The research areas of the Department of Business Administration Online

The department's faculty members provide a brief insight at their research and areas of interest

The Department of Business Administration Online is part of the MCI research focus "Ethics, Law & Information Society". In addition to exciting projects with faculty from the Department of Management & Law and Management, Communication & IT, the department's own faculty also conduct research in other exciting areas. In this article, you will learn more about the research interests of the faculty of the Department of Business Administration Online.

Maria Pammer is the head of Department of Business Administration Online at the Management Center Innsbruck (MCI). As a business educator, she has been involved in topics related to "Learning & Development" throughout her career. She has been intensively involved with the effects of corporate practical experience on the competence development of teachers. In recent years, however, she has been particularly fascinated by the question of how new technologies affect learning and work processes. She is particularly interested in the opportunities and challenges of new technologies for personal development and the associated change processes on an individual and organizational level.

Antje Bierwisch is professor and study coordinator for Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Foresight at MCI in the Department of Business Administration Online since 2018. Prior to that, she worked for ten years as a project manager/senior researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISI in Karlsruhe. Her research focuses on futures capabilities, future trends and technologies, corporate foresight, and sustainable innovation. She is member of the “Netzwerk Zukunfsforschung” and is a certified trainer for LEGO Serious Play® as well as Futures Literacy Labs. Based on her experience gained from more than 50 applied research projects, she is consulting expert for strategic foresight.

Wendy Farrell is a professor of business administration at MCI. Her research focuses on topics around Business, Culture, and Technology, especially regarding how we moderate our expectations and usage of technology in international business. A number of her research projects look at how best to conceptualize and implement responsive e-learning so that business students can learn wherever and whenever. Other studies look at how communication technology is selected and utilized for communication and collaboration on global virtual teams.

Yevgen Bogodistov is a lecturer in Strategic Management and Process Management at MCI. As a positivist researcher, he focuses on the intersection of strategic management (e.g. strategic decisions, organisational capabilities), organisational behaviour (e.g. burnout, emotional labour), and information systems (e.g. process innovation, digitalisation). Yevgen received his PhD in Strategic Management in 2015. For the past five years, he has been conducting research on dynamic capabilities in healthcare, focusing on psychological aspects of process management. In the area of dynamic managerial capabilities, Yevgen focuses on emotions and their influence on decision-making.

Christiane Aufschnaiter is a lecturer in Marketing at the MCI and a PhD candidate at the University of Innsbruck. Her research is embedded in the field of consumer culture theory and her current research activities focus on the intersection of materiality, sociality, and branding in digital and physical space. Digitalization has entered almost every sphere of life and profoundly influenced how consumers relate to material objects, and what and how they consume. In her dissertation, Christiane examines the complexities of material consumption practices and the role of materiality against the backdrop of progressing digitalization in consumer society. Her current research contexts are first, consumers of a specific brand—the Moleskine notebook,  and second, nomadic consumers who use digital technologies to navigate their mobile and lightweight lifestyle—so-called digital nomads. In her research, she relies on qualitative methodologies such as in-depth interviews and netnographic studies (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) to shed light on digital and physical consumption practices.

Moritz Mosenhauer is an assistant professor for economics at the MCI. He received his PhD in economics in 2020 at the University of Glasgow. His research interests are in the Organizational Economics and Experimental Finance. Both theoretically and empirically, he explores irrational decision making and possible countermeasures. He also evaluates university admissions procedures, both with respect to the efficient allocation of scarce economic resources as well as with respect to their fairness and accessibility to disadvantaged groups.

Students in the department discuss individual aspects of these research foci in their studies, as faculty are always eager to incorporate new research findings coupled with current practical know-how into their teaching.