Global Sustainable Business Management MSc

Corporate governance offers the foundation for establishing transparency and accountability within organisations as well as support their strategic success. It plays a pivotal role in shaping the relationship between the organisation and its shareholders, other stakeholders, and the society at large. This module will explore various internal and external mechanisms of corporate governance that supports the organisation as a responsible member of the society and how this relates to the concepts of social responsibility, sustainability and business ethics. The module will also establish the links between responsible business practices and wider sustainable development initiatives such as the UN sustainable development Goals (SDGs).
The module will then consider the dynamic and complex landscape of sustainable finance which includes a myriad of players including security issuers, regulators, standard setters, rating agencies to investment companies. The module will introduce various sustainable and green investment vehicles. The module will consider green washing/impact washing, individual and collective actions among other contemporary issues in this area. Finally, the module will consider some of the technological innovations in the area of sustainable finance including innovations in banking and payment systems, applications of blockchain technology including digital assets and big data analytics including the use of AI. A key feature of the module are the workshops that will enable you to acquire data analysis skills using specialist software.

The module will also develop your curiosity and interest of ethical decision making in business, and to help you understand what ethics means from both an individual and organisational perspective. The module will enable you to develop an awareness of ethical dilemmas in business and challenge you to discuss and debate ethical decision-making as a future employer or employee
Topics

1 Responsible business and Sustainable development
2 Corporate governance and accountability
3 The use of ethical frameworks to aid the decision-making process
4 Sustainable finance landscape and issues
5 Fintech innovations in sustainability
6 Ethics and professionalism

In this module you will learn about a comprehensive range of research methods and business analytics techniques. This will equip you with the knowledge and practical skills necessary for you to conduct research at Masters’ level and prepare you to complete a Master’s Dissertation, Consultancy Project or Management Enquiry. By the end of the module you will know how to apply both quantitative and qualitative data collection and business analysis techniques. In quantitative techniques you will learn about sampling, questionnaire design, statistical inference, and hypothesis testing while qualitative techniques covered will include methods such as interviewing and focus groups. Analysis methods such as content analysis and thematic analysis will also be covered. In addition, you will gain some understanding of research philosophy (positivism and interpretivism) and research ethics and you will be able to write a research proposal to bring these ideas together.
Furthermore, this module will provide clear, critical, and analysis of data, you will also be able to consider the use of analytics implementation skills, where you will be introduced to analytics software such as SPSS. SPSS statistics analysis is one of the powerful solutions that is designed to help businesses and researchers to solve problems by various methods (geospatial analysis, predictive analytics and hypothesis testing).

You will be introduced to key knowledge, processes, practices and mindsets of design-led responsible innovation and its value within responsible business models. By learning about human-centred design thinking and humanity-centred design you will be able to understand how concepts of responsible innovation are constructed in different contexts and what this means for practice.

You will tackle innovation projects, working in teams, responding to real-world challenges. During these projects you will be coached, supervised and challenged as you learn how best to contribute your knowledge and expertise within a design-led responsible innovation process. You will learn about different forms of innovation and design-led co-creation, by practicing:

Empathise: research to understand complex situations and different stakeholders needs.

Define: synthesising research and insight emerging from it to define opportunity spaces and articulate clear problem statements.

Ideation: using creative tools and techniques to produce, cluster, develop and evaluate ideas and their fit to opportunity space criteria.

Prototype: developing concepts or concept elements through low fidelity communications.

Test: engaging different audiences in dialogue to gain feedback about emerging concepts.

Unpack: reviewing in a collaborative manner the quality of the design thinking work and individuals’ continuing development needs.

The first part of the module will encourage you to work on the type of responsible leader that you might become. This module will address an area of leadership development that is often minimised in dominant literature: the relationship between one's identity, social systems, power dynamics, and one's leadership identity. You will demonstrate the ability to work in diverse teams, reflecting on your ethical values and the impact of individual or organisational decision making on social and environmental contexts by exploring contemporary leadership theories. In this module, you will develop new knowledge and skills in leadership and followership and how to apply them to your organisation. You will be challenged to critically reflect and develop relational qualities that you think are necessary to build sustainable relationships and cope with the complex leadership challenges in a global, uncertain and interconnected environment.



The second part of the module is focused on developing your leadership competence and provide you with a toolbox for gaining insight into your strengths and weaknesses as a leader. This will equip you with critical thinking skills to successfully deal with complexity in a globalising world through introducing you to relevant concepts for becoming a responsible leader. In this part, the focus will be on topics such as: Dilemma Thinking and Reconciliation as an approach to dealing with complexity and tensions between stakeholders in the global business environment; Mindful vs Mindless leadership, Emotional and Cultural Intelligence. You will also learn about the application of neuroscience to leadership development and HR management. Based on your understanding of how the brain works, you will create a series of personal challenges in which you aim to explore in-depth knowledge, cultivate and improve specific aspects of your competence (e.g. resilience, emotional labeling, stress management or trust building).

After undertaking this module you will be able to identify the normative presuppositions involved in ethical dialogue and use this in your analysis of ethical issues. This will enable you to better understand conflicts over such issues as executive pay, prompt payment, workplace rights, privacy, positive discrimination and many others. When developing organisation policy, representing the organisation in the media, negotiating agreements and otherwise undertaking work with an ethical dimension, this will enable you to anticipate and plan for objections, to identify weaknesses and contradictions in your interlocutors’ arguments and thereby enable you to better manage ethical conflict at work. Through this process you will also improve your internal ethical dialogue. Clarifying your own normative presuppositions, values and virtues and better understanding their implications and exclusions will enable you to reflect upon the coherence of your own moral agency.

This module critically explores the conceptual and practical tools for analysing and evaluating linear business practices and models from a circular economy perspective and how the growing interest in sustainable production philosophies and techniques together with responsible consumption support the application of circularity. Various platforms (e.g. UNEP) will inform the curriculum, and formative and summative assessments in which the students will engage with. Taking inspiration from real-world business practices from round the globe and contemporary theories will be used throughout the module to inform critical appreciation of the current body of knowledge and develop your decision making and management skills. You will have opportunities to collaborate with similarly minded peers, academics and practitioners on team-based projects that concern both domestic and international organisations working in commercial, social enterprise and public sectors.



The module will expand across the following broad topics:



Economic growth and consumption: the global middle class

Linear and circular economic models

Responsible marketing and consumer behaviour

Green manufacturing

Recycling business models

Sustainable supply chains

Life cycle analysis

Technologies for circular economy

Resource optimisation



The module will also feature a Design Sprint workshop focused on the development of students’ design thinking as a contemporary management tool.

This option is offered as an alternative to the NBS Masters’ Dissertation on all 1-year MSc programmes and in the second semester of year 2 on the 2-year programme variants with Study Abroad and with Advanced Practice (if the students select an Internship in semester 1), again as a Dissertation alternative. It is also offered as alternative to the Management Investigation on the MBA.

On this consultancy based module you will enhance your individual effectiveness and employability skills by locating the learning and development in an organisational context. In doing so, you will promote personal and group development, commercial awareness, and a range of inter-personal, intellectual and practical skills and knowledge centred on and demonstrated through a group negotiated real-time work-based project.

The content of the management report will be unique. The nature and scope of the area of your investigation will be defined and agreed in collaboration with the organisation and the University supervisor. The syllabus will include:

• Conducting research in organisations.
• Identifying researchable questions.
• Consultancy and project management skills.
• Research methods and doing a literature review
• Presentation, communication and report writing skills.
• Analysing findings.
• Writing recommendations and action plans.
• Reflecting on work based experiential learning.

In undertaking this project based module, you will critically reflect and evaluate upon organisational practices and their relation with academic theory, and in doing so, provide practical and actionable recommendations through an investigative management report.

The assessment for your module consists of a Group Consultancy Report (7,000 words) and Final Client Presentation, weighted at 60%, alongside an Individual Assignment comprising a Literature Review (4000 words) and a Reflective Learning Statement (2,000 words), weighted at 40%.

In this module you will gain an understanding of the academic skills that are required to produce a Masters Dissertation. By the end of the module you will have written a 15000 word Masters dissertation. The areas included are:

• Justification for the choice of topic
• Appropriate understanding, awareness and critical analysis of existing and up to date literature evidenced by a comprehensive and well-referenced literature review with an extensive reference list
• Selection, justification and application of an appropriately rigorous methodology - including limitations of the approach selected
• Clear statement of the findings of the research
• Critical analysis of the findings
• Explicit links between the analysis and the conclusions supported by critical argument
• Evidence of original work or thought for example in the form or context of the data collected, analytical process or application of findings

The Management Enquiry module is a student-led individual project that enables you to undertake a significant piece of assessed work commensurate with a capstone module. The module aims to provide you with an opportunity to demonstrate an authentic engagement with managers and/or professionals in your discipline, and to integrate the knowledge you have developed during your programme to explore the theory in practice. The learning on this module is experiential and problem based, where the focus is upon you discovering, probing and questioning key practice-based issues. Through the module you will be offered the opportunity to develop and enhance key transferable employability skills including; time management, project management, communication (written, aural and verbal), negotiation, persuasion and influence, discovery, initiative, problem-solving and analysis.

The module has five thematic areas; explore, review, engage, reflect and connect. These form the key elements of the assessed submission.

Part A (35%, 3,500 Words)
• Explore: Interviewing a manager and/or professional in your discipline. In this interview you will either explore a key issue which you feel the discipline is facing or, alternatively, explore with the manager or professional the key issues that they feel they are facing in practice. It is expected that you will apply appropriate interview methods and provide evidence of the interview within the submitted enquiry report (e.g. within the appendices).
• Review: Critically examining the appropriate literature to support the exploration, displaying an ability to critically assess and appraise the knowledge of your discipline related to a specific key issue arising from your exploration.

Part B (65%, 6,500 Words)
• Engage: Displaying an authentic engagement with the discipline problem/issue identified in Part A, by collecting/generating and analysing further live data (beyond the initial interview) regarding the discipline problem/issue. This live data may be primary data (e.g. further interviews with, or questionnaire to, managers and/or professionals in practice) or secondary data (e.g. industry data). Application of appropriate, ethically-considered, research methods and appropriate qualitative or quantitative data analysis.
• Reflect and Connect: Demonstrating an ability to critically evaluate and reflect on the issues arising from the Management Enquiry. Demonstrating how you have connected and fed-back to the participants of the Enquiry (usually the manager and/or participants) your key findings to provide clear prioritised, well-justified, practical and actionable recommendations for change/enhancement/improvement to existing practice to show how the recommendations would potentially affect workplace professional decision making.

This option module aims to kick start and support the aspirations of students who which to start their own business while at the final stages of their Masters programme and with a strong responsible enterprise focus. Socially responsible enterprises are commercial entities aimed to be profitable and grow in their market. They can be found in a variety of sectors, acting within a local, national or international market-driven space. Their ethos and strategic insight aims at turning a business idea into a commercial activity which transforms lives and delivers towards the fulfilment of the 17 SDGs by the UN.



Students joining the Masters programme may have already formed ideas for a business venture centred around a social or environmental purpose. In the UK alone there over 130,000 social enterprises registered with a combined turnover of £78 billion making a high-value impact to their local economy and beyond, shaping the strategic thinking of other organisations, their consumers and suppliers and inspiring other entrepreneurs. Regardless at whichever stage you may be in your plan to engage in social entrepreneurship you will benefit from the mentorship, advice and resources provided by Northumbria’s Incubator and in particular the Enterprise Development Team, a highly engaged and experienced consultancy team which have supported numerous Northumbria students and graduates in making their business plan a reality. You will make full use of the Northumbria Incubator as a learning environment.



Topics which we will cover in the module include:



Ideation

Design Thinking and Innovation

Business planning

Funding and sources of finance for social entrepreneurs

Business models for social enterprises

Business marketing concepts and ideas

Business pitch skills

Responsible venture capitalist world



The above topics will offer students taking the module sound theoretical and skills competencies in order to develop their socially responsible enterprise business plan, product/service portfolio, seek sources of responsible funding and aim to register their social enterprise venture. The assessment strategy of the module will reinforce the adoption of such skills required to produce an investor-ready business plan.

This 20-credit module delivered is the first semester of the MSc GSBM. It aims to develop your critical understanding and evaluation of the strategies necessary for the sustainability transition. We will identify strategic paths and approaches in order to redesign the economic, rational and innovative aspects of organisations at corporate and business unit levels. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations (UN) and in particular SDGs 8, 9, 11, 12, and 17 will drive inspiration in the classroom and we will review the theoretical constructs and debates in the field of strategic management.

The key topics of the module covered in lectures and interactive seminars span across the following topics:

SDGs and Business Strategy

Typologies of Sustainable Businesses: Organisational hybridity

Theory of Competitive Advantage: Exogenous strategies

Sustainable Strategic Capabilities: Endogenous strategies

Innovation and Sustainability

Social Enterprise [governance, finance & strategies]

Reporting sustainable strategies: from CSR to ESG

Stakeholder salience & Corporate governance

This module aims to develop your academic and professional writing skills necessary to produce a consulting report to a high-level professional standard. It is vital as a future manager who is shaping, promoting and implementing the sustainability agenda to be able to communicate in a clear and articulate manner to the organisation’s internal and external stakeholders the value and challenges of the transition towards a more responsible business model.


The module is based on a series of lectures, seminars and workshops where you will have the opportunity to learn and apply theoretical frameworks aimed to build your research, critical thinking and reflective writing skills. You will be provide with the cognitive tools necessary for a criterial review of information provided in the public domain by various types of organisations on their sustainability credentials and performance. As a future manager confident in your approach to communicate effectively to a wide range of audience you will develop management reporting and writing skills based on complex and multi-disciplinary data, information and other sources of secondary data.



Topics covered in the module are decoding and making sense of complex data sets, critical approach to writing, understanding your audience and stakeholder expectations, reflective and authentic writing, and GRI Sustainability Reporting Standards.