Modern Languages with Business BA

This module presents a formal analysis of entrepreneurship in theory and practice leading on to a consideration of creativity and business concept generation. You’ll have 11 two-hour lectures with the module concluding with the practical application of these theories and concepts in a business planning and business concept presentation.

The module explores the nature of work and society. The module will look at the development of our understanding of work and society. The development of the industrial and the post-industrial society will be explored and its impact on the nature of work, organisation and management.

There will be a historical and critical review of the schools of thought and key writers. Examples of research into individual and group experiences of work, organisation and management will be discussed.

This module will engage you in the more practical elements of innovation and enterprise activity, in terms of creating new businesses and entrepreneurship within the corporate environment. You will become prepared for enterprise activity across a variety of contexts. 

This module will introduce you to the basic ideas of organisational behaviour. The content will encourage you to develop an understanding of managing and developing people within business organisations.

The module will draw its primary material from the major theorists and theories of both organisational psychology and organisational behaviour. The module will also develop links with other aspects of the business school curriculum such as general management and international business.

You will receive a firm grounding in the structures of French through the core language module. You will also follow a core module 'Introduction to French and Francophone Studies' which will prepare you for studying the range of topics and skills you will develop in your degree course. You will also choose optional modules in French literature and the history and politics of contemporary France.

This module will focus on a selection of themes: French political institutions, with particular emphasis on the presidency; political parties in France; immigration and identity, including questions of identity in contemporary French culture.

This module aims to introduce students to the comparative study of literature and culture, inviting students to consider how Paris is represented in a range of texts (poetic, narrative and filmic) in the modern period (post-1800). Students will learn reading techniques adapted to different genres and media, and to consider representations of the city within their broader social, historical and critical contexts.

This is the core module for first year students of German. We look at the history of German and introduce you to the linguistic study of the language, and at a range of themes and styles in German literature linked to key areas of German and Austrian culture (such as gender relations, migration, and race). Further topics address the study of German film, and German history with a focus on recent history since German reunification in 1990. The module gives students insight into the different areas we teach and also the skills to explore these areas in more depth in subsequent modules.

This module will introduce students to selected topics in the history of the Low Countries from the sixteenth century to the present day. It will focus on a number of key events and periods such as the fall of Antwerp in 1585, the Belgian Revolution of 1830, the Flemish Movement and the Second World War. You’ll spend two hours per week in lectures and seminars studying for this module.

Although the Third Reich is very well researched, it still raises many questions: How could Adolf Hitler gain so much power? How could a whole nation ‘fall’ for the Nazi ideology? Why the Jews? In this module we will discuss and research Nazi politics as well as its society and culture. We will consider propaganda, the press, youth and women’s organisations, as well as the role of films, art and literature. Theoretical writings on fascist ideology will provide us with relevant background knowledge and we will work with original German materials such as documents, newspapers, photos, posters, films and speeches.

This module introduces students to important areas and topics in Russian and Slavonic Studies, examining important aspects of the histories and cultures of the region, as well as aspects of the languages, cultures and literary traditions. You will learn to analyse a wide range of cultural phenomena, including pictures, music, film, literary texts and other kinds of written sources.

This module introduces the development of Russian history and culture, starting with the reign of Peter the Great (1682-1725), following the development of Russia into a modern state through to the end of the 19th century, and ending with a survey of the Bolshevik Revolution and the early Soviet period (1917-c.1928). Alongside the history of Russia, students learn about aspects of Russian culture relevant to different periods of its history (such as painting, architecture, music, folklore and religious beliefs).

This year-long module introduces Russian literature of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries through study of texts by canonical writers such as Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Zamiatin, Bulgakov and Akhmatova, as well as by some exciting contemporary authors. Alongside insights into the changing culture of Russia over this dynamic period of history, the module equips students with skills for analysing and discussing prose, poetry and drama.

You’ll read a series of key texts from Spain and Spanish America. Its purpose is to impart an essential body of literary-historical and cultural knowledge relating to the main periods, genres and conventions of literature in Spanish from the Middle Ages to the modern period. You’ll spend two hours per week in lectures and seminars studying for this module.

In this module you’ll study the evolution of Spanish and Portuguese history, politics and culture from 1898 to the present day. You’ll be encouraged to draw links between the Portuguese and Spanish experiences, and place both countries’ experience of the twentieth century within the broader context of European and wider global history in this period. Particular emphasis will be placed upon the development of both countries from a (perceived) position of ‘difference’ and ‘backwardness’ to relatively prosperous, economically developed and culturally diverse members of the European Union. You’ll spend around four hours in lectures each week.

This module is designed to focus on the strategic and operational aspects of marketing management. It will examine:

• understanding the marketing concept
• the role of marketing within business and its contribution to business performance and enhancing value
• developing marketing strategy
• segmentation, targeting and positioning
• managing the marketing mix
• planning and implementation

This module will develop your understanding of entrepreneurship in an international context through considering a range of key issues and topics. The module adopts a critical and broad-ranging social science approach to the subject and aims to provide you with the ability to analyse entrepreneurship from an international perspective within the context of a wide range of management, organisation studies and social science debates.

The module focuses on both the conceptual aspects of international entrepreneurship as well as practical elements in order to equip you with a valid grounding of both theory and practice.

To aid the formulation of effective strategies, this module will introduce and analyse the fundamental tools and techniques of strategic management. Content will include:

• the concept of strategy
• environmental analysis (including the Five Forces framework, strategic groups, and scenario planning)
• internal resources and competencies (including the resource-based view, core competencies, and dynamic capabilities)
• positioning strategies (including Porter's Generic Strategies, Value Chain, and Blue Ocean Strategy)
• corporate strategy and diversification (including portfolio matrices and Rumelt's diversification types)
• the alignment of strategy and structure
• growth methods, including M&A and strategic alliances

This module considers several of the transformations that have arisen in contemporary organisations as a result of the use of information systems. Topics include different ways to understand the relationship between technology and organisation and implications of technology for knowledge management and other management areas.

This module explores a range of political and social issues relevant to contemporary sub-Saharan Francophone Africa through literature, film and popular culture. It also offers an overview of the history of the French language in Africa and introduces students to the range of varieties of French spoken there today. You’ll have an hour each of seminars and lectures weekly for this course.

This module explores the socio-cultural politics of equality through the study of three key texts by prominent French and Francophone thinkers. It considers the equality and inequality of class, gender and race through close readings of the texts within the wider context of twentieth-century French and Francophone history and culture as well as in relation to major philosophical and theoretical ideas and traditions such as semiotics, linguistics, Marxism, postcolonialism, existentialism, feminism and psychoanalysis. You’ll have an hour long seminar weekly plus a workshop to aid your understanding of the module content.

The module will focus on the interplay between language and politics in 21st-century French. It will address issues of ideology, identity, and power in French-speaking countries from a linguistic perspective. Students will examine the driving forces behind the invention and the preservation of standard French, the role of norms and variation in identity politics, and the role of language choices in current political debates in France. Students will apply the principles and methods of sociolinguistics and cognitive linguistics to a variety of recent textual and audiovisual documents, and digital data (TV programmes, news broadcasts, interviews, radio podcasts, corpora based on social media and online newspapers).

In this module we will study the role of radio and television in Germany. We will investigate the cultural and economic functions of those media in German society and analyse the relationship between public and commercial broadcasters. We will study a range of programming formats (news, infotainment, soaps, quiz shows) and discuss a variety of critical approaches to understanding modern media. Intercultural issues will be explored through comparisons with British television.

Building on the introductions to literary study in year 1, this second-year module combines the detailed discussion of stories (Novellen) from the 19th century with a closer look at the ways in which German literature engages with European and world history between 1789 and 1914. Historical themes include the French Revolution, the memory of Napoleon, and the impact of industrialisation and colonial globalisation in the 19th century. Authors include Joseph von Eichendorff (the quintessential German Romantic poet), Wilhelm Hauff (one of the first modern professional writers), and Wilhelm Raabe (a leading representative of German Realism). 

This module will introduce students to the history of the Germanic languages, from the earliest linguistic evidence up to the present day. We will investigate the major sound changes that distinguish Dutch, German and other Germanic languages like English from the rest of the Indo-European language family (which includes French, Greek, and many other European languages, as well as Sanskrit). You'll look at the process by which Dutch and German went their separate ways , ultimately emerging as two standardised languages in the 17th century. You'll spend two hours per week in lectures and seminars.

You’ll gain an understanding of the growth and development of the cult of saints in the Eastern Christian world in the context of the history and culture of late antiquity and the middle ages. In particular, you’ll learn to interpret original written sources and icons and will master the basic tools for conducting research in the field, spending around three hours in lectures and seminars each week. 

In this module you will acquire an in-depth understanding of developments in Russian society and culture as reflected in popular and influential films from around 1900 to the present day. You’ll examine how films are constructed technically and develop skills in analysing cinema in its historical and social contexts. You’ll spend two hours per week in lectures and seminars

This module provides you with an introduction to the themes of dissidence and exile, central notions in Russian literature, culture and thinking, using the examples of the life and work of four major Russian writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Bulgakov). You will learn the theory of different literary forms (verse narrative, novel, short story and drama).

This module aims to provide an introduction to cinema and painting in in Spain, Portugal and Latin America, from the late fifteenth century to the present. You will learn to analyse paintings in terms of what is spatially and metaphorically represented on the canvas, and in understanding the styles and contexts from which the paintings emerge. You will also be trained in addressing questions of style, form, socio-historical context and narrative in contemporary cinema from Spain and Latin America. You will gain skills in critical analysis, research methods, and presenting complex arguments, and an understanding of visual texts as documents bearing witness to the temper of their times.

This module brings together the histories and cultures of key regions of the world in which Portugal establishes varying degrees of colonial rule between the 16th and 20th centuries. In this module you will examine the historical background to the age of Discoveries against which Portugal emerged as a leader in maritime exploration and European Imperialism. You will also examine the historical and political events of Portuguese colonialism and imperialism in Africa and Brazil, with an emphasis on understanding the political and social significance of cultural production in developing countries. In this module you will have a combination of lectures and seminars totalling 2 hours per week.

In this module you will be introduced to some of the major texts of the Portuguese-speaking world. You will examine the ways in which ideas of nationhood and national identity have been expressed and constructed through cultures of the Lusophone world. You will study the ways in which cultural production is embedded in the formation of nationhood and ideas about national identity and therefore culture are examined through its political and historical context. For this module you will have a 2-hour lecture each week.

This module explores business-society relations through the theories and practices of business ethics and social responsibility. The module will consist of two parts.

The first part will address the concept of business ethics, a discussion of citizenship theory and the challenges of globalisation and sustainability. It will also look at the normative nature of ethical theories, how business ethics has evolved and prescriptions from theoretical frameworks as to how business should be managed.

The second part of the module will address the issues, impacts of business on individual stakeholder groups and analyse business ethics and social responsibility in relation to each group.

Topic covered include:

• environment
• theory of multinational enterprises
• entry strategies
• international leadership
• operating in international markets

This module examines the managerial and organisational factors that influence the formation and subsequent realisation of strategy. It enables you to develop skills in the analysis of strategic processes and practice with particular reference to the role of organisation in strategy development and execution, strategic leadership, strategic change, internationalisation and stakeholder management in strategic management.

This module simulates the challenges of running a large business and meeting the demands of stakeholders. Teams of students will play the role of the senior management team of a large UK corporation, and must deliver strategic change and react to tactical issues that unfold during the module. Each group will deliver responses to a series of unfolding challenges from customers, media, regulators, and other prominent stakeholders.

This module explores Spanish business from both a historical and contemporary perspective. It begins by looking at changes in the social, economic, political and technological environment for business since the transition to democracy and assesses their impact on the composition of the private sector in Spain. The main themes include the economic legacy of dictatorship, changes in the global and European regulatory environment, the influence of neoliberal thinking, the role of entrepreneurship, the relationship between state and business and Spanish business’ response to the spread of the knowledge economy and rapid technological change. The module also looks at recent challenges to business in Spain. In particular, it explores the impact of the economic crisis on the private sector, the criticism of business’ involvement in a number of high-profile corruption scandals and proposals emanating from new political formations such as Podemos aimed at increasing state regulation of the private sector. Finally, the module analyses new social innovations and practices that are challenging business’ pre-eminence in the production and distribution of goods and services in Spain. In doing so, it reveals a diverse and vibrant landscape that integrates a range of practices including co-operativism, social markets and community currencies.

The module aims to impart understanding of the interfaces between literature and politics, by studying the articulation of key social and political issues and aesthetics in contemporary Spanish cultural artefacts. The module aims to discuss the status of literary writing in late capitalism, concentrating on how contemporary ‘Hispanic’ authors have dealt with issues of language, identity, culture, society, nationhood, gender, class, memory, time and writing. It also explores debates regarding the consistency of the categories of ‘Spain’ and ‘Spanishness’ when analysing cultural production in contemporary Iberia, and assesses the competing discursive practices involved in remapping the notion of Spanish canonical literature at the beginning of the new millennium.

In this module you will focus on identities and identity formation, as represented or articulated in literary, cinematic and visual texts, as the basis of a chronological survey of the development of Lusophone societies and culture in the 20th century. You will focus on two particular areas: the political ramifications of contending conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality in the last century and the role of cultural indentity and ‘identity’ politics’ in nation-building and in the negotiation of, and recovery from, collective crises such as regime change and civil conflict. For this module you will have a two-hour seminar each week.

In this module you will be introduced to the major currents in the 20th Century in the context of finisecular and early 20th century European and American literature and culture in order to situate the latter common preoccupations and formal experiments of writers of poetry and short fiction of various nationalities, languages and cultures. This module consists of two case studies split between the Autumn semester where you will focus on the comparative analysis of works by poets such as Rubén Darío and Mallarmé, Apollinaire and Alberti, and Fernando Pessoa among others. In the Spring semester you will you focus on the parallel developments in the evolution of the short story across a similar range of languages and cultures and include an analysis of short fictions from authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, João Guimarães Rosa, Carlos Fuentes among others. For this module you will have a two-hour seminar each week.