Bachelor Thesis, Master Thesis or Project Study
📌 Key facts
Contents
- 💡 Background
- 🦾Who We Are
- 🎯 Goals
- 🧠 Topics of Interest
- 🎓 Profile
- 📚 Further Reading
- 📄 Requirements to any Work
- 📬 How to Apply
💡 Background
“Some of the most important innovations will be how we organize work and working together” - Tom Malone
The world of work is changing. Remote work, flexible work hours, dynamic job requirements, fluid jobs, artificial intelligence, automation, and robotics will make this shift significant. While some jobs will be lost, and many others created, almost all will change. Both organizations and individuals need to manage this shift. As there is a great level of uncertainty and the COVID-19 pandemic has shown how quick things can change we want to find out how companies prepare, what approaches there are to cope with changes, and what they have to expect.
You should aim to answer one of the following questions: How will the work of world change in the next decade(s)? Which new work and collaboration concepts will we see on the rise? What will work look like in a Post-Corona world? What is the role of offices? What will they look like? What will be work organization? What will be the role of homeoffice and remote and virtual work? What is the relationship between productivity and working remote (what are moderators and mediators for this relationship)? How to best transition from on-site work to remote work? What will work relations look like in new work? How to on-board someone new to the team in a remote work team? Are there any manuals/books/videos that companies have produced to prepare their virtual leaders?
🦾Who We Are
The Chair for Strategy and Organization is focussed on doing research with impact. This means we do not want to repeat old ideas and base our research solely on the research people did 10 years ago. Instead, we currently research topics that will shape the future. Topics such as Agile Organizations and Digital Disruption, Blockchain Technology, Creativity and Innovation, Digital Transformation and Business Model Innovation, Diversity, Education: Education Technology and Performance Management, HRTech, Leadership and Teams. We are always early in noticing trends, technologies, strategies and organizations that shape the future, which has its ups and downs.
🎯 Goals
- Creation of conceptual frameworks
- Desk research on companies on how they transition from onsite work to remote work
- Desk research on companies on how they organize new work
- Collect pictures of what new work spaces look like
- Case Studies or empirical study on new work
🧠 Topics of Interest
- New work theories
- New work concepts
- Success factors for new and remote work
- Company material on new and virtual work
- etc.
🎓 Profile
- Reliable and self-driven
- Enthusiasm for work organization / new work / remote work / organizational structure
- Ability to do sophisticated internet, desk research, and connect with practitioners
- Passion to learn more about the future and do research with impact
📚 Further Reading
Malone, T. W. (2004). The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life. Harvard Business Review Press.
Malone, T. W. (2015). Handbook of Collective Intelligence Hardcover. The MIT Press.
Morgan, J. (2014). The Future of Work: Attract New Talent, Build Better Leaders, and Create a Competitive Organization. Wiley.
📄 Requirements to any Work
We do not want your research to gather dust in some corner of bookshelf but make it accessible to the world. Thus, we warmly encourage you to create some or all of the following:
- Infograph - visually represent some of your work (find examples here)
- Slide Deck - summarize your research and possibly present it
- Extract most important sequences from podcasts, videos, and other media
- 3-4 Tweets about the most important findings and summarizing the topic
- optional: Medium Article - let people outside university know about your research and start your personal brand
📬 How to Apply
If you are interested, please contact Prof. Dr. Isabell Welpe (e-mail below) by submitting your CV and grade report. Please also briefly outline your tentative research idea (research question, data and methods, possible outcomes with a tentative outline all in word as *.docx)
We're greatly looking forward to hearing more about you!