Three year bachelor's degree
Are you keen to understand how businesses and managers operate? Lancaster University courses are designed to develop your conceptual understanding and provide practice-based insights. You will also develop your personal competencies, including communications and mathematical abilities. Such skills have helped recent graduates find work in a wide variety of roles, within sectors such as banking, retail, consultancy, sales and marketing, and data analysis.
In Leipzig, this course will look at international trade and industry, as well as focusing on real life examples from the thriving German economy.
Three years (full-time)
English
Our broad-based business management programme gives you the expertise to understand the changing world of business on national and global levels.
Compulsory modules in your first year cover the broad foundations of management, developing your understanding of the functions and processes involved in managing complex organisations and establishing your leadership skills.
You will study across our full-spectrum management school, learning from world-leading researchers and experts to develop fundamental skills in areas including management theory and organisational behaviour, accounting and finance, marketing strategies, business analytics, entrepreneurial thinking, and economic environments.
Whether you want to work in large private organisations, the public sector, or start up your own business, you can personalise your degree to acquire the analytical, quantitative, presentation and other transferable skills needed to succeed and stand out.
Did you know? Lancaster University Management School (UK) is quadruple-accredited by AACSB, EQUIS, AMBA and the Small Business Charter.
Programme structure: 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, staff changes and new research. Not all optional modules are available every year.
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.
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.
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 students with an essential understanding of the basic theories relevant to the management of work organisation and to enable students to identify and understand the limitations inherent within these theories.
This module examines the key elements of marketing theory and practice, and how these connect with other aspects of business management. The module is arranged into three themes, with the first examining the fundamentals of market offerings, including brands, products and services. The second theme focuses on the competitive marketplace and explores how organisations understand and engage with consumers, including a look at recent developments in digital marketing. The final theme consolidates learning by considering how marketers obtain and utilise information to inform innovation and the marketing planning process. The module also aims to support students in the development of key transferable skills such as critical thinking, analysis and delivering effective business presentations.
In this module, we challenge preconceived views about whether or not entrepreneurship can be taught, and the widely-held opinion that entrepreneurs are born, not made. We consider entrepreneurship in a wide variety of contexts and for a range of different purposes. This includes entrepreneurship for social or environmental good, or as a means of self-expression, as well as entrepreneurial start-up and classic profit-driven motivations of business founders. Theory and practice are combined throughout the module, and teaching is brought to life through the expertise of our entrepreneurs in residence. You will therefore meet practicing entrepreneurs and be provoked to consider your own values and how these might, in future, shape your own expressions of innovation and entrepreneurial behaviour, whether as an employee, in your home society, in a family business, or as a business founder or sole trader.
This module provides an introduction to key economic concepts and analytical tools which underpin their applications in a business context. It is targeted at students majoring in business-related degrees and covers a range of important topics for understanding the business applications of economics relating to the behaviour of both consumers and firms as well as the possible role of government in addressing market failures.
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.
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:
This module looks 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.
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.
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.
Building upon Entrepreneurial Learning theories, this module prepares students to understand the core dimensions of an entrepreneurial mindset and guides students to find and assess opportunities, seek answers, gather resources and implement solutions regardless of context or institutional constraints.
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.
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.
And any other two modules from the following:
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.
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.
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.
And any other 5 modules from the following:
Teaching is delivered via a combination of small group lectures and group-based tutorial coursework (oral and written presentation), and assessment is via individual coursework (oral and written presentation) and examinations.
You will be encouraged throughout to undertake independent study to supplement what is being taught/learnt and to broaden your personal knowledge.
All BSc (Hons) Business Management students will receive their undergraduate degree from the quadruple-accredited Lancaster University Management School in the UK.
A degree in business management can open up a range of exciting career avenues, including the following roles:
