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Bachelor Theses

Dear students,

We offer two start dates for writing a Bachelor thesis at our Chair. The next application window takes place from March 16-31, 2026.

The application process for writing a Bachelor thesis at our Chair encompasses the following steps:

  • Register for our Bachelor Colloquium (Stud.IP course number 38556).
  • Attend the mandatory kick-off session on March 13, 2026, at 10:15 a.m. in our Strategy Lounge (HK 14b 202) or via Zoom. During this session, we will explain the application process, the topic assignment procedure, and provide an introduction to scientific writing.
  • Apply for topics by filling out the application form on our website (online from March 13-27, 2026).
  • Upload your motivation letter, CV, and current grade overview in one PDF file.

For more information about the theses, please consult the Guideline for Writing a BA Thesis.

Please use the following guidelines for your bibliography:

  • Application form (online from March 16 - 31, 2026)
  • Letter of Motivation
  • Short CV including High School Diploma
  • Current Transcript of Records of your bachelor's program

(as one pdf)

Please check the website of the examination office for all information on registration.

For confirmation of the completed application for admission, please contact the administration office of the chair.

Topics for Bachelor Theses

We are currently supervising Bachelor theses in the following research projects. 

Strategic leadership dispositions and migration policy

This thesis investigates how communal political leaders’ characteristics affect the symbolic representation of “migration,” “immigration,” and “the Foreigner” displayed by immigration offices, and their symbolic communication over the past 25 years.

Methodology:

  • Developing a research methodology for a panel of migration offices in Europe
    • Set up of a database on all migration offices in Germany (and other European countries) and characteristics of municipal political leaders
    • Web scraping of the textual and visual representations on migration offices' websites

Platform Capture Media: How Platform Dependence Reshapes Journalistic Watchdogging and Legitimacy

This thesis

  • examines “infrastructure capture”: growing dependence of newsrooms on platform-provided distribution, data, and AI tools—and how this affects watchdog neutrality and legitimacy dynamics.
  • builds a longitudinal, cross-country corpus of journalism on major platform firms (e.g., Google/Meta/Amazon/Microsoft/Apple; optionally OpenAI) to analyze volume, sentiment, framing, emotionality, polarization, and actor voice.
  • tests whether critical events/crises shift coverage—and whether those shifts are moderated by media–platform ties (“capture”), editorial orientation, and regulatory context.
  • adds an input–output design linking platform strategic communications (press releases, earnings calls, shareholder letters, CEO statements) to journalistic “output.”

Rightwing CEO Sociopolitical Activism - A Literature Review and Cases Studies

The Emotional Cost of Fieldwork: Exploring Researcher’s Experiences in Emotionally Challenging Contexts

  • Conducting organizational research in extreme contexts—such as war zones, disaster areas, high-stress healthcare environments, or ethically volatile workplaces—can have profound psychological and emotional effects on researchers. Despite growing interest in extreme contexts, little attention has been paid to the emotional labor, trauma exposure, and psychohygienic strategies (i.e., mental health self-care and support mechanisms) of the researchers themselves.
  • This thesis explores research and its approaches in extreme contexts in a literature review.

Broader research topics

  • The connection between strategy and resilience
  • Organizational misconduct and wrongdoing

For more details and concrete topics, please contact Dr. Hendrike Werwigk directly

Executive celebrity in media coverage

Situation:

  • Media coverage plays a crucial role in shaping public perception of organizations (Graf-Vlachy et al., 2020; König et al., 2018)
  • Today, the media cast Celebrity executives as protagonists in dramas, representing larger-than-life figures with immense vision or valor (Lovelace et al, 2022; Pollock et al., 2023)
  • We focus on Bundesliga clubs as “ideal natural laboratory” for studying organizational behavior (Kilduff et al., 2016) and on head coaches as a distinct form of celebrity executives: They receive intense media attention and serve as organization figureheads of the club identify (Gintzberg, 1979)
  • Pot. Research Question: How does the celebrity of Bundesliga head coaches evolve over time?

Goal of the thesis:

  • To systematically collect and compare the sentiment and thematic framing of media reports on the top 5 Bundesliga head coaches
  • To ensure manual classification and validation of media snippets by head coach and sentiment
  • To manually code a stratified sub-sample of articles for celebrity attribution dimensions (e.g., charisma, leadership style, symbolic status) following established coding schemes (Pollock et al., 2019; Hayward et al., 2004)

Type of thesis:

  • Manual labeling of news snippets of German and international outlets about 5 Bundesliga head coaches across 5 seasons
  • Quantitative sentiment analysis of all relevant newspaper snippets
  • Manual coding of a random stratified sub-sample by celebrity attribution dimension

Broader research topics

  • Strategic leadership (personality traits & cognition) in digital platform ecosystems
  • Platform entrepreneurship and its socio-economic impact in Sub-Saharan Africa
  • Business model innovation and corporate social responsibility in the fashion industry
  • NewSpace (the space industry) as emerging hypercomplex entrepreneurial ecosystem.

For more details and concrete topics please contact Moritz Maier directly

Stigma Cooptation Strategies

In strategic management research, vibrant conversations emerge around stigma, “a vilifying label that contaminates a group of similar peers” (Vergne, 2012, p. 1028). Stigma arises from physical, moral, and/or social sources of “taint” and can be ascribed to individuals (e.g., Goffman, 1986), occupations (e.g., Ashforth & Kreiner, 1999), organizations (e.g. Devers et al., 2009), and industries (e.g., Lashley & Pollock, 2020).
Even though stigma is a negative social evaluation, actors can use and manipulate stigma strategically for specific purposes at all levels, which means, they engage in stigma cooptation as part of their stigma management strategies (Zhang et al., 2021).

Methodology:

  • Conduct a literature review on on stigma cooptation on an individual, occupational, organizational, and industry level in management research.
  • Identify and categorize key themes in the literature.

Broader research topics

  • Formal and informal institutions influencing digital platforms
  • Social evaluations (legitimacy, stigma, reputation, status, …) in the context of digital platforms
  • Stigma and legitimacy in tainted industries (cannabis market, „dirty“ work,…)

For more details and concrete topics, please contact Verena Kummer directly.

Contact information

Verena Kummer
Verena Kummer
Room HK16 112
Dr.-Hans-Kapfinger-Straße 14b
Phone: +49(0)851/509-2512
Fax: +49(0)851/509-2512
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