business and management studies assignment page

Business and Organizations - Assignment 1 - Feb 2005 veryard projects > organization and management > assignment > BO Feb 2005

Task

Due Date

Business and Organizations - Assignment 2 - March 2004 veryard projects > organization and management > assignment > BO March 2004

DUE DATE

TOPIC

DIRECTIONS

Business and Organizations - Assignment 1 - Feb 2004 veryard projects > organization and management > assignment > BO Feb 2004

Task

2500 words, to be handed into the undergraduate office by Friday February 20th.

Include references to the sources you have used.
 

BSkyB

FAQ

When you find a strongly expressed opinion on the company in question, you should be able to position this opinion. Where is this person coming from – what is their agenda – how are they looking at this? For example, a political or regulatory perspective on the broadcasting industry may yield quite different views to a commercial or investment perspective. You need to show how different perspectives produce contrasting views. In order to do this, you have to analyse at least two different perspectives.

What is meant by P/E?

P/E stands for Price/Earnings ratio – it is the current share price divided by the latest figure/estimate on earnings per share.

BBC does not have a P/E ratio because it is a public corporation funded by a licence fee, rather than a commercial company.

ITV does not yet have a P/E ratio because it has only recently been formed (by a merger between Carlton and Grenada), and no earnings figures have been published since the merger.

Please don’t. The markers reserve the right to stop reading when they reach the maximum number of words, so your efforts beyond that point may be wasted.

There is no official minimum. If you can express what you need to say clearly and succinctly, there is no need to pad it out. However, if you fail to communicate the depth and intelligence of your analysis, you may not get many marks.

In this assignment, the structure is up to you. Your task is to communicate your findings and analysis as clearly as possible. You may find it helpful to you and the reader to make the structure clear, using headings and subheadings as appropriate.

This is optional. Source material need not be included in the word count. All material should be briefly summarized in the assignment itself, so that it is possible to make sense of the assignment without reading the appendix.

We do not penalize incorrect English, provided we can make sense of it.

Business and Organizations - Assignment 2 - March 2004 veryard projects > organization and management > assignment > BO March 2004

Purpose

In each tutorial, we have looked at a specific case in some detail. Cases have been chosen because they illustrate some repeating themes and issues of business and organization. One of the ways you should be able to demonstrate what you have learned is to be able to apply the same kind of thinking to similar cases that you have found in your reading or picked up from the media.

Instructions

1. Find at least three business stories that are interesting to you. Note where you found them and summarise each story briefly.
2. For each story do the following two steps:
3. Find some connection (a parallel, a contrast, a comparison, an application) between one or more of the tutorials and the story. Try to find a connection that gives a different view of the story than that taken by the original source. Document which tutorial applies and what aspect of the tutorial you are using.
4. Say why you think the connection is relevant, interesting or important to you. This part of the assignment must be in your own words

• your understanding of the relevance of the business perspectives covered in the course and practiced in the tutorials
• your background reading in the press and on the net about current business issues and sources

Your background reading could also be recorded in your log but we do not require this. Note particularly when something strikes you as interesting and why.

Criteria

• Refer clearly to what you have written in your log
• Identify the particular business stories and what issues are raised for you
• State briefly what insight you can derive from applying what you have learnt

Deadline

Foundations of Business - Assignment - Feb 2003 veryard projects > organization and management > assignment > FOB Feb 2003

Using Internet and other sources, find recent examples of at least one merger and at least one demerger (20 marks). Use these examples to discuss mergers and demergers from the perspectives of economics (20 marks), ethics (20 marks), sociology (20 marks), and systems theory (20 marks).

Your answer may include some of the following considerations, but need not be limited to them.

Economics. How is a merger or demerger supposed to create/release economic value? What specific benefits were claimed in the examples you have found?

Ethics. What are the consequences of the merger or demerger for various categories of stakeholder?

Sociology. How does the merger or demerger redistribute power? What aspects of the merger or demerger take the longest time to implement, and why?

Systems Theory. How are mergers and demergers regulated.

Target. 2500 words. To be handed into the undergraduate office by Friday February 28th.

Notes on Mergers and Demergers (pdf)

Organizational Behaviour - Assignment - Nov 2002 veryard projects > organization and management > assignment > OB Nov 2002

Task

Overview

The purpose of the assignment is to explore some of the people issues within an organization.

What is the organisation trying to do? How does the person you are interviewing try to manage that task?

Your report should describe the nature of the task facing the organization, indicate some of the issues with managing people to perform the required task(s) effectively and efficiently, and describe how the interviewee has attempted or is attempting to tackle these issues.

What other ways have you learnt to think about these same issues?

Your report should also comment on the issues and the management response from the perspective of the theories presented on the Organizational Behaviour module.

Deadline

Interview Guidelines

Selecting a target

The interviewee is likely to be known personally to you – perhaps a member of your own family, or a family friend.

Arranging the interview

Find somewhere private, quiet and not too casual. A quiet and anonymous coffee bar is okay, a noisy pub may be difficult, a sitting-room packed with other family members is completely out of the question.

Topics

• The nature of the task facing the organization.
• The degree of uncertainty and anxiety associated with the task.
• The way the organization is structured to address the task.
• Leadership style
• Motivation and morale. Stress levels and stress release mechanisms.

Conducting the interview

Don’t expect the interviewee to be familiar with organization theory or jargon, and don’t use time in the interview explaining organization theory.

It’s a useful technique to switch off your mobile in front of the interviewee as the interview starts, because this sometimes prompts the interviewee to switch theirs off as well. If for some reason you really need to leave your phone on, explain that you are expecting an urgent call – but do not talk to anyone.

Keep to the allotted time, and do not overrun. When you are close to the end of your time slot (say 5-10 minutes to the end), it’s a useful technique to provide your own summary of what you have been told, and ask if there is anything important you have omitted.

Addressing Problems

However, do not expect problems to be easy to solve. Explore what approaches to dealing with these problems have already been attempted, and how successful these approaches were. When making recommendations, consider the conditions for these recommendations to be successfully implemented, and any likely side-effects.

While you should not devote too much time to the economic arguments, you should avoid making recommendations that are unlikely to be economically viable. (For example, if a department is grossly over-worked, you may think that the appropriate solution is simply to employ lots more people, or to introduce expensive automation. Such recommendations are unlikely to be accepted by cash-strapped organizations. However, if you can show that a relatively small expenditure can achieve a significant improvement, then you may have a better chance of acceptance.)

Report Guidelines

Length

Anonymity

Completeness

Visible reasoning process

• The observations made and any problems or issues reported by the people interviewed
• The different perspectives on the situation which can be generated using Organisation Behaviour Theories and insights
• The evaluation of the options for different potential recommendations
• The chosen recommendations

Critical distance

Avoid the temptation to stay close to the viewpoint of the person interviewed. As a guideline it is always useful to establish a different (though not necessarily contradictory) perspective in analysing the situation.

For instance, when a particular style of management has been adopted, you might look at your predictions of how the set of issues and problems would look from the perspective of a different management style. You don’t have to recommend the management style you are using in order to use this technique.

In some cases, you may be able to achieve some critical distance by using the viewpoints of more than one person in the organization studied.

Foundations of Business - Assignment - Feb 2002 veryard projects > organization and management > assignment > FOB Feb 2002

Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of bureaucracy as an organizational form. Include economic, ethical, social and system-theoretic considerations. Illustrate with examples wherever possible. Maximum 2500 words.  Work to be handed in by February 25th.

Marking Scheme

In general, we have found it much easier to award marks to students who have structured their essays in a way that matches the question, discussing each area separately.

Where students have failed to provide a clear structure to the essay, we have attempted to award marks according to the following keyword scheme.
 

General	20 marks	nature of bureaucracy, historical trends, alternatives
Economics	20 marks	efficiency, productivity, reduces transaction cost, specialization, (rational) decision-making
Ethics	20 marks	agency cost, responsibility, fairness, reduces favouritism, equal opportunity, goal displacement
Social	20 marks	standardization, motivation, power, authority, conflict, hostility, trust, machine-like organization, culture, clarity/visibility, surveillance
Systems Theory	20 marks	communication, information flows, resistance to change, responsiveness to environment, flexibility, dysfunction, servomechanism

General strengths

Many students discussed the characteristics of bureaucracy in particular countries – in some cases, these may be the country of origin for the student or his/her family. In some cases, this provided an opportunity for the student to bring in aspects of the material that had some personal significance. We welcome this, especially where the students have successfully integrated this with other material.

Many students have introduced stories – either from personal experience or from secondary sources. In general, it is always useful to illustrate the theoretical material with such examples, although some students should apply greater caution in applying these examples (see below).

There are many amusing cartoons, quotes and anecdotes about bureaucracy. A little well-chosen humour in an essay does no harm. However, you should show that you are capable of going beyond humorous soundbites.

General weaknesses

Some students seem to have based their essay on only one source. Although Weber is an important historical source for bureaucracy, you should not attempt to base your essay entirely on the views of a sociologist who was writing over a hundred years ago.

You should be careful to avoid circular reasoning. This was particularly noticeably with examples taken from secondary sources.  Here’s an example of some stupid administrative behaviour, so it must have been bureaucratic, therefore it supports my argument that bureaucracy is bad. (It’s quite possible for an organization to be incompetent without being bureaucratic.)

Don’t assume that something is bureaucratic simply because someone (who may know considerably less about bureaucracy than you do) labels it as bureaucratic. If you do an Internet search for “Bureaucracy”, you may well retrieve some dubious material from people who don’t know what they’re talking about. Such material may still have some value, but you need to process it carefully – this means filtering, interpretation and critique.

Don’t conclude too much from a single example. While analysing an example of a bureaucratic organization may indicate a possible weakness in bureaucracy, it doesn’t prove it.

Some students focused on bureaucrats rather than bureaucracy as a system. Focus on bureaucrats allows you to say something about the social and ethical aspects of bureaucracy, but not much about the economic and systems-theoretic aspects.

At university level, there is a much greater diversity of material, and much less likelihood that the person reading your essay is familiar with the same material and the same examples. It’s not good enough to throw in a diagram or mention an example without introducing it and explaining it properly.
 

Misconceptions about Bureaucracy

Organizational Behaviour - Assignment - Nov 2001 veryard projects > organization and management > assignment > OB Nov 2001

Assignment One: Small Business Development

Context

1. A small business you know where you can interview the owner or manager
2. An autonomous unit of a larger business or other organization (so long as it has some scope for development by its own management) where you can interview the manager
3. The case study provided (food wholesale business).

Task

• Customer service needs to be more consistent
• The business needs to innovate to stay ahead of the competition
• More attention needs to be paid to safety
• The performance of the organisation in meeting key goals needs to improve
• Unaccounted for losses of products need to be reduced
• Product quality need to become more consistent
• Productivity and/or quality is suffering because of poor motivation and stress.

Requirements

Marking scheme

Assignment Two: Perspectives on Railtrack

1) Describe the internal organizational behaviour issues faced by Railtrack and its successor organization. What was the effect on the internal organization of the recent rail disasters?

Requirements

General Comments on Assignments

Read the question

Consider organizations as systems

This is particularly true of motivation, a subject many assignments have paid attention to. The potential conflict between internal motivation, interest in doing a good job, and external motivation by targets and rewards needs a much subtler understanding. A policy that is supposed to increase motivation may very well reduce motivation in practice.

Pay attention to behaviour

Use the course material. Refer to the theory. Give relevant examples. Explore connections.

Visible reasoning process

To some extent there must be a separation of:

• The observations made and any problems or issues reported by the people interviewed
• The different perspectives on the situation which can be generated using Organization Behaviour Theories and insights
• The evaluation of the options for different potential recommendations
• The chosen recommendations

Critical distance / Courage to analyse

There is a general tendency to stay close to viewpoint of the person interviewed or to the reporting perspective in the supplied case study. As a guideline it is always useful to establish a different (though not necessarily contradictory) perspective in analysing the situation.

For instance, when a particular style of management has been adopted, you might look at your predictions of how the set of issues and problems would look from the perspective of a different management style. You don’t have to recommend the management style you are using in order to use this technique.

Some assignments have achieved some critical distance by using the viewpoints of more than one person in the organization studied. This is also a useful technique.

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