Business Management BSc Hons - 2020 Entry

Course Structure

Lancaster University offers a range of programmes, some of which follow a structured study programme, and others which offer the chance for you to devise a more flexible programme to complement your main specialism. We divide academic study into two sections - Part 1 (Year 1) and Part 2 (Year 2, 3 and sometimes 4). For most programmes Part 1 requires you to study 120 credits spread over at least three modules which, depending upon your programme, will be drawn from one, two or three different academic subjects. A higher degree of specialisation then develops in subsequent years. For more information about our teaching methods at Lancaster please visit our Teaching and Learning section.

The following courses do not offer modules outside of the subject area due to the structured nature of the programmes: Architecture, Law, Physics, Engineering, Medicine, Sports and Exercise Science, Biochemistry, Biology, Biomedicine and Biomedical Science.

Information contained on the website with respect to modules is correct at the time of publication, and the University will make every reasonable effort to offer modules as advertised. In some cases changes may be necessary and may result in some combinations being unavailable, for example as a result of student feedback, timetabling, Professional Statutory and Regulatory Bodies' (PSRB) requirements, staff changes and new research.

Year 1

Core

• Employability and Careers I

  This module is designed to support the first stage in your journey towards securing a future graduate job role which you will enjoy and thrive in doing! In the first year, we combine gaining business insights from visiting employers alongside a focus on two important stages for employability preparation: ‘Opportunity Awareness’, career opportunities available to Business Management graduates and how this knowledge relates to ‘Self-Awareness’, personal interests, motivations, values & skills.

• Introduction to Business Analytics

  Business analytics focuses on developing new insights and understanding of business performance based on data analysis.

  Designed to give you the kind of skills that are sought after in many organisations, this module introduces you to a range of quantitative techniques for collecting, analysing and interpreting data and develops your understanding of how to apply these techniques to management problems to draw practical conclusions. The module provides the foundations for statistical methods in follow-up modules.

  The computing side of the module introduces the use of word processing, spreadsheet software for statistical calculations, and writing of management reports.

  You will learn not only the fundamental analytical techniques, but also when and how to apply them to management problems and how to interpret the results. This module also involves you working as a junior business analyst on a simple but realistic case study and reporting results and conclusions to a fictional boss.

• Introduction to Financial Accounting for Managers

  This module provides an introduction to the analysis and use of published financial statements and concepts underlying financial reporting by companies. It also considers the perspectives of various users and opportunities for creative accounting. The concepts and use of financial statements are placed within the current commercial context, so that you acquire an appreciation of the role of financial accounting.

• Introduction to Management

  This module introduces a variety of traditional and non-traditional ideas about management, followed by the theory and practice of team working and capability for management. Other themes include quality and entrepreneurship. The aim is to provide you with an essential understanding of the basic theories relevant to the management of work organisation and to enable you to identify and understand the limitations inherent within these theories.

• Introduction to Marketing

  This year-long module is designed to give students a broad and critical introduction to the subject of marketing through a series of lectures and seminars. A comprehensive range of topics are taught at foundational level which you will then explore further in your second and final years. Subject areas that you will study include Understanding Markets, which examines how markets are created and sustained, Consumer Behaviour, Marketing Communications, Marketing Research and Innovation.

  Throughout the year, you will be asked to consider how theory works in practice, by examining your own experience of marketing as well as current stories from the press and marketing media. Assessment consists of coursework including an individual essay and a group-based business report, and a Summer exam which is largely essay-based. As part of your studies on this module, we will help you to develop all of the necessary academic skills to succeed in your first year at University and throughout your degree.

  In addition to your marketing studies, you will study two further subjects from across the University (subject to availability and timetabling). These may include other subjects in the Management School such as Organisation Work and Technology, or Entrepreneurship, but there are many others including marketing related subjects such as Design, Media and Cultural Studies and English Language that you can choose from. This flexibility allows you then to continue with one or more of these subjects in your second and final years, or you can choose to focus exclusively on marketing modules.

• Management, Organisations and Work: Key Issues and Debates

  This module aims to provide you with a broad introduction to management covering a wide range of topics that are relevant to work, business and organisations. The module begins by locating organizations, work and technology in a broad historical context. It considers the meaning of work and different debates regarding alienation and technology. It then introduces different metaphors through which we can understand and analyse organisations. Finally, it considers the changing nature of employment relations by considering the shift from industrial relations to Human Resource Management (HRM). The module is constructed to encourage you to think critically and to reflect upon taken-for-granted assumptions about the world of work and management’s role in relation to it. As a means to achieve this, the second part of the course explores the contemporary issue of human resource management and development which fundamentally contributes to the development of employee-engaged and productive organisations. The final part of the module continues the theme of encouraging critical reflection and explores key issues and debates related to gig employment, globalization, sustainability and business ethics that are intimately related to management. Many of these debates and issues will be explored in greater depth in subsequent OWT modules (e.g. OWT.223 Human Resource Management, OWT.226 Management and Information Technology, and OWT.229 Business Ethics).

Year 2

Core

• Employability and Careers II

  In the second year of your Business Management degree, this module supports your journey towards securing a future graduate job role which you will enjoy and thrive in doing! We combine gaining business insights from visiting employers alongside a considered look at the important stages for your employability preparation according to Career Decision Learning theory.

• Entrepreneurship: Discovery and Practice

  This module develops an understanding of the different issues underlying business creation and development. It familiarises you with current theory and research and enables you to understand the processes of enterprise creation and development and the behaviours, motivations and business strategies of entrepreneurs – considering also how these affect the types and performance of the new ventures created.

  The module also examines the primary issues associated with entrepreneurial activity in franchise systems, in mature organisations and larger corporations, and in not-for-profit contexts. Frequent use is made of illustrative case histories, and several visiting speakers will share the reality of their entrepreneurial experience with you.

• Introduction to Economics for Managers

  Looking at microeconomic issues relating to markets and firms, and macroeconomic issues relating to money, banking and monetary policy, this module helps you to analyse economic issues from a business perspective. It demonstrates why economic concepts and principles are relevant to business issues by applying introductory economic theory to a range of issues that affect economic aspects of the business environment. Particular emphasis is given to interpreting the economic behaviour of individuals and firms, using theory to interpret events and evaluate policies.

• Introduction to Operations Management

  Operations management is the core managerial discipline in all kinds of operation – from private-sector manufacturing through to public-sector services. It is about the human capacity to organise all the operations that underpin the modern world: transportation, the generation of energy, retailing, the production of goods, the provision of medical and educational services, and so on.

  The module will introduce students to key concepts and themes of Operations Management such as operations strategy and performance objectives, operations design (e.g. layout, facility location and capacity), inventory planning and control, project management, quality management and supply chain management. These topics will be approached using a combination of qualitative and simple quantitative methods.

  By the end of the course students should be able to:

  • identify different kinds of operations and predict their characteristics
  • apply basic planning and analysis techniques to particular cases
  • understand operations problems and identify improvement strategies
• Spreadsheet Modelling for Management

  Many organisational recruiters have identified a number of skills and knowledge they want to see from a prospective employee. Top in the priorities are spreadsheet modelling, problem structuring, statistics, and project management.

  Students will be introduced to Microsoft Excel 2016 and the basics of dynamic model building, including skills such as data handling, filtering and analysis, using functions, charting, plus advanced techniques such as optimisation, simulation, and the use of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to automate models and construct decision support models.

  The course will make extensive use of case-studies and workshop-orientated learning tasks.

• Techniques for Management Decision Making

  Techniques based on mathematics and statistics can be extremely powerful tools in helping to solve organisational problems and are widely used in practice. This module explains the business situations in which such techniques apply, and shows how to use the techniques and interpret the results to make better business decisions.

  Five such techniques will be covered:

  • Forecasting
  • Simulation
  • Decision analysis
  • Network analysis
  • Linear programming

Optional

• Business Start-up

  This module aims to advance knowledge of entrepreneurship by experiencing aspects of the business start-up process through project-based activities. It aims to help you understand you own enterprise skills and develop the ability to communicate new business ideas using opportunity business models in the context of business start-up.

• Entrepreneurial mindset

  Building upon Entrepreneurial Learning theories, this course prepares you tounderstand the core dimensions of an entrepreneurial mindset and guides you tofind and assess opportunities, seek answers, gather resources and implementsolutions regardless of you specific context or institutional constraints.

• Further Topics in Economics for Managers

  The module further develops microeconomic issues relating to labour, organisations and markets, together with macroeconomic issues relating to employment and aggregate demand management.

  It examines the essential features of a money economy:

  • banking
  • the national debt, interest rates, inflation, seigniorage
  • the balance of international payments
  • fixed and flexible currency exchange rates
  • monetary policy
  • money and business cycles
• Human Resource Management

  The aim of these two modules (223 and 224), which can be taken both separately as well as in combination (which we strongly advise), is to understand how the elementary functions of HRM unfold, and why they do so in certain ways nowadays compared to, say, thirty years ago.

  At one level, HRM seems very simple: it is a combination of (a) recruitment and selection, (b) control and motivation, (c) training and development, (d) strategy and planning. It is a function which mediates between organisations and people. How complicated can that be? The answer is that it is as complicated as the central objects of such practices – the human and work – are: namely, extremely complicated.

  The reason HRM is endlessly complicated (i.e. there never is an end to the central question to which it has to answer, namely what is work?) lies in the simple fact that the relationship between work as effort and efficiency as the rationality of work is always indeterminate. How much is an hour of work worth? How much should I be paid so that work is ‘fair’, or ‘just’? These essential questions cannot be answered in themselves – they depend on an endless list of other crucial questions – such as, what is it that I have to do? For what should I be paid? What counts as the work that is covered by an employment contract? Where does effort begin and end? What does it mean for instance to be committed to one’s job, company, or team – in terms of effort? How do we account for sentiments in work? What does it mean to be creative, or innovative? Are these part of the employment contract? How much commitment is one contracted to feel?

  These and all the other aspects of HRM have become its language and the objects of its practices; human work and human being have become entangled in management in very complicated forms in the last thirty years. You will be the subjects of these practices and will have to understand what is going on in them and how the simple question what is worth doing in the context of contemporary work? is asked and answered today.

  This means that HR practices in contemporary organisations (private, public, large or small) can only be understood if you will understand something much more fundamental, much more profound and much more enabling: the cultural conditions and resources that make these practices possible at all. You will need to understand how these practices are structured from a cultural viewpoint, from the point of view of the social imaginaries that make them possible.

• Introduction to Finance

  This module offers an introduction to finance. It covers the financial environment, including assets, markets and intermediaries, capital investment appraisal, an overview of the risk/return trade-off, and the cost of capital.

• Management Accounting for Business Decisions

  This module provides an introduction to the use of management accounting information for management purposes. This includes an examination of cost-volume profit analysis, the concepts of direct and indirect costs, and various costing methods. The importance of budgets to organisations and their impact on performance are also discussed.

• Managing People at Work

  This module outlines how the management of people is approached and understood within different cultural, economic and political contexts. It will review to what extent the meanings, strategies and practices of managing work and workers have changed over the last couple of decades. Particular emphasis is thereby placed on the exploration of the social, temporal and spatial dimensions of managing and regulating work within the organizational context and beyond.

  Overall, the module aims to outline the organizational as well as individual challenges, ambiguities and complexities that are concomitant with current modes of managing workers and employees. We will cover topics such as bureaucratic and entrepreneurial forms of work organization, creative knowledge work and workers, employee subjectivity and identity, normative forms of power and control, as well as ethico-political aspects of contemporary management.

• Social Media Marketing

  This module will offer students the chance to explore various forms of social media in the context of digital marketing and online consumer culture. Students will develop awareness and gain insights into a diverse range of topics such as social media tools, mobile marketing, online consumption environments, virtual identities and online consumer behaviour, online consumption experiences, and the rise of virtual economies amongst others. Module will also explore current and potential trends in the digital environment.

• The Changing Role of Management

  In OWT 228 we look at the changing role and position of management and managers in organisations and society. Much of modern analysis of management emphasises a change in forms of management control from traditional authority through vertical hierarchical forms to ones which are more horizontal and look to incorporate employees into the organisation and its goals in ever closer ways. This happens for example through attempts to align employees identities, emotions and interests with commitment to the organisation: the much discussed capturing of hearts and minds. Another aspect of this is the manipulation of meaning in order to facilitate this identification of employee and organisation, usually discussed as the corporate culture movement. Together these can be taken as two significant aspects of modern management the management of meaning and the management of identity - which feature little in traditional management texts that emphasise management as the co-ordination of tasks and the control and deployment of resources.

  However, it is important to see management and managers within the light of organisation analysis. Managers are not the autonomous agents they are often portrayed, first because they are also employees themselves (albeit in the position of formally representing the interests of capital), and second, they are also subject to organisational structures, cultures and power relations. Perhaps especially in the light of managerial control designed around commitment, integration and identification with the organisation, managers are tied in by the very control strategies that they themselves are promoting. However, as we shall see, there are also important tensions between the changing context of management and these forms of control which can lead to unintended consequences such as impression management and various forms of resistance.

  Thus this module focuses on how management is a social process, and what this means for the lived experience of doing management. In exploring this we look at topics which are relevant for the day-to-day experience of managers, although rarely are these addressed in conventional management textbooks: issues such as humour, diversity, impression management and emotional management.

Year 3

Core

• Business and Management in the 21st Century: Central Questions in the Global Economy, Ecology and Ethics

  The underlying objectives of this module are to explore how management and business can be treated as a global phenomenon – in other words, that management and business are not merely a collection of techniques from several disciplines, but rather have a coherent cultural core which corresponds to a system of values that have to be grasped and understood if management and business are to make sense at all. We will investigate some of the key themes of current management and business agendas in order to equip you with a wider understanding of the complex problems you are likely to face in your professional lives. First, we will examine together how the 21st Century is characterised by what has come to be known as the Knowledge Economy and examine the global reach of management. The idea of a new kind of global economy in which personal, organisational and social success is divided by the ability to access, mobilise and produce knowledge sets up a complicated, tense context for managerial work and asks new kinds of questions about the object and implications of management. Following on from this theme, we will consider some of the reactions in management and business to unprecedented environmental challenges, as well as the major ethical issues and demands facing business today and in the coming decades.

• Principles of Strategic Management

  This module will provide an understanding of strategy that will enable discussion of real-life business activities within a framework of contemporary strategic management thinking. Topics such as takeover, merger, diversification, divestment and corporate raiding will be examined. Using lectures, case analyses and class discussions, the module is designed to encourage you to develop a personal and distinctive understanding and appreciation of strategising for different industries and in uncertain environments.

• Rethinking Leadership

  It is often argued that “more effective leadership” is a key way to improve organisational performance. Yet, it is also increasingly evident that traditional understandings of what constitutes leadership - heroic and transformational models - have not lived up to their promise. Against this background, this module seeks to re-think leadership dynamics by exploring the strengths and weaknesses of various primary perspectives on leadership. In particular, the course addresses heroic, post-heroic and critical approaches and explores important but neglected issues such as distributed leadership and proactive followership, culture and context, power and control, gender and diversity, resistance and conformity, identity and insecurity, and emotion and the unconscious. The course is designed to rethink leadership dynamics in ways that critically examine their facilitators and challenges in organisations and societies.