The organization sciences area offers courses at undergraduate, master's and doctoral levels that covers organizational behavior, organization theory, human resource management, as well as general and international management. The area is also responsible for a program in educational and pedagogical skills for high school teachers.

Research is conducted within the following areas: economic organization theory and labor market analysis, networks, technology development and innovation, human resource management and competence analysis and organizational psychology and behavior.

Economic organization theory addresses how different types of organizational architectures influence efficiency in organizations.

Special emphasis is placed on how transactions, contracts and ownership structures transmit information between actors, contribute to incentives for actions and coordinate the activities of the actors involved. In labor market analysis, focus is set on the mechanisms that serve to match vacant jobs with job applicants. Another important issue, is how labor market procesesses generate and distribute outcomes in the form of income, unemployment and mobility opportunities.

The focus of research on networks and technology development is on social structures, roles and positions and their influence on the diffusion of the technologies, and on how norms for appropriate choice of technology develop. A related field of inquiry is innovation and entrepreneurship.

Human resource management and life-long learning both have potentially wide-ranging consequences for the substance and practice of management in general, and for the performance of business firms. In regard to lifelong learning, research is conducted on the basis of theories of upskilling, deskilling and skills popularization in order to decipher how the strategies of firms impinge on the developmental opportunities of employees. A related field is the study and analysis of human capital in organizations, chiefly knowledge and skill resources in the form of competence held by employees, teams and firms.

Organizational behavior research examines how organizational settings and organization members interplay in generating behavior in, and of, organizations. It is the integrated study of organizational processes/structures and individual characteristics that distinguishes organizational behavior from fields such as psychology and sociology.

Micro research on organizational behavior, i.e. organizational psychology, focuses on a variety of issues, including decision making in organizations, group and intergroup relations and cooperative/competitive processes. Presently, research on negotiation from an organizational behavior perspective focuses on cross-cultural negotiations, purchasing, multiparty negotiation negotiations (groups), and conflict management in general. Finally, research is conducted on individual and group level determinants of organizational commitment and the strength of such relationships.

The strategy area offers courses at undergraduate, master's and doctoral levels that covers corporate strategy, business strategy, strategic alliances, strategic change etc.

Research is conducted within the following areas: Strategic change, corporate strategy, and cooperative strategy.

The research on strategic change focuses on the context, content and processes of implementing major strategic decisions. These are decisions such as mergers, acquisitions, IT-projects, downsizing, restructuring, cultural change etc. Furthermore, more specific themes such as the role of consultants as change agents and empowerment have been investigated.

The research on corporate strategy focuses on the rationale behind diversification and the partenting advantage of large corporations. Diversification is investigated both from the perspecitve of maximizing shareholder value and from pursuing the management's own interests. Furthermore, the choice between different entry models is addressed.

The research on cooperative strategies includes both alliances and networks. Research has been carried out to investigate the rationale behind alliances, constructural isues and challenges in the management process. Furthermore, the research on networks has focused on the challenges involving a large number of parties such as free riding, opportunism.

The information management area offers courses at undergraduate, master's and doctoral levels that covers basic business data processing, macro programming, datamodelling, management information systems, BPR, knowledge management, electronic commerce etc.

Research is conducted in the following areas: IT-based business development, information systems implementation, multimedia technology and electronic commerce, knowledge-based information systems and etichs etc.

This research area basically relates to the integration of IT and the organization. The main focus is on methodologies and models for effective business development, including integrated approaches to systems development, project management, and business process reengineering (BPR). Gunnar Christensen is currently engaged in a two-year ESPRIT project - BUSINES-LINC - the overall objective of which is to strengthen the competitiveness of European enterprises by collecting, describing, verifying, consolidating, adjusting, and disserminanting business innovation cases where IT plays a key role. The project consortium has six partners from Germany, Italy, Holland, Denmark, Sweden in addition to NHH.

This research area is closely related to the previous one. The main focus is on the process of IT implementation as well as on the factors and preconditions for successful IT implementation. A variety of research questions have been raised and a number of implementation issues have been investigated. Some studies have focused on the implementation process while others have been preoccupied with key factors which may explain the success or failure of an IT implementation. Finally, we are currently involved in a research program at Statoil, which is related to their implementation of SAP R/3.

Internet has changed the world of computing. From a focus on the computer as the basic facilitator for effective information processing, the focus is now on the network and the computer, so-called network computing. Furthermore, Internet facilitates multimedia processing of network computing, also known as computer mediated environments, raises new research questions and changes our traditional business concepts in general and computer information systems concepts in particular. A joint research team on emarkets has been established with SNF headed by Leif B Methlie. The group conducts research on ecommerce/ebusiness both on the supply side: new business models for companies, and on the demand side: customer behaviour studies and adoption of new services. Two industries have been particularly adressed: banking and travel. On a more general level our faculty performs research on electronic commerce, marketing, sale, and delivery of products and services through electronic channels.

The work on knowledge-based information systems comprises two areas: 1) knowledge-based decision support systems (KB-DSS) and 2) knowledge-based (intelligent) search agents on open information networks. The work and KB-DSS is a spin-off of the research on DSS at the Department in the 1970s. In a recent doctoral thesis, the cognitive paradigm of connectionism has been tested on financial diagnosis using the technology of neural networks. Work in the second area, intelligent agents on open information networks, has just started. It is closely related to the research on multimedia technology and electronic commerce described above. Primarily, intelligent agents for banking and finance will be studied.

Decision support systems (DSS) have been used to assist managerial decision-making for more than thirty years. However, the insights whether the use of such systems really improves decision-making, are still modest. The department is currently involved in two research projects with the purpose of studying IT-effects on the quality of strategic decisions. The empirical contexts of the research are a large oil company and a large European bank.

Information ethics have become important teaching and research topics at the Department. Knut J. Ims is responsible for the business ethics part of NHH's curriculum. Research on business ethics focuses on the concept of responsibility in corporations and on ethical action. Ims is currently involved in various research projects: 1) A case study of an unfriendly takeover 2) developing moral sentiments by using authentic cases and role-plays.

The marketing area offers courses at undergraduate, master's and doctoral levels that cover basic marketing, marketing research, brand management, consumer behavior etc.

Research is conducted within the following areas: Advertising and Marketing Communication, Brand Management, Buyer Behavior Export, and Internationalization, MacroMarketing, Philosophy of Science, Meta-Theory and Research Methods, Product Development and Innovations, and Service and Tourism.

Communication activities are important for organizations in order to establish contact with, and in order to influence buyers, clients and other constituencies. Such activities influence the greater society as well. A variety of topics related to advertising and marketing communication have been addressed, including the development of communication strategies and decision making process related to the acquisition of advertising agency services.

Recently, brand management has become a major research area at the department. Specific projects involving methodologies for assessing brand associations and brand extensioninvolves several of our staff and research scholars.

A variety of buyer behavior topics have been treated in several publications by our staff. The contributions range from Johan Arndt's classic study of word-of-mouth advertising to recent doctoral dissertations on consumers' external information search, family decision making, savings behavior and the like. A considerable part of purchasing behavior is the outcome of group decisions in firms, thus much research conducted by staff members have dealt with issues such as intra- and interorganizational power, decision making by households and organizations, buying-center activities, strategic purchasing etc.

Norway's economy is small by international comparisons - but it is one of the most international economies in the world. Our late colleague, Bjarne Bakka, spent most of his time at the institute on the issues related to how firms become international. Combining his extensive industry experience with his inquisitive and systematic mind, he was able to assist students and firms alike in their internationalization process. Members of our faculty have been involved in large-scale research projects seeking to determine the key success criteria for firms that decide to enter foreign markets.

Marketing activities by individual firms impact our society in a variety of ways. The study of MacroMarketing focuses on subjects like economic development, marketing and the environment, consumerism and issues of ethics and business etc. Macromarketing is also concerned with the study of marketing systems, the interaction of multiple firms in value chains, networks and the like.

Philosophy of science, meta-theoretical perspectives and research methods are of fundamental importance to any academic discipline. Research focusing on methodological problems such as scaling and elicitation techniques have been the focus of doctoral dissertations. The department has also established close-working relationships with internationally recognized scholars addressing methodological issues in their research. In cooperation with researchers at other institutions some of the researchers at the institute have for some years addressed the performance of different estimation methods in Structural Equations Modelling (Lisrel). Some of the papers coming out of this stream of research have now been accepted for publication in international journals.

Innovations and innovative activities have been focused in research. More recently we have been involved in several company-sponsored research projects focusing on product development and commercialization of new technologies of importance for firm's survival, economic change and growth.

The Department has developed a substantial research stream in the service and tourism area. More than 100 research reports and working papers have been produced in addition to conference proceedings and texts. Of particular importance is the research focusing on service quality addressing both theoretical and empirical issues.