Business Management BSc Hons - 2022 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

• Economics for Business

  This course provides an introduction to microeconomics for students majoring in business-related degrees and delivers a range of important topics for understanding the business applications of economics relating to both consumers' and firms' behaviour.

• 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 Entrepreneurship

  With many people questioning whether entrepreneurship can be ‘taught’ and suggesting that entrepreneurs are born and not made, this introductory module is designed to challenge preconceived notions of entrepreneurship.

  It uses a combination of interactive workshops and an online environment to encourage active participation. Theory and practice are combined throughout the module, and within the teaching sessions we draw on the expertise of entrepreneurs who attend our business support programmes.

• 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.

• Principles of Marketing

  The aim of this module is to introduce the key elements of marketing as both scientific discipline and organisational practice. The module is designed around three themes which serve as a solid foundation for the second year module MKTG227 marketing Management Essentials and further markting modules following this.

  This module also aims to support students in the transition towards independent learning, and in the development of a critical and analytical approach to ideas and theories.

Year  2

Core

• 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 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.

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 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 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.

• Marketing Management Essentials

  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.

• 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 and evaluations

  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.