in relation to the topic of leadership) and intensive reading and discussion of texts. The pedagogical approach reflects that a productive learning experience is co-created; hence, students will be invited to mobilize their knowledge (their PhD research) in relation to not just the texts but also in relation to their colleagues’ work. This interactive learning experience is complemented by concise input and guidance of debates by faculty.

Learning objectives

After the course, the student is expected to be able to

• Engage with the field of leadership studies, acknowledging the variety of methodological and theoretical approaches, and formulate a valid research contribution to it.

• Critically discuss current issues in the field of leadership studies, particularly concerning the intersection between leadership and organization studies.

• Advance their PhD significantly within a deeper sense of the overall leadership research terrain

Workload:

Preliminary Schedule

Preliminary literature for the themes:

To be updated.