MSc Business Analysis and Strategic Management

For entry in the academic year beginning September 2027, the tuition fees are as follows:

• MSc (full-time)
  UK students (per annum): £21,500
  International, including EU, students (per annum): £32,000

The fees quoted above are fully inclusive of tuition, administration and computational costs.

Fees for entry are subject to yearly review. The University reserves the right to increase your tuition fee by up to 7% each year for courses lasting more than one year, including to reflect rising costs associated with delivering our educational and wider student experience. Postgraduate fees information .

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All students should normally be able to complete their programme of study without incurring additional study costs over and above the tuition fee for that programme. Any unavoidable additional compulsory costs totalling more than 1% of the annual home undergraduate fee per annum, regardless of whether the programme in question is undergraduate or postgraduate taught, will be made clear to you at the point of application. Further information can be found in the University's Policy on additional costs incurred by students on undergraduate and postgraduate taught programmes (PDF document, 91KB).

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Graduates of The University of Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan University can receive a 10% discount on their master's degree tuition fees as part of our Manchester Alumni Loyalty Discount scheme.

The unit explores how different forms of organizing—broadly defined as agentic systems of coordinated action—create, capture, and distribute value, and how organizations define and build organizational purpose. Drawing on management research in organizational design and governance, strategy, and complex systems, the course analyses a wide range of organizational forms. These include traditional authority hierarchies (e.g., corporations, public agencies), managed supply chains (e.g., Tesla, Toyota), business ecosystems (e.g., Uber, Airbnb, Facebook, TikTok, Deliveroo, Revolut), digital platforms (e.g., Apple, Android), public–private partnerships and other strategic alliances (e.g., banking syndicates), “bossless” organizations (e.g., Valve Corporation), and democratic organizations (e.g., worker cooperatives, commons, social movements). The course also explores emerging organizational forms that incorporate agentic artificial intelligence—autonomous AI agents capable of analysing data, setting goals, and taking action with minimal human supervision.

In addition, the course studies forms of organizing that bring together public, private, and civil society actors to address some of today’s most pressing challenges, including social inequality, climate change, biodiversity loss, Africa’s population growth, rapid urbanization, and antibiotic resistance. Students also examine organizing around emerging opportunities, such as competition over access to the Arctic. Attention is given to how organizations adapt their designs to institutional environments characterized by weak or underdeveloped market-supporting institutions (e.g., property rights, rule of law, contract enforcement, independent judiciaries, and checks and balances), and to strategies for mitigating geopolitical risk.

By the end of the course, students will have sharpened their intuition for organizational design as a set of tools and frameworks that enable managers to define value, create value, capture value, distribute value, and build organizational purpose. The course equips students to make informed judgment calls central to designing organizations, governance structures, and processes that allocate resources efficiently while achieving distributions of jointly created value that are perceived as fair by both contributing and non-contributing stakeholders.

To achieve these objectives, students complete an individual essay and participate in a group project. The course emphasizes hands-on engagement with the subject matter through case discussions, lectures, and guest speaker sessions.

BMAN73932 Programme Req: BMAN73932 is only available as an elective to students on MSc Business Analysis & Strategic Management, MSc Management and Implementation of Development Projects, and MSc Data Science (Bus&Man)

MSc Business Analysis and Strategic Management

Msc Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship

This units aims to introduce students to core concepts in organizational design and situates them within the realities within a rapidly changing geopolitical and technological environment, where the institutional architectureinherited from the post–World War II settlement is increasingly fragmenting due to rising geopolitical risk, nationalistic movements, polarised politics, the spread of misinformation, supply-chain security, climate change, weakening global institutions, and fiscally constrained governments together with rapid advances in AI are reshaping how organizations operate, compete, and govern.

Against this backdrop, organizational design is treated not as a technical optimisation exercise, but as a strategic and moral choice through which managers exercise agency to create, capture, and distribute value—and to define organizational purpose under conditions of institutional instability and rapid technological development. The course examines the fundamental relationships between organizational design, value creation and distribution, and purpose in a world where resilience, legitimacy, and long-term sustainability have become as important as efficiency and productivity.

The primary outcome of the course is familiarity with core organizational design concepts and their practical application as a coherent set of tools and frameworks that enable organizations to pursue their goals in ways that are economically viable, institutionally robust, and socially legitimate. Students learn how organizational structures shape who benefits, who bears risks, and how trade-offs between efficiency, fairness, and collective welfare are managed in practice.

From an organizational design perspective, students are introduced to alternative ways of addressing three fundamental problems faced by any form of organizing: (i) division of labour (who does what), (ii) integration of effort (coordination and cooperation), and (iii) exception management. Students learn to compare alternative forms of organizing, ranging from authority-based hierarchies (firms and public bureaucracies) and managed supply chains (simulated hierarchies), to markets, strategic alliances, commons, clubs, and participation architectures (e.g., social movements).

Empirically, students gain confidence in analysing both traditional and emerging forms of organizing enabled by advances in digital technologies. These include online communities of production, business ecosystems, digital platforms, “bossless” firms, flash organizations, and the implications of agentic AI for organizational design, particularly in human–AI interaction.
 

The course will seek to create as much hands-on interaction as possible with different realities to develop students´ skills to tackle complex problems through case discussions, lectures, and guest speakers’ talks. The students will have to prepare an individual essay (in blog format) and participate in a group project, which also includes three essays. Through the emphasis on essay writing, students will learn to develop an essay: present an analytical question or problem and offer a thesis that addresses the issue. Specifically, students will learn to provide enough information so the reader can understand the context and understand what is at stake in the argument. Further, students will learn that the introduction should explain what students add to the discussion and why it is worth reading the rest of the essay. Students will also learn to avoid writing very general opening sentences or “funnel” introductions where they begin with a broad topic and gradually narrow it down. Finally, students will  learn to move the reader through the argument and ensure the reader can see the connections between ideas. Through the case discussions in class, we will ‘dive’ into different real-world cases and sharpen students’ intuition for the organizational design choices. The focus will be on the relationships between organization design, value creation, value distribution and organizational purpose. Working in groups, the students will be asked to think and do as leaders: articulate complex problems in simple ways; develop a logic analysis of alternatives; and make arguable claims considering facts and counterarguments. As in the real-world, students won’t have all the information and evidence which they would like to have at hand to build their claims. Rather, students will have to make assumptions and argue for their plausibility.

 

CLASS PREPARATION

Students are advised to form study groups and meet with their group each week to prepare for class discussion. This approach increases learning, develops a sense of teamwork, and encourages good preparation for class discussion. In a typical session, one or more students will be asked to begin discussion of a selected topic. If students have prepared thoroughly the case and/or readings, students should have no difficulty in handling such a lead-off request. Students want to use the study questions for each case that are provided at the end of this document to guide your thinking. During case discussions, students will analyse the case situation and address the problems and issues that it presents. We will ask students to make recommendations and discuss their implementation. A portion of the class will be a lecture/discussion of concepts and methods that are brought out in the case or reading, but that are useful to a broader range of interorganizational contexts.

 

Development of argumentative, verbal skills is a priority in this course. The classroom will be an opportunity where students can develop their ability to present their analyses and claims clearly, to convince peers of the correctness of their approach, and persuade them about the merits of implementing their ideas. Students must display a nameplate on their desks in each session. Class participation is not graded, but the criteria I would use to judge effective class participation are:

•    Is the participant a good listener? is there willingness to participate?

•    Are points made relevant to discussion and linked to comments of other?

•    Is there willingness to test new ideas, or are all comments “safe”?

•    Do comments show clear evidence of appropriate and insightful analysis of the case data?

•    Do comments clarify and highlight the important aspects of earlier comments? 

Analyse how organisational design choices address division of labour, coordination and exception management in contemporary geopolitical and technological contexts. Fundamental problems of organization design (division of labour and integration of value and exception management)

Evaluate how value, stakeholder roles, governance structures and control rights shape value creation and distribution in organisations.

Basic Principles of Organizational Economics: Agency Theory; Property Rights Theory; T Apply organisational-economics reasoning—including agency, property-rights and transaction-cost theories—to diagnose design problems in real cases.

ransaction Cost Economics

Differentiates between new and classic stakeholder theor; theory of stakeholder governance vs agency theory

Categorise organizational structures (markets; hierarchies; commons; clubs)

Collective action theory: common pool resources; tragedy of the commons; anti-commons problems

Design organizational and governance structures

Articulate definitions of value and organizational purpose

Organizational design is a universal problem , from constituting a family to starting up a firm, a public agency, or a social movement

Be able to talk about value and purpose are skills that apply to a wide variety of private, public, and non profit settings

Group project (main report) – 30%
Group project (3 case study essays) – 30%
Individual assignment (essay) – 40%

 

Through Canvas blackboard, within 2 weeks after submission

Baldwin C. 2024. Chapter 17 How Technology Shapes Organizations. Design Rules Volume 2.

Baldwin, C. Y. (2019) Capturing Value by Controlling Bottlenecks in Open Platform Systems, HBS Working Paper. November.

Fjeldstad, et al. 2012. The Architecture of Collaboration. Strategic Management J.

Gatignon & Capron 2020. The firm as an architect of polycentric governance: building open institutional infrastructure in emerging markets. SMJ

Gil and Yongcheng 2022. Megaproject Performance, Value Creation and Value Distribution: An Organizational Governance Perspective, AM Discoveries

Gil et al. 2024. Chipping Away at a Grand Challenge: Aligning Goal and Governance to ease off Homelessness. CMR

Gulati, R., Puranam, P., Tushman, M. 2012. Meta-organization design: Rethinking Design in Interorganizational and Community Contexts. Strategic Management J, 33, 571-86

Elinor Ostrom. 2010. A Long Polycentric Journey. Annual Review Political Science. 13:1-23.

Hardin, G. (1968). The Tragedy of the Commons. Science, 162(3859), 1243–1248.

Kretschmer et al. 2020. Platform ecosystems as meta-organizations: Implications for platform strategies. SMJ

McGahan 2020 Where Does an Organization’s Responsibility End?: Identifying the Boundaries on Stakeholder Claims

Puranam, Alexy, and Reitzig, 2014. What is new in new forms of organizing. Academy of Management Review

Williamson, OE Transaction Cost Economics and Organization Theory. ICC 2(2) 107-156

Williamson, O.E. (1979). Transaction-Cost Economics: The Governance of Contractual Relations. Journal of Law and Economics, 22 (2) 233-261

Gibbons, R and Henderson, R 2012 Relational Contracts and Organizational Capabilities. Org. Science

David Frydlinger, Oliver Hart, and Kate Vitasek A New Approach to Contracts How to build better long-term strategic partnerships . HBR

Harford T 2013. Do you Believe in Sharing? Financial Times, August 30,