Sustainable Business in the 21st century

LEARNING OUTCOMES

Upon successful completion of the module students will be able to:

1. Evaluate critically a range of current sustainability concerns.

2. Evaluate critically the role of sustainability including business ethics and corporate (social) responsibility.

3. Evaluate critically the impact that business activities have on the environment and the options for sustainable alternatives, including relevant economic and social factors.

4. Reflect upon their own actions and those of others in business in relation to sustainability and be able to identify appropriate alternatives.

This assessment has been designed to enable you to demonstrate that you have achieved (and exceeded) the learning outcomes.

• Essay covering learning outcomes 1-4. (3,000 words, equivalent to 100% of module assessment plus a bibliography).

Assessment Title: Sustainable Business in the 21st century

• Part A – Sustainable Business In A Selected Industry
(For Part B select one of either: clothes retailing or tourism)
The aim of this essay is to demonstrate:
(a) knowledge and understanding acquired from study of module MMB019, and
(b) ability to apply ideas considered in the module to a particular ‘real-world’ context.
Work which does not meet this aim will be assessed as a ‘fail’.

2. It is essential that your essay demonstrates knowledge and understanding acquired from study of module MMB019.

Study of module MMB019 means the following.

You are assumed to have read all documents and other material provided on the module Moodle page, such as the module handbook, assessment instructions, information on plagiarism, on Harvard referencing, and so on.

The module proceeds with a series of lectures and seminars.

Lectures explain some key ideas and also recommend publications in which these ideas are further explained and discussed. You should aim to understand these key ideas fully and to form a critical assessment of them. It is unlikely that you will achieve this by simply attending the lecture – you will need to review the lecture slides and your own notes, together with the recommended publications. In addition to explaining key ideas, lectures also act as a guide to further relevant material that is explained less thoroughly in the lecture, but which is explained and discussed in recommended publications that you should read and study independently. Overall, lectures can be viewed as a guide to what you should be reading and learning, and as providing some explanation to assist with this learning.

Seminars take a number of forms. For example, seminars may involve discussion of basic module information such as how to approach the assessment. Or you may be asked to read some material before the seminar, ready to discuss it. Or seminars may provide formative feedback on draft student work – and so on. Similarly to lectures, all of the activities undertaken in seminars can be seen as a guide to what you should be reading and learning.

Considerable emphasis is placed on reading particular recommended publications. Some of these publications are provided to you in convenient electronic form, but you will also require hardcopy items that are available in limited quantities in the library. Part of your study of this module involves planning ahead to ensure that you obtain the publications that you need in a timely manner, by borrowing items for copying or scanning, or purchasing your own copies.

From the above it follows that in order to demonstrate knowledge and understanding acquired from study of module MMB019 (as the assessment requires) your essay must – as a minimum – discuss ideas and publications that are referred to in lectures and seminars. Work which does not do this will be assessed as a ‘fail’.

The above describes a fairly basic approach to studying the module. There are additional things that you can do in order to achieve higher marks – please see notes 7, 8 and 9 below.

3. Part A – Overview Of Key Module Ideas
is an opportunity to showcase your learning and critical understanding of a selection of key material in module MMB019. Please do not try to summarise the entire module; but you should take the opportunity to demonstrate both breadth and depth of learning and understanding of module material.

You may find it helpful to refer to the following reminder of topics considered in the lectures and recommended reading.

Sustainability and Sustainable Development
including, for example, sustainability concerns, environmental limits, the environmental Kuznets curve, cleaner production, eco-efficiency, life cycle assessment, industrial symbiosis, pollution taxes, tradable permits, the least cost theorem, sustainability as conservation of capital stocks of various kinds (Hartwick rule).

Business Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility
including, for example, morality, ethics and ethical theory, regional differences and alternative perspectives, key issues, corporate social responsibility: Friedman’s critique, Carroll’s pyramid, Freeman’s stakeholders, Elkington’s triple bottom line, fair trade certification.

Corporate Governance
including, for example, the principal-agent relationship, shareholder activism, ethical issues, differing models of capitalism.

Sustainability Strategies and Leadership
including, for example, Orsato’s model as a useful framework for addressing sustainable business issues, strengths and weaknesses of this model, sustainability leadership.

To repeat:
the assessment does not ask you to summarise all of these topics, but rather to discuss selected key module ideas so as to demonstrate both breadth and depth of learning and understanding of material considered in module MMB019. The above information is provided as a helpful reminder of what you are choosing from.

4. Part B – Sustainable Business In A Selected Industry
is an opportunity to consider how the selected key ideas discussed in Part A apply in detail to a particular ‘real-world’ context.
You must select one of either:
– clothes retailing, or
– tourism.
In your chosen industry, you may, for example, consider:
Which issues are particularly important? (eg regarding sustainability, ethics, governance, etc).
Are there notable examples of bad practice in this industry? Notable examples of good practice?
Which academic ideas may be useful in addressing these issues? How can they be applied?
What sustainable business strategy might be adopted by a forward-looking enterprise in your chosen industry?

5. You must include your name and/or student number, the module code (MMB019) and the title of your critical essay at the beginning of the document.
All pages must be numbered. Single line spacing should be used throughout. The minimum font size is 10 point.
Please do not provide an abstract or executive summary or a table of contents (a document with these features would typically be called a report, not an essay).
Any tables or figures must be labelled similar to:
Figure 1: Demand and Production Possibility Frontiers.
If the table or figure uses information from a publication, then a citation is also needed, similar to:
Figure 1: Demand and Production Possibility Frontiers.(Reinert 2012, p35).

6. You must use the Harvard system to acknowledge publications that you have consulted and to provide evidence to support any claims that you make. The Harvard system is sometimes called the name-date system since in-text citations are in the format: (Reinert 2012).

Citations must be used whenever your essay mentions something that you know because you have read about it somewhere, to acknowledge the person who wrote it.
Internet addresses should almost never be shown in the main text of your essay; instead provide a citation using the Harvard name-date format. Full information including the web address is then provided in your list of references.

Your essay will often take ideas that you have read about and explain these using your own words, to show that you understand – this is called paraphrasing. Whenever you paraphrase, you need a citation.

Rarely, you may want to reproduce exactly the words written by someone else; this is a quotation. Wherever you include a quotation you need more than just a citation – also the exact words reproduced must be in quotation marks “like this” and the citation should include the page number.

Lectures and similar University teaching material should not usually be cited in your essay. Part of the purpose of most lectures is to draw your attention to publications that you should read – it is these publications that you should cite (and read).

You must provide a reference list at the end of your essay giving full information of each publication cited in the text. This should be a single list (not separate lists for books, web publications, etc) in alphabetical order by author surname. There are precise rules about exactly how this should be done; information is provided on the Moodle page for this module, also see: http://library.yorksj.ac.uk/smile/Smile_Harvard_Referencing.pdf

While there are no hard-and-fast rules, it is unlikely that a good essay for this module will have a reference list containing fewer than 10 publications.

7. The preceding guidance notes aim to explain the essential requirements of the assessment required for a ‘pass’. Once you have met these essential requirements, additional marks are available for things such as:

– demonstrating detailed, critical or insightful understanding of relevant theory

– finding interesting real-world data or case study examples and explaining how
these relate to the general issues or illustrate academic theories

– demonstrating your understanding of relevant good quality academic
publications (eg located using YSJ library databases Emerald, Business Source
Premier, Web of Science or Academic Onefile in preference to material found
using web search engines)

– demonstrating an awareness of different points of view, of how they relate to each
other and of how they can reasonably coexist

– demonstrating an appreciation of linkages: how ideas fit together; for example
sustainability, ethics and CSR are all related in subtle ways

– overall clarity and insight demonstrated in your essay style and structure

– achieving an overall ‘critical essay’ style (please see further explanation below).

8. The logical structure of your essay is important in demonstrating your academic skills and your understanding of the topic.

The essay should begin with a paragraph describing the aim of the essay and the structure of what follows.

The essay should have clear sections on well-defined topics that relate to each other in a logical way that develops the points you are making. These sections can be defined either using headings or by explaining what is happening in your text (eg above X was considered; Y is also important, this is considered next…).

Paragraphs are an important way of organizing what you write. The basic idea is that each paragraph should explore a single coherent idea; a new idea needs a new paragraph. It is good to keep paragraphs fairly short. There is no hard-and-fast rule about paragraph length but as a rough guide you should try not to exceed 10 to 15 lines of text, with many paragraphs shorter than this.

Since each paragraph contains an idea, and most ideas in your essay come from things that you have read, this implies that most paragraphs will contain at least one citation.

The essay should end with a paragraph (possibly two or three paragraphs) of conclusions. An essay of this type is very unlikely to reach a dramatic conclusion – don’t try. It is usually best to view the conclusion of your essay as a summary of the main points previously made in the essay. This means that you will not usually introduce new material in the concluding paragraph(s). Providing a concise and insightful conclusion is another way in which you can demonstrate your good understanding.

9. It is important to understand what is meant here by a ‘critical essay’. The key characteristic of a ‘critical essay’ as opposed to any other kind of essay is that it must demonstrate a sensitive appreciation that the topic under consideration is ‘contested’. This means that there is no single, universally-agreed, correct point of view.

The main aim in a critical essay is not to discover who is ‘right’ and who is ‘wrong’ but instead to demonstrate a thoughtful, balanced and detailed understanding of different perspectives on the topic, of how they relate to each other, and of how it is possible for reasonable people to disagree on such matters.

10. If you are in any doubt about any of the above, please discuss this with the module leader at your first opportunity. These matters are also discussed in seminars.

ASSESSMENT CRITERIA AND MARKING SCHEME ATTCHED.

PLEASE read the Assignment Brief very carefully and care about all points.