Business Management

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, recent alumni and networking opportunities, alongside a focus on building graduate labour market knowledge and preparation for the graduate recruitment selection process.

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

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 2019 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.

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.

Building upon Entrepreneurial Learning theories, this course prepares you to understand the core dimensions of an entrepreneurial mindset and guides you to find and assess opportunities, seek answers, gather resources and implement solutions regardless of your specific context or institutional constraints.

Human Resource Management is that part of management that happens to everyone, all the time. Nobody can escape HRM. We are all human resources and, therefore, it should not be a surprise that HRM has become very much a reflection of us – we find in HRM our own conceptions of ourselves, of work and of life in the 21st Century. The aim of this module is to understand how HRM is done and why we manage people in the ways we do.

The module introduces and analyses HRM as a complex part of management today in all organisations. OWT.223 examines aspects of employability, of performativity, performance management and of work motivations as key ingredients for the management of people in contemporary corporations, large or small, private or public. For you and your employability, it will be essential to understand what is going on in HRM and how this is done. You will have to be able to grasp the fundamental question of work: what is worth doing in the context of contemporary work? What is asked of you, and how do you have answer in return?

Also, it is essential to remember that every manager is always a human resource manager: they have to know how to recruit, how to communicate decisions and how to understand people and their motivation to work, how to think about individuals and teams, and about all the psychological and social aspects of work. No effective and respectable manager or executive can be a poor manager of people.

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.

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.

This module provides you with the opportunity to further develop your knowledge of marketing management and its conceptual frameworks and techniques as well as to apply and adapt your knowledge of these frameworks to a diverse range of marketing management contexts. Going to market will be examined in terms of business buyer behaviour, consumer buyer behaviour, brands and brand management, channel selection and management, and international markets.

Various topics of interest to prospective managers are covered within this module, including production and demand, competition and strategic behaviour, advertising and distribution, capital budgeting and inventories, the foreign exchange market, the economics of the multinational enterprise and the politics of corporate economics. The module provides knowledge of aspects of microeconomics relevant to general management, and also emphasises techniques and tools of analysis alongside relevant theory.

The module is designed to as an introduction to aspects of the firm and its environment which are of particular relevance to management. The topics selected aim to bridge the gap between the traditional approach to managerial economics and the more modern study of the organisation.

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.

The underlying aim of this module is to show you 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 generalised, globalised system of values that have to be grasped and understood if management and business are to make sense at all. Therefore, we will seek to show how management and business are part of the broader cultural and historical nature of contemporary global society.

We hope you will understand that, as part of society and culture, both management and business carry within them the signs of all the major tensions, problems and crises that face us today in the world economy, in our relationship with the Earth and the natural environment, and in our relationships with each other as humanity. The module is designed to help you recognise management’s central place in this essential ‘system of crises’ and to understand that such crises are problems for managers with possibly far-reaching social and organisational implications, rather than incidental external matters that have no bearing on your future professional lives.

Strategic Management is about making distinctive choices concerning the direction and scope of the organization over the long term, in order to enhance its ability to create value and improve its prospects for organizational survival and growth. In a complex and turbulent environment, with rapid economic, regulatory and technological changes, strategising – the art of processing complex information thoughtfully and creatively and the ability to convince others of your analysis and recommendations – is a critical skill to acquire. The goal of this module is to provide you with an understanding of strategy that will enable you to discuss real-life business activities within a framework of contemporary strategic management thinking. This module is designed to encourage you to develop a personal and distinctive understanding and appreciation of strategising for different industries and in uncertain environments, through lectures, case analyses and class discussions.

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.