Ph.D. Fellowship in Business History
The research project on „The History of Strategic Games in Management Training“ offers a position for a young scholar in Business History on a two-year contract at the University of Bielefeld, beginning October 1st 2013.
Strategic computer games have been used for management training in large companies since the 1960s. In our opinion, the behaviour of management personal as well as corporate decision-making became deeply changed by that practice. Decision-making turned into being a more routinized rather than an intuitive behaviour and management was partly referred to an artificial environment, where it could learn about its behaviour without any “real” consequences. The project aims at studying the historical effects of strategic games on the processes of corporate decision-making. Therefore historical computer games will be reconstructed and tested by a group of media scientists in collaboration with the business historian’s project.
The project offers a lively research environment within the Economic History unit of the History Department at the University of Bielefeld as well as the integration in the Graduate School of History and Sociology (BGHS), with its mixture of international Ph.D. students. Furthermore we offer integration into our Ph.D. programmes. The project context will include an intensive research exchange with our project partners in the Media Science department of the Arts College in Braunschweig (Prof. Dr. Rolf Nohr). The position is paid on the base of a 65% TVL contract, ca. 35.000–40.000 Euro a year. Archival trips and trips to conferences are expected and will be funded by the project.
We are looking for trained historians, economic historians or sociologists with an interest in and experience of the examination of big businesses’ transformation over the last 50 years. Basic knowledge of archival research in corporate archives would be helpful. Since we are interested in international comparative research you should be able to read and work with source material written in German, English and preferably a third European language. We expect the ability for independent academic work and active participation in the debates and the discussions of our local workgroup.
Please send your application with CV, academic publications (if applicable and as far as connected to our research aim), a letter of reference of your MA supervisor and a two-page proposal that describes your preferred object of examination (i.e. the concrete enterprises, countries, consultancies, business schools, etc. that you aim at researching) in form of a single pdf-file until July 20th to:
jan-otmar.hesse@uni-bielefeld.de
Job interviews are scheduled for August and can be arranged for Bielefeld or the Uppsala meeting of the EBHA.