Course content

Core modules

You will study three core modules to give you a broad overview of key business areas. The course is heavily academic; you will be reading and preparing case studies, applying theories and models to real scenarios, with assessment through a mix of group and individual assessment, plus exams.

The Foundations of Corporate Performance

While the topic-focused modules allow you to explore the leading critical works in that subject, their historical development, and their interrelations, this integrative module, running throughout the course, looks directly at how fundamental ideas from these subject areas contribute to organisational performance. Consider the practical tools and techniques of corporate performance enhancement and, through business case studies, the way in which real managers and other stakeholders interact in extremely dynamic environments.

Marketing

You will identify and evaluate a selection of the major contemporary challenges facing organisations in designing and refining the route to market in changing market conditions, taking a process perspective. Gain the basis for challenging conventional marketing frameworks and techniques and explore the value of traditional marketing practices.

Strategy, Analysis & Practice

This module will provide you with a foundation for, and a critical assessment of, theoretical and empirical approaches to strategy. Consider the links between strategy and performance and contextualise strategy in its historical and academic roots. Case studies will allow you to explore the frameworks and models for the interrogation and development of strategy.

Independent research

You will complete both an individual and a group project as part of the Foundations of Corporate Performance module. These will be pieces of desk-based research on a company of your choice, and will test your understanding of management theory as well as your ability to select and apply it. The sort of title you could expect to be given is shown below:

For an organisation of your choice, report upon its past and current performance and the main factors generating that performance. Taking account of the various exogenous and endogenous forces at work, make recommendations as to actions that might be most favourable to future performance of the organisation.

For each project, you will have a member of academic staff as a supervisor, and complete a written dissertation. The group project dissertation has a 5,000 word limit, the individual dissertation has a 7,500 word limit.