What follows doctoral courses?

A number of universities in the Nordic countries have a history of joint effort in educating doctoral students.

Britta Gammelgaard explains the background of this in this article: The joint-Nordic PhD program in logistics (International Journalf of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management, 2001). The first course arranged was Logistics from a philosophy of science perspective in Tisvildeleje, Denmark, in January 1998. Two years later, Copenhagen Business School hosted the course Methods in logistics research. These courses did not only influence the work of the particpants on their dissertations but did also motivate further work within this area.

Stefan Holmberg wrote a paper on A Systems Perspective in Supply Chain Measurements, Dag Näslund worked on Logistics needs qualitative research – especially action research, and Karen Spens has together with Gyöngyi Kovács written several papers on topics that I am sure are influenced by various courses on these topics:
A content analysis of research approaches in logistics research and Abductive reasoning in logistics research . Jan Arlbjørn and Arni Halldorsson were inspired to write
Logistics knowledge creation: reflections on content, context and processes, and Arni Halldorsson and Jesper Aastrup have provided some thoughts on Quality criteria for qualitative inquiries in logistics.

Jan Arlbjørn co-authored (with Ebbi Gubi and John Johansen) Doctoral dissertations in logistics and supply chain management: A review of Scandinavian contributions from 1990 to 2001. Finally, Herbert Kotzab recently co-edited (with Stefan Seuring and Martin Müller) this reader on Research Methodologies in Supply Chain Management.

I must be forgetting some contributions and would be happy to add them to this list.

We are certainly influenced by a number factors that help us to push the envelope. Among these are doctoral courses that (ideally) provide the experimental setting necessary to articulate, discuss and synthesize some of the research problems we face during our research activities.

Árni