Teaching
My extensive teaching portfolio reflects over 15 years of experience at some of the most renowned research universities and business schools in Europe. My courses follow a problem-driven approach to translate cutting-edge research insights into accessible and engaging formats. I am passionate about bringing teaching innovations, such as experiential learning, arts- and film-based education, or gamification and simulations, to the classroom, both in large lectures and in bespoke executive programs. As a seasoned teacher, I thrive on engaging with executives, emerging scholars, and future leaders. I am happy to discuss teaching queries as well as requests for supervising external doctoral candidates.
Executive Education
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Turning good ideas into reality requires a deep understanding of how change actually unfolds, and how people and organizations behave within those processes. The real challenge is building effective collaboration between leaders and their teams, so that change makes sense and delivers value both to individuals and to the organization as a whole. Change management often fails because it fixates on the destination while ignoring where the organization currently stands and how it got there. This course puts sensemaking at the center of change, an approach in which continuity plays a pivotal role. Sensemaking emerges through the ongoing interaction between employees and leaders, and it is what ultimately allows change to be understood, embraced, and translated into action. Rather than offering a survey of every change management framework on the market, this course is grounded in a process-based view of how organizations and the people in them actually work. A core premise is that organizations move from past through present into future, and that the success of any change effort hinges on the extent to which the people involved experience it as meaningful.
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Rapid growth may be a disorienting experience for founders and executives of new ventures. What used to work at twenty employees breaks down at eighty; informal coordination gives way to ongoing conflicts; vision alone no longer compensates for organizational drift. This course offers executives the conceptual tools to make sense of where their organization currently stands and how to successfully navigate the growth journey. Drawing on classic work on organizational growth and lifecycle dynamics as well as recent research on scaling and the temporal dynamics of growth, we examine the predictable crises and tensions that accompany growth and the strategic choices that shape how and whether they are resolved.
Doctoral Education
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This PhD seminar explores the growing interest in time and temporality as analytical lenses across the humanities and social sciences. It introduces students to three key perspectives: time as resource, time as structure, and time as process—each rooted in disciplines such as economics, sociology, and (process) philosophy. The course examines their theoretical foundations, recent applications, and current research frontiers. Students will engage with concepts like pacing, timing, rhythm, and future-making to better understand how time shapes social and organizational life. The seminar aims to equip students with the tools to apply temporal perspectives in their own research.
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This PhD course provides an advanced introduction to qualitative research methods in management and organization studies. Students learn to design qualitative projects, formulate research questions, and apply methods such as case studies, grounded theory, and ethnography. Emphasis is placed on collecting and analyzing unstructured data using rigorous qualitative techniques, as well as evaluating research quality. The course is hands-on: students work in groups to design and carry out a small-scale research project. By engaging with exemplary studies, participants gain a deeper understanding of the diversity and potential of qualitative research in addressing complex organizational phenomena.
Graduate Education
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This M.A. course explores how innovation emerges, spreads, and gains traction in organizations and society. Adopting a process-oriented view, it explores the social, structural, and temporal dynamics of innovation using both classical and critical perspectives. The first part focuses on the emergence of novelty through creativity, bricolage, resourcefulness, and collaboration. The second part addresses how innovations gain traction, with attention to scaling, legitimation, narratives, and temporal complexity. Combining theory, case studies, and interactive formats, the course enables students to critically analyze innovation processes and reflect on how they can be actively shaped.
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This M.A. seminar critically examines the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in management and organizations, focusing on its often-overlooked risks such as algorithmic bias, discrimination, and accountability displacement. After an introductory session, seven thematic sessions explore issues like integrity, opacity, fairness, disruption, and democracy. The course encourages critical-reflexive engagement, including the use of generative AI in assignments, and fosters the skills students need to responsibly navigate and shape AI-driven organizational futures.
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In an era of overlapping crises—climate change, pandemics, inequality, disinformation, and geopolitical instability—organizations must navigate unprecedented levels of complexity. This M.A. course invites students to rethink organizing in such contexts using four analytical lenses: structural (roles and routines), informational (sense-making and communication), cultural (shared meanings and values), and political (power and legitimacy). Through this multi-lens approach, students explore challenges like digital transformation and sustainability transitions, learning to develop systemic strategies that anticipate unintended consequences, identify leverage points, and build resilience. The course fosters critical thinking and equips students to respond reflexively to complex, interconnected crises shaping today’s organizational landscapes.
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The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has created a deep crisis raising urgent questions for management scholars and practitioners. How do firms and leaders respond to war? How are stakeholder relationships reconfigured? How do global supply chains, digital platforms, or hacker collectives interact with armed conflict? How can organizations build resilience, and what are corporate responsibilities during war?
This course comprises 12 classes examining war and disruption across different management functions. It is a collaborative effort by organizational scholars from Austrian, Dutch, German, and Swiss universities. Each class includes a recorded lecture, core readings, and press coverage. All materials are openly accessible.
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Over the past two decades, the range of possible forms of organizing has expanded dramatically—consider open source communities, hacker collectives, terrorist networks, and crowd-based organizing. Many scholars argue that traditional vocabularies of organization studies can't keep pace, with some declaring the field in crisis. This seminar critically examines that diagnosis and explores how new forms of organizing invite us to rethink organization itself. We begin with classical theories of organization as a distinct mode of coordination, then dive into cutting-edge research that challenges established thinking. A special focus is how globally available digital technologies reshape the way we manage and organize. Students gain a deeper grasp of what constitutes an organization, fresh ideas for entrepreneurial ventures, and a critical-reflective mindset for diverse career paths.
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This advanced seminar introduces students to managerial and organizational perspectives on sustainability. Climate change is a key strategic concern, yet established firms often translate it into "business as usual," struggling to integrate sustainability with market strategies and to navigate the resulting tensions. Meanwhile, new hybrid forms of organizing seek to bridge market and sustainability logics from the outset, raising broader questions about how to organize sustainable transformation at a societal level. Drawing on cutting-edge research, the seminar critically examines dominant practices that obstruct sustainability—economic short-termism, strategic myopia, and corporate irresponsibility—while exploring how new ways of organizing can drive positive impact. Students learn to see organizations as embedded in larger social and ecological systems, engaging as active inquirers rather than passive learners.
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In the digital age, organization and technology have become inseparable—organizing without technology seems impossible. Emerging technologies like AI, robots, and deep learning are often framed as paradigm-shifting, comparable to the steam engine or electricity. Pessimists warn of job loss, surveillance, and technological domination; optimists see vehicles of liberation, prosperity, and mastery over nature. Questions about whether technology determines organizational behavior, and how organizations shape technology, are therefore more pressing than ever. This advanced seminar introduces students to research on organization and technology, covering foundational perspectives, current debates, and emerging ideas. Rather than focusing narrowly on economic performance, it invites students to critically reflect on the organizational, ecological, and socio-political implications of new and emerging technologies.
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Two of the most important assets of any organization are its people and its strategy. The aim of Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM) is to create a fit between these two with the aim of increasing organizational efficiency and performance. Whereas some consider SHRM as an important source of competitive advantage, others take a more critical view, emphasizing how its underlying processes and practices may be used to control individuals. Even others challenge the fundamental idea of SHRM altogether. The course introduces students to the concepts and theories of Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM), connecting these to relevant practical examples, from both organizational and individual perspectives. It situates SHRM in wider strategic debates and management trends and discusses critical approaches to SHRM by addressing thematic issues such as identity control and HR rhetoric.
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Organizations are not only tools for achieving business goals but also social systems that crucially depend on the work conducted by and among (groups of) people who have different identities, interests, and goals. Understanding and managing the behavior of people and groups in organizational settings—as well as that of organizations as social systems in their own right—is thus central to organizational functioning and effectiveness. This module offers an advanced-level introduction to the management of organizations and the (groups of) people who work within and for them. The course will familiarize students with key theories and practices on the individual, group, and organizational levels. At the same time, it seeks to raise students’ awareness for the context within which organizing and managing unfold in the 21st century, not least in relation to some of the grand challenges of our time: climate change, globalization, inequality, and financial in-/stability. Overall, the course aims at enabling students to become more knowledgeable about the way in which organizational systems work (and why they may not work), more conscious of the consequences of the decisions one makes as a manager, and more confident that they possess the skills required to succeed in a corporate setting.
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Like virtually every other domain of modern society, today's economy is dominated by formal organizations. The lion's share of global value creation takes place within organized social systems—or, more precisely, within business enterprises. A solid grasp of how organizations in general, and firms in particular, function and evolve is therefore part of the core curriculum in any contemporary business education. More than that: it is a fundamental prerequisite for effective leadership in practice. Leaders today face a question more pressing than ever: How can organizations—and the people within them—be led in ways that are not just efficient, but sustainably effective in an uncertain and complex environment? This course takes up that question, along with a number of related ones, through a critical engagement with the theories, models, and concepts that define modern management and organization studies.
Undergraduate Education
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This course introduces undergraduate students to the conceptual architecture of the modern firm. It treats business administration not as a toolbox of techniques but as a practical science—a disciplined inquiry into how organizations decide, coordinate, and create value. Students examine the firm as an economic unit within a broader economic order, interrogate competing models of corporate governance and codetermination, and confront the ethical obligations enterprises owe their stakeholders. Furthermore, the value-creation process itself comes into focus to survey decision theory, collective choice, and the logic of operational and strategic control. Weekly tutorials complement the lectures, pressing students to defend positions, engage primary literature, and develop the critical vocabulary of serious management scholarship.
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Organizations shape our lives: we are born in hospitals, learn in schools, work in firms or NGOs, and spend our leisure time in clubs and theatres. Large organizations like multinational corporations are increasingly seen as powerful actors responsible for societal challenges such as climate change and inequality—yet organizing is also our primary tool for addressing them. Because organizing is a core managerial task, students of business and entrepreneurship must understand organizations as social systems in their own right. This lecture introduces classic and contemporary organization theories through a multi-paradigmatic, problem-driven approach, focusing on five generic problems: structural design, individual-organization integration, organization-environment relations, emergent processes (power, politics, culture), and organizational change. A complementary seminar allows students to explore a chosen sub-area in greater depth.
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This course introduces students to the field of strategic management and its interplay with organizational dynamics. Beyond examining the origins and underlying logic of the management process, the course centers on the two functions of strategy and organization—and, crucially, on how they interact. Particular attention is given to the strategic management process and to the ways in which organizational design shapes both how strategy is formulated and how it is executed. The module takes a deeper look at the relationship between strategy and organizational structure, at how to navigate the political dynamics inside organizations, and at how to build effective inter-organizational relationships. Strategic change receives additional attention. Participants develop an understanding of the fundamental logic of running a company, along with a detailed working knowledge of strategy and organization—covering the strategy process itself as well as the formal and informal dimensions of organizing. Selected case studies give participants the opportunity to apply these concepts and reflect on them in practice.
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Shared cultural ideas, meanings, and beliefs shape how people in an organization think, feel, and act. Organizations are also arenas where people negotiate various work and non-work identities—and they rarely observe such processes passively, often actively managing socialization and identification. This seminar introduces organizational culture and identity, covering theoretical foundations and practical applications such as leading employees, managing innovation, and designing sustainable organizations. After an overview of the main approaches, it examines thematic issues including socialization, identification, critical approaches to culture and control, the relationship between work and non-work identities, and occupational identities.