Center for Responsible Leadership PhD project opportunity

Application deadline: January 15, 2026

The Center for Responsible Leadership at SSE is inviting applications to the PhD program in Business Administration for a project to investigate how young people experience leadership in the Nordic and Baltic context, as leaders and as followers.

Heightened societal and organizational uncertainty has led to an intense desire for leadership as a means of mitigating and adapting to ‘grand’ environmental and societal challenges, such as biodiversity loss, social injustice and climate change (Kempster & Jackson, 2021). At the same time, there are concerns that established practices of leadership have a tendency to maintain the status quo and protect the interests of a privileged few. Recently however, there have been signs that younger generations are communicating stories of leadership that challenge elitist conceptions of leadership through embodied, material performance (Smolović Jones et al., 2025).

Appreciating that leadership is always located in socio-cultural and historical contexts, we invite proposals that consider how younger generations see the possibilities for doing leadership differently, as a creative, empathetic and responsible practice. The project will develop understanding of the role of leadership development in enabling young people to learn how to lead responsibly as an action-oriented practice (Lloyd, Caroll & Woolsey, 2025). Another aspect of the project will be to explore the relationship between leadership, activism and entrepreneurship as world-making practices of organizational creation, institutional disruption, and collective future-making (Daskalaki, Hjorth & Mair, 2015). There will also be opportunities to explore how young people’s leadership is performed, positioned, narrated, including via media and social media (Bell et al., 2024).

The project offers a unique opportunity to study a variety of organizational settings in the Nordic and Baltic regions where leadership training tends to reflect the role of civil society. This provides a unique setting to explore how high institutional trust, consensus in decision making and non-hierarchical principles shape expectations of leaders and leadership. It is anticipated that a broadly qualitative approach will be taken, involving the use of interview, ethnographic and historical methods of data collection and analysis.

The successful applicant will be affiliated to the Centre for Responsible Leadership which provides an open and distinctive research environment for engaging with current topics and international leadership researchers. The main supervisor currently holds the H.M. King Carl XVI Gustaf’s Chaired Professor in Leadership, which provides unique collaborative research access opportunities, including via the Royal Foundation for Youth Leadership and the Future Leaders Academy, SSE Riga. For questions about the Center and suitable projects, please contact Professor Emma Bell.

How to apply

Applications to the PhD program in Business Administration must be made through the web-based application system. You can read more about the application requirements, process and timeline here. 

Please indicate that you are applying for the PhD in Business Administration, specializing in Management and Organization and quote the title of this call, ‘Generational perspectives on doing leadership differently in the Nordic and Baltic context’ in the Statement of Purpose section of your application.

References

Bell, E., Sinclair, A. and Vachhani, S.A. (2024) A leadership of refusal: Remaking the narrative of the falling leader. British Journal of Management. 35(4): 2137-2154.

Daskalaki M., Hjorth D. and Mair, J. (2015) Are entrepreneurship, communities and social transformation related? Journal of Management Inquiry, 24(4): 419-423.

Kempster S. and Jackson B. (2021) Leadership for what, why, for whom and where? A responsibility perspective. Journal of Change Management 21(1): 45–65.

Lloyd, R., Caroll, B. and Woolsey, L. (2025) Responsibility as weight and space: An aesthetic (re)theorising of responsibility and responsible leadership development for youth. Management Learning, 56(3) 442–462.

Smolović Jones, O., Smolović Jones, N. and Carroll, B. (2025) Spacing leadership with Greta Thunberg: A materializing ‘story-so-far’, Human Relations, 46 (6): 827-855.