The Ph.D. Course saves the heritage of the "Communication, Research, Innovation" Course, ensuring a wider representation of the scientific and cultural domains present in the Department of Communication and Social Research and adding to the two pre-existing curricula a third, specifically devoted to Marketing.
The PhD is so divided into three curricula: "Communication Sciences", "Methodology of Social Science" and "Marketing".
On the one hand, therefore, the Ph.D.'s structure pursues the objective of enhancing the synergistic evolution of the tools that communication and methodological studies use in the field of their advanced research (mass media impact analysis, ICT, social prediction, macro process simulation, data mining). On the other hand, the aim is to form a solid theoretical basis for business management and marketing, in the belief that contemporary society and the economy are and will increasingly be pervaded by models of relationship between supply and demand with high intensity of communication and that the Italian productive world, public and private, profit-oriented or not, has an increasing need to assimilate a culture oriented to the customer / user and competition.
Regarding the areas of study covered by the three Curricula such areas, it is intended to offer suitable tools for study:
- the analysis of cultural production and consumption;
- the impact of network and social communication on the dynamics of social relations;
- content analysis techniques, also of large textual corpora;
- the role of the brand in postmodern exchange systems;
- the concept of value as a meeting point between supply and demand;
- debates on the social science method;
- training in the use of advanced procedures and techniques for the collection, processing and analysis of qualitative and quantitative data;
- research into emerging social phenomena and their generative mechanisms.
In order to offer an education that enhances the ample space devoted to the methodological and empirical research dimension, the PhD programme encourages and supports the development in students of that body of knowledge that is indispensable for tackling the new challenges of the communication of knowledge and research, and also encourages their propensity to publish and confront themselves in scientific and research contexts,including international ones.
In detail, the specific research lines are set out below.
COMMUNICATION SCIENCES
- Audience, television and media studies;
- Communication, politics, citizenship and participation;
- Youth cultures, socialisation, cultural consumption;
- Urban cultures, public art, museums, experiences of place;
- Cultural diversity, identity, migration;
- Journalism and information ecosystems;
- Languages, Narratives, Imaginaries and Transmedia;
- Media and Gender Studies;
- Network society: platforms, social media, production and consumption processes;
- Public History, communication of history, cultural industries and institutions.
METHODOLOGY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES
- Historiographical themes of the discipline (Micro-Macro Relations; The construction of standardised survey instruments);
- Analytical Sociology and Theory of Action (Experimental and quasisperimental designs; Non-standard, qualitative and hermeneutic information detection instruments);
- Networks and social structure (Social explanation, prediction and simulation; Focused interviews and focus groups);
- Social constructionism (Quality and quantity; Quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods);
- Social representations (Validity and reliability; Techniques and models for quantitative research designs: principal components, multiple correspondences, cluster analysis, logistic regression, path analysis, etc.);
- Cognitive and mind processes (Generalisation of results, representativeness, sampling; Data processing/synthesis (from indicators to indices; Social Network analysis; Agent simulation).
MARKETING
- Marketing and management for business management;
- Consumer and consumption. Research covering all activities associated with consumer choice, purchase, use and post-purchase of goods and services. Consumer behaviour is the way in which consumer emotions, attitudes and preferences influence purchasing behaviour. Particular attention is paid to the customer experience and the customer journey in relation to IoT;
- Brand and brand management;
- Innovation and digitisation in business models and enterprise management;
- Internal marketing and human capital in the management of organisations;
- Technology and IoT in different sectoral application fields;
- Services and service ecosystems.
The above will proceed in parallel with the development in the students of that corpus of knowledge indispensable to face the challenge of knowledge communication and research brought by bibliometrics and international comparison of ideas, also through the stimulus to the students to publish and compare themselves with foreign counterparts in scientific and didactic contexts.
It should also be emphasized that the Doctorate intends to cultivate the commonality of interests and activities that has characterized the presence of the Doctorates of the Department of Communication and Social Research within the Doctoral School "Mediatrends". As a result, there is a desire to maintain in common a series of educational and scientific-cultural initiatives.
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