A STUDY ON DISSERTATION TOPICS AS AN INDICATOR FOR MANAGEMENT TRENDS - BY THE EXAMPLE OF 'BALANCED SCORECARD' AND 'SUSTAINABILITY'

In academic education, there is an increasing call for the integration of current and future trends into teaching. Students at German private universities in most cases address current company-related issues in their final theses. Content analysis is a method to derive unambiguous characteristics of a text corpus such as word frequencies. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to identify whether the entirety of final theses written at a private university is a suitable corpus for content analysis aiming at identifying trends. The underlying data has been obtained from a project conducted in cooperation with FOM University of Applied Science in Germany. Based on a corpus of over 20,000 titles of dissertations written at FOM during a period of seven years the lifecycles of two management concepts "Balanced Scorecard" and "sustainability" are presented in this paper. These are compared to the respective lifecycles deduced from the Web of Science, a large corpus containing millions of records of specialized literature. This paper demonstrates that the entirety of dissertations titles is a suitable corpus for content analysis, and that management trends' lifecycles can be visualized on the basis of this data. Subsequently, recommendations can be derived for academic education, for example for curriculum conception or the offering of specific future-oriented courses. Thus, additional value can be created for universities that meets knowledge-based market's needs.