Accounting (Accounting, Organisations and Institutions),PhD

The Department of Accounting at LSE is one of the leading groups in the world for teaching and research on the economic, institutional and organisational aspects of accounting and financial management. Our PhD programme provides rigorous academic training aimed at preparing students to undertake research of the highest international standards.

You'll benefit from a truly international and interdisciplinary environment. You'll have access to a wide range of taught courses and research seminars across different departments and research centres within the School. You'll work closely with faculty in the department throughout the programme, and you'll interact with leading scholars from other universities thanks to our active external workshop series. All students admitted to the programme are fully funded, and financial assistance is also available for you to present your work at conferences.

You'll be expected to complete the programme within five years. In the first two years, you'll take a set of core and elective courses in accounting and related fields and complete a research paper. After the second year, you'll focus on your PhD thesis.

Our programme is structured in two tracks: the Accounting, Organisations and Institutions (AOI) track, which is devoted to the study of interrelationships between accounting, organisations and institutions, and the Economics of Accounting (EoA) track, which primarily examines accounting and financial reporting issues from an economics perspective. Below you'll find more information about the AOI track. Find out more about the EoA track.

Research in the AOI track is mainly qualitative in approach, focusing on the accounting process within and across organisations. Our intention is that your chosen topic will involve the investigation of how accounting practices are shaped by their institutional contexts, have behavioural consequences and can be vehicles for operationalising different values. Efforts to design internal and external accounting practices are both a function of specific economic and political interests, but are also shaped by social and political aspirations. Research in this track can potentially embrace a wide variety of accounting areas, such as studies in management accounting and organisational control processes, analyses of the impact of new accounting systems in the private and public sector, event-based work on transformations of auditing and risk regulation regimes, and historical studies of accounting, as well as broader contributions to social theory.

Faculty supervising students in the AOI track have close links with LSE’s Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation (CARR).