Electives on the MPhil in Management

Information technology (IT) and associated computer-based information systems (IS) continue to have far-reaching effects on our organisations and societies. However, effective use of the potential of IT/IS requires an understanding of people, organisations and technology in combination, which is the focus of this course.

The syllabus covers:

• Introduction: IS and organisations
• Emerging trends
• Reinventing strategy
• Rethinking business processes
• Cultural, structural and political issues
• People and information systems
• Organising IS activities
• Managing and implementing projects

How will new technologies change the nature of work?

In this elective you learn about technologies, work, and organisations. We begin with the fundamentals: What is work? What is technology? How have past predictions about the future of work held up to the historical record of technological change? We then use these core concepts to learn some of the important theories about work and technological change: technological determinism, the social construction of technology, deskilling, the sociology of automation, and visions for a post work society. We then learn about and interrogate ideas about the future of work as it concerns new technologies, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, algorithms, and digital transformation. The theories and concepts taught in this course enable you to think critically about technological change in diverse industries and the future of work more broadly.

Digital currencies are transforming our monetary systems. Since the first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, was introduced in 2008, many new developments have challenged the use of traditional notions of money, payments and financial contracts. Bitcoin and other crypto assets rely on a foundational digital technology – blockchain.

A blockchain is a ledger of encrypted issuance and transaction records stored as a hashed chain of blocks on a distributed network of nodes. All nodes of a given blockchain store copies of the entire history of the blockchain. Some nodes also support a blockchain by selecting, validating and adding/chaining new blocks of records to the ledger in accordance with a pre-specified consensus algorithm.

The blockchain ecosystem currently encompasses ledgers with very diverse underlying technological features (specific cryptographic technologies and electronic sharing protocols), as well as varying governance solutions (private vs open access to the ledger and a variety of consensus algorithms).

This course provides a foundational knowledge of the blockchain technology and goes over a number of its key applications leading up to decentralised finance (DeFi) on the one hand and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), on the other.

This elective provides an understanding of the nature and extent of the globalisation of business, and examines the economic forces that give rise to global economic integration and the nature and behaviour of the key agent of global business, the multinational corporation.

This workshop is designed to make a positive difference (however small) to whatever it is you choose to pursue beyond the programme. The effectiveness of the techniques you pick up here depend not just on their apparent rationality but on how you put them to work with those around you. The beauty is that you can put them into practice pretty much right away.

At the core of this workshop are 4 interactive negotiations exercises. These provide you with hands-on experience of negotiating. They also give you an opportunity to learn about yourself as a negotiator and to learn by observing your colleagues in action and receive (and give) feedback on how you handled different situations. The classroom is a safe environment. We encourage you to experiment with different negotiating styles or analytical techniques, without incurring significant losses or getting hurt. We move progressively from relatively simple to more complex types of negotiations.

This module introduces you to two essential and complementary ways of dealing with future uncertainties. On one hand we have diversification, the intuitive notion that you should “not put all your eggs in one basket”, which is ubiquitous in modern management. This exemplifies passive risk management. On the other we have the real options paradigm. This emphasises that future value depends on both unfolding uncertainties, which you cannot control, and the flexibility of your future responses. By investing in research and development projects, for example, companies buy the option to launch a product, which they may or may not exercise, depending on the level of success of the R&D effort and on market conditions at the time of launch. However, flexibility also costs money: R&D expenditure, for example in the biotech industry, can be huge. So how much flexibility shall we build into the system? This is the realm of project design for active risk management. System designers and project managers need tools that help them decide if added flexibility is worth the money. This course gives you a mindset and a suite of tools to tackle such problems.

All participants are expected to be familiar with probability and statistics at the level of an introductory undergraduate course.

With decreasing geographical barriers, emerging markets and lower labour costs that lure firms overseas, managers face the challenge of aligning and coordinating global manufacturing and supply networks. Supply chain management has become both a core management function, as well as a source for competitive advantage of companies across industry sectors. This elective provides an in-depth discussion on how companies use their supply chain strategies as competitive advantage. Based on the notion that in fact “entire value chains compete, rather than individual companies”, this exploration of the subject includes some of the latest tools and techniques for analysing and improving supply chain processes.