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Third-cycle (doctoral) programme in Business Administration

A Swedish Ph.D. is expected to take four years to achieve, or five years if the student chooses to take part in lecturing at 20% of her or his time. It is mandatory for each Ph.D. student to have one main supervisor (being at least an associate professor), one additional supervisor (having at least a Ph.D. degree) and one examiner (being at least an associate professor), although. Supervisors and examiner can be changed during the process if the Ph.D. student so wishes. In total, the Ph.D. program consists of 240 credits, in terms of two major parts, of which one consists of course work (90 credits) and the other of the thesis itself (150 credits).

All open PhD positions at the School of Business and Economics at Linnaeus University are announced here: https://lnu.se/en/meet-linnaeus-university/work-at-the-university/. We do not accept applications in other forms.

Mandatory courses

The course work consists of several mandatory courses (in total 45 credits) as well as courses, which are chosen by the Ph.D. student. The purpose of these mandatory courses is to give the Ph.D. student a good understanding of methodological issues as well as writing texts and defending or discussing them during seminars in combination with learning to take part in the scientific discourse. The mandatory courses are:

  • Science of philosophy for Ph.D. students (7,5 credits)
  • Methodology and method, at least 7,5 credits qualitative and at least 7,5 credits qualitative (30 credits)
  • Active seminar participation (7,5 credits)

Read more about the third-cycle courses at the School of Business and Economics.

Research seminars

Writing the thesis is done with the support of the supervisors. However, the examiner takes a more active part at the seminars. It is mandatory for the Ph.D. student to present her or his on-going research at five seminars. The research seminars are:

  • Research proposal seminar, containing a research proposal in order to determine the viability of the research interest and thesis purpose (after one-two semesters)
  • Middle seminar, containing half of a thesis and usually a tentative description of empirical data as well as possible venues for analysis (after four-five semesters)
  • Final seminar, containing an almost finished doctoral thesis (after six-seven semesters)
  • Dissertation defense, that is the official defense of the Ph.D. student's thesis (after eight semesters)

General syllabus