Concentrations

The field of Management and Organization is typically considered as comprising a division between a more macro orientation geared towards studying organizations and their higher level aggregates as well as the more micro-level concerns focusing on individual and group behavior within organizations. The Management and Organization specialization within the Ph.D. program at Sabanci University can accommodate students who wish to pursue any one of these lines of research as well as those who may wish to seek ways to integrate the two.

The curriculum of the Management and Organization program firstly provides a strong background in conducting scholarly research. Building on this, students then take courses that specifically focus on organization theory, strategic management, organizational behavior and cross-cultural psychology. Students are then provided with the opportunity, through elective courses, to pursue their specific interests and develop a research agenda to be examined during dissertation work.

Business Analytics and Operations Management is a field that has emerged from the need of explicitly addressing the decision-making issues that managers confront regarding the operations function of their organizations. With its continuously evolving nature, and especially with the increasing presence of Big Data in our lives and the endless possibilities to make humanitarian and commercial use of it through data-driven business decision-making, it has expanded from its foundations to include a wide array of subjects such as operations and manufacturing strategy, service operations, pricing, as well as supply chain design and management.

The Ph.D. program curriculum has been designed so that the students are exposed not only to traditional research foundations rooted in quantitative methods and statistics, but also to research methodologies from other management disciplines such as organization studies. Given this perspective, students are then provided with the opportunity to focus on their specific interests and develop a research agenda to be examined during their dissertation work. The flexibility of choosing a curriculum with cross-discipline courses not only increases the variety of academic exposure in this field, but also prepares our students in the most extensive and effective ways for their future careers.

The Ph.D. specialization in Finance emphasizes rigorous analytical training and prepares students to pursue careers either in the academia or in the financial industry. Theoretical research in finance generally starts with economic models. Researchers aim to understand the mechanisms of the financial markets through these models. Understanding the causal relationships between different factors that shape the player’s decisions in financial markets provides a powerful tool for investors, firm managers, regulators and the other decision makers. The initial set of courses in finance, mainly taken from the economics program, emphasize the role of theoretical models to build such a framework. 

The finance specialization curriculum also stresses the importance of empirical methods that are used to test the predictions of the theoretical models. The empirical models discussed in the program are often used in investment, asset pricing, corporate finance, corporate governance and banking fields.