PhD Block seminars

Topic:  “Accounting for private entities and non-investor stakeholders” (18h/3 ECTS credits)   

Dates: June 10 - 14, 2024

Instructor: Professor Anna Costello, University of Chicago, USA

Dr Anna Costello is Professor of Accounting. Before joining Booth, she previously served as an Assistant Professor of Accounting at University of Michigan Ross School of Business and MIT Sloan School of Management. She received her Bachelors and Masters of Business Administration from the University of Notre Dame and a PhD in Business Administration from the University of Chicago. Prior to earning her graduate degrees, Anna worked as a senior auditor for Deloitte. 
Costello's research investigates the role of information sharing between supply chain partners. Specifically, her work shows that information asymmetry between buyers and suppliers impacts the terms and restrictions in long-term supply contracts. She also studies how trade credit between supply chain partners influences firm-specific and market-wide risk. Her research has been published in the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Accounting Research, the Journal of Accounting and Economics, and The Accounting Review. 

Read more about Anna Costello. 

Course description

The goal of this course is to provide an overview of accounting research in the area of unregulated entities and transactions. Specifically, I will cover accounting choices and consequences by privately held firms. The second part of the week will cover the usefulness of accounting information for stakeholders of the firm that are not equity investors or lenders (non-investor stakeholders), with a focus on suppliers and customers as well as employees. The focus of the course will be to expose students to the existing literature in each of these areas, but we will also discuss the challenges of exploring unregulated transactions and entities, notably accessing data and settings. The course will also contrast the findings in the private-firm space to much larger body of work that uses public firms and investor transactions as a setting. Lastly, we will also discuss the appropriateness of different research designs and statistical methods in this space.

Outcome

To come

Schedule 

To come

How to Apply: 

If you are interested by joining us please submit your:

• CV (résumé)
• Personal statement (max one page) which includes your current research interests (thesis topic) and contact details of your thesis supervisor.

to Hailee Tindale, doctorat@hec.fr

Topic: “ Institutional Theory and Analysis ” (18h/3 ECTS credits) 

Dates:  May 13 - 17,224

Instructor: Patricia Thornton, Professor of Sociology and Entrepreneurship, Mays School of Business, Texas A&M University (USA) and Professor at HEC Paris.
Patricia H. Thornton is The Grand Challenge Professor of Sociology and Entrepreneurship, Department of Sociology and Adjunct Professor of Management, Mays School of Business, Texas A&M University. She is affiliated faculty to the Program on Organizations, Business, and the Economy in the Department of Sociology at Stanford University.

Her research and teaching interests focus on the areas of institutional and organization and management theory, innovation and entrepreneurship, and the social and cultural factors associated with entrepreneurship. She along with cameo practitioners in the Raleigh-Durham area have developed the Action Learning Approach for teaching entrepreneurship using live business plans, entrepreneurs, and investors.Read more here.

Synopsis:
Identifying a theoretical contribution is a necessary skill for scholars to motivate their research and convince editors and reviewers of its merit.  This class teaches how to analyze a theoretical contribution and how to identify opportunities in a literature to develop a theoretical contribution. This type of analytical thinking will be taught in the context of learning institutional theory with a focus on the institutional logics perspective. Students will complete the course with a 1) knowledge of institutional theory as applied to management and strategy, 2) how to analytically identify a theoretical contribution, 3) practice in teaching and class participation facilitation, 4) with a research design for a new study or advance of a current study using institutional theory and analysis.


Course overview (subject to change): 

The course begins with reading classic research to understand the background for the development of different variants of sociological institutional theory and methods of analysis. The focus is on the institutional logics perspective as the most recent perspective to study the effects of the institutional environment on phenomena. 
The institutional logics perspective is a metatheory, meaning the influence of institutional logics mediate other concepts and theories in sociology, management, strategy, public policy, entrepreneurship, and other domains. We examine how and why existing theories are conditioned by differences in institutional logics which affect strategic reasoning and decision making. 
Registered students are required to take the role of lead facilitator of discussion for one two-hour session. Registered students are also required to write and post for all students 5 memos that review one or more of the readings for a session and to submit a 10-15-page research paper. This research paper can be an existing paper you have been working on that can be advanced with the application of institutional theory, or it can be a research design to conduct a new study that uses institutional theory. 
 

Key topics:

This seminar has 3 goals:

1. To guide students’ familiarity with central research on institutional theory, in particular the institutional logics perspective,
2. To teach the social science of how theory grows to understand how to analytically, (not descriptively) evaluate a theoretical contribution
3. To identify an opportunity to participate in a research project.

Learning outcomes:

• Master basic concepts and assumptions of different variants of institutional theory. 
• Identify how different theoretical variants of institutional theory have developed and grown
• Identify unsolved theoretical and empirical problems for future research 

Schedule (tentative):

Monday 13 until Thursday 16: 10h00 - 12h00; 14h00 - 16h00

Friday 17: 10h00 - 12h00

How to Apply:  

If you are interested by joining us please submit your:

• CV (résumé)
• Personal statement (max one page) which includes your current research interests (thesis topic) and contact details of your thesis supervisor.

to Hailee Tindale, doctorat@hec.fr

Application deadline: Two weeks prior to the start of the course. 

Topic: “Corporate Purpose: Defining and researching it”   (18h/3 ECTS credits) 

Dates:  April 8 - 11, 2024

Instructor: Rodolphe Durand, HEC Paris, Joly Family Professor in Purposeful Leadership, Strategy and Business Policy Department, Society and Organizations Institute

Rodolphe (rudy) Durand is the Joly Family Professor of Purposeful Leadership at HEC-Paris and the founder and academic director of the Society and Organizations Institute (S&O) which he launched in 2009. Over the past decade, he was Visiting Professor at UCLA (Anderson), Oxford University (Said Business School), New York University (Stern Business School), London Business School, and Cambridge University (Judge Business School), and Visiting Scholar at Harvard Business School. 
As a scholar, Rodolphe’s primary research interests concern the normative and cognitive dimensions of firms' performance, and especially the consequences for firms of identifying and coping with the current major environmental and social challenges. Why do organizations supersede rivals? Can Corporate Social Responsibility bring an advantage to firms and diffuse in markets?  How and why does a firm’s purpose provide economic advantages? For his work on these questions that integrate multiple research streams, Rodolphe received the American Sociological Association’s R. Scott Award in 2005, the European Academy of Management/Imagination Lab Award for Innovative Scholarship in 2010, was inducted Fellow of the Strategic Management Society in 2014, and granted a Doctor Honoris Causa from UC Louvain in 2019. As a board member, purpose committee member, and advisor, Rodolphe works with multiple organizations on developing, implementing, and assessing impact strategies that value a firm’s purpose and intangible assets. Read more  about Professor Durand here.

Course description (subject to change slightly):

The aim of this seminar is to reflect on the recent expansion of research around corporate purpose.  This collection of articles points to corporate purpose as a legal, social, cognitive, and strategic construction. Depending on the core definition of corporate purpose, different research questions can be asked and solved –or not. It is the aim of this seminar to acquaint participants with some of the issues around corporate purpose definition and development using several lenses to examine the advantages (and potential disadvantages) accruing to firms who state and implement a corporate purpose.

The past decade has seen a surge in the questioning of the roles of both the firm and its shareholders. The Economist in August 2019 wondered what the role of firms was. Recently, corporate purpose has attracted an influx of attention, especially with large businesses vowing publicly to become more purposeful (thereby responding to the demands of their stakeholders, not only those of their shareholders: Business Roundtable 2019), practitioner-oriented publications touting the merits of corporate purpose, and forerunning academic articles paving the way for a reasoned inquiry about the influence of purpose on firm performance. This course takes the position that there are many very interesting and important issues that can be addressed provided that the definition of corporate purpose is clear and the underlying assumptions buttressing theories explicit.

The course involves morning and afternoon discussion sessions distributed over four days.  Each of the four class days will consist of a morning session in which a collection of articles will be openly discussed among everyone in the course. The purpose of these morning sessions is to introduce conceptual material to fuel analysis and new conceptual development.  We will then break for lunch and return for an afternoon session that will involve individual work, small group discussion and group presentations about the key research issues that are suggested by the reading material assigned that day.  Thursday’s session will differ slightly in that each student will present an idea for an original research project that is suggested by the week's reading and discussions.  

The course syllabus and reading material will be made available a few weeks before the start of the course. It is recommended that students begin to read the articles ahead of time and to begin preparation for the article reviews. 

Please contact us for the complete course description here. 

Programme schedule (subject to change slightly): 

Monday April 8: Morning session: 09h30 - 12h00 - Afternoon session: 14h00 - 17h00

Tuesday April 9: Morning session: 09h30 - 12h00 

Wednesday April 10: Morning session: 09h30 - 12h00 - Afternoon session: 14h00 - 17h00

Thursday April 11: Morning session: 09h30 - 12h00 - Afternoon session: 14h00 - 17h00

How to Apply:  

If you are interested by joining us please submit your:

• CV (résumé)
• Personal statement (max one page) which includes your current research interests (thesis topic) and contact details of your thesis supervisor.

to Hailee Tindale, doctorat@hec.fr

Application deadline: Two weeks prior to the start of the course.