Sustainable Business Leadership (Professional Practice) MSc

Throughout your professional career you are likely to be confronted with debates about sustainability and managing scarce resources more effectively. It is essential that you are able to engage in these debates with future employers, colleagues and other stakeholders. This module provides an opportunity to explore the challenges of responsible resource management through circular economic thinking and solutions that enable business and society to go beyond a traditional model of linear production and consumption. You'll consider and aim to become familiar with debates about how far the adoption of circular economic principles takes us in this direction.

This module explores the links between people management practices and positive organisational outcomes and how these are achieved in different types of organisational contexts. Focusing on leadership, flexibility and change management, the aim being to help students become effective strategic managers as well as effective HR specialists, managing others fairly and effectively and increasing levels of engagement, commitment and performance.

As more and new corporate and trading actors emerge onto the global commercial scene, questions as to the relationship between business and human rights increasingly raise profound and intriguing problems of law and policy. This module, alert to historic developments, and drawing on principles of international law, investigates how national, regional and international initiatives to regulate the ever-changing dynamics of financial and cultural globalisation, are affecting respect for human rights in contemporary society. Your study will focus on some of the key dilemmas and opportunities arising from shifts in power dynamics towards non-state actors, enquiring as to how the UN’s negotiation and legal frameworks are adapting for the purpose of protecting rights and ensuring the viability of trading networks in the 21st century.

Businesses around the globe are becoming more aware of their role in helping to build a more sustainable future. Consequently, this module will aim to provide you with an integrative understanding of the role of business in overcoming the challenges of sustainability. Utilising both theory and practice-based frameworks related to business responsibility, corporate sustainability and sustainable development, you will have the opportunity to identify, and assess the challenges associated with the responsibilities of business. You will also be introduced to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with a view towards examining how businesses could collaborate to achieve these.

In today’s highly mobile and interconnected world of business, you will undoubtedly find yourself working with culturally diverse teams, partnerships and customer bases. It is therefore essential that you are able to offer future employers, colleagues and other stakeholders an adaptable interculturally aware and responsive approach. In the light of that, this module fosters transferable skills fundamental to global employability. Your professional and personal development will be guided through the application of the eight CIPD Behaviours, University of Huddersfield’s target Graduate Attributes, and key Intercultural Effectiveness skills and mindsets. As you develop professionally through your subject studies you will increase consciousness of your individual cultural make-up and the impact of this on behaviour, relationships and worldview in order to navigate beyond the borders of your own culture. You will develop a conscious approach to effective global practice, responding positively to difference, and constructing strategies to deal with intercultural workplace encounters.

Adopting a cross-disciplinary approach to pressing global challenges, the module will explore the humanitarian problems raised by challenges such as migration in the Mediterranean, the use of chemical weapons, desertification, global inequality, and issues around (de)development. By interrogating theoretical, practical, and legalistic responses to unfolding humanitarian challenges the module will draw on scholarship in disciplines including law, geography, and economics to provide a critical and engaging study of tested and innovative humanitarian strategies. You will consider and critique how problems of a transnational and global nature are being addressed by reference to a combination of technical, diplomatic, and legal initiatives.

The Individual Research Project provides an opportunity to pursue your own interests and engage more deeply with your subject by completing an in-depth piece of research work using relevant research methods. Working autonomously, but under the guidance of a supervisor, you will make choices about the most appropriate methods and then conduct your own research project. Through the Individual Research Project, you will have the opportunity to greatly enhance your own knowledge and skills. The research will be presented in written format using academic conventions recognised in your field.

The Group Consultancy Project provides you with the opportunity to engage in a ‘real world’ live client brief. You will work in small teams and will be expected to engage in the process of scoping the project with the business client, undertake the necessary information gathering, analysing the information and make recommendations to the client. As part of this module, you will also need to evaluate how principles of ethics, sustainability and responsibility influence your professional decision making.

The module will encourage you to develop your entrepreneurial mind-set, and help you understand the challenges and opportunities of starting and running a new venture. Your entrepreneurial skills and abilities will be guided through the application of different entrepreneurial tools and techniques – as well as practical exercises - that should enable you to assess your own entrepreneurial readiness, while preparing for the risky, uncertain and challenging environment of creating new ventures.