BBA350 Strategic Management

Assignment One Further Guidance

1. Introduction.

I have written these notes to give you some further guidance for the first essay for BBA350.  I hope you find them clear and useful.  

Kind regards

ed

(Dr Edward Wray-Bliss, Unit Convenor)

• The Question

Write a 1000 word academic essay on the following question:

‘How do the dominant technical models of strategic management demonstrate the enduring legacy of militaristic and/or neoliberal values?’

• General Instructions.
• This is a 1000 Word Individual Essay (+/- 10%), due before Friday 12pm (midday) of Week 5, Weighting: 20%
• You will need to submit your essay to turnitin on the unit’s ilearn site.
• No hard copies need to be submitted.
• Please use in-text referencing such as Harvard, not footnotes
• You are required to use essential tutorial readings, several of the additional readings on the ilearn site and concepts and arguments in the lecture slides to answer this question (a minimum of 6 articles from this unit’s ilearn site will need to be used for this essay).
• You are required to take a critical, questioning approach in your essay – not to reproduce taken-for-granted assertions about the importance of strategy.  
• You should base your essay on academic articles that have been uploaded for you on the ilearn site and those referenced in lectures.
• If you wish to use articles and sources from outside the unit you should be aware that these should only be used to supplement the articles on the ilearn site and referenced in the lectures – to hope to pass the assessment you need to show that you have read and used the articles and readings that constitute this unit.
• General discussions of strategy, drawn from sources that do not demonstrate engagement with the readings, ideas and syllabus of this unit will result in a fail mark.  
• A marking rubric has been uploaded for you on the ilearn site and you should check this to see what you are being assessed upon.
• No extensions will be granted. There will be a deduction of 10% of the total available marks made from the total awarded mark for each 24 hour period or part thereof that the submission is late (for example, 25 hours late in submission – 20% penalty).
• This penalty does not apply for cases in which an application for disruption of studies is made to the Faculty and has been approved.
• Further guidance

Here I present some further guidance on the nature of an academic essay.  For some of you this may merely repeat what you already do, for some others it may be a useful refresher.

• An essay is an argument. More specifically it is your argument in relation to the question that you have been set. This means that it is not just a summary of someone else’s views or writing.  It is instead a piece of academic work in which you present your answer to the question asked, that draws on a range of other people’s published academic material to support and develop your answer.

• So, to do this you need to look at the lectures and read-around the subject by selecting from among the tutorial articles and further reading articles on the ilearn site.  Having read a fair few articles, and thought about these and the points from the lecture, you then need to start to work out what your overall argument (your own particular answer to the question asked) is going to be.  Then start to structure and plan this argument and continue to do more reading to develop and support it.  

• Your argument must have a clear, logical structure in the finished essay.  This means explicit Sections, that each deal with a particular aspect of your core argument, and an Introduction, that tells the reader what you will argue and how you will structure your argument.  I would suggest 3 sections for an essay of this length – plus your Introduction and Conclusion.

• Your essay must show evidence of substantial reading of relevant academic material and it must support its main points through references to this published academic material.  For this unit, this means that you need to read, use and cite a minimum of six essential and/or further readings from the unit ilearn site.   

• You essay must have a Conclusion which summarises, again, your argument and how you developed this in the main sections of your essay and it must have an alphabetically ordered bibliography of the items referenced in its pages.          

The concept of using an essay to develop and present an ‘argument’ may be unfamiliar to some of you.  You may be more used to writing essays that merely summarise ‘for’ and ‘against’ points of view, or that summarise sources such as a textbook.  This is not what we are after at this level.  To help with understanding what is meant by developing an ‘argument’ in your essay: your argument is your core, overarching, answer to the question asked.  You need to tell the reader what this argument is in a clear and explicit opening paragraph at the very start of your essay and then tell the reader how you will structure your essay into sections to develop this argument.  (This is, of course, why each tutorial starts by asking you to summarise the argument and structure of the article that you have read –  so as to get you into the idea of seeing academic work as always organised around an argument and a structure).

I have no problem with you using the first-person form of address to do this.  So, for example, your essay may start with something like this:

‘In this essay I am going to argue that both the military origins of strategy and the more recent neoliberal history have had profound effects on the dominant technical models of strategic management.  While a military history and a neoliberal present are quite different contexts, I will argue that in many important ways the effects of these two elements on strategy coincide and are mutually reinforcing.  I make this argument in three sections.  In Section One, I draw upon Knights and Morgan (1990) and Hoskin and MacVe (1988) to argue that the military history of strategy has brought the values of ….. from the military realm into the business realm. I show how these values can be seen in the models of …….. and ……… In Section Two, I draw upon Sewpaul (2015), Bockman (2013), and Styhre (2014) to examine the nature of neoliberalism and I argue that neoliberal values can be seen in the assumptions of ……. In the models of ………..  In Section Three I argue that neither the military nor neoliberalism are encouraging strategic management models that evidence sustainable or equitable strategies.  In the Conclusion to the essay I summarise my argument and I end by considering whether there yet may be ways of conceptualising strategy and the nature of business that do not reproduce such values’  

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