Module Title: Towards 2050 – Management and Managing in an Age of Transitions.
Coursework
The coursework essay for this course is to be chosen from the list below. It should normally not more than 3,000 words long (excluding references), typed in font size 12 and with at least 1.5 spacing. Please write the essay using footnotes for your sources.
Some Notes on the Assessed Essay
The essay is to be written as if to an interested and relatively informed colleague or if you were asked to put your contribution up on a website seeking to explain and inform people about your topic. In other words please write an essay that is readable and informed. You are seeking to communicate your ideas.
I would like you to treat it slightly differently than many academic essays you might have written in the past by emphasising that you are aiming to communicate your ideas to a interested and reasonably well informed colleague or friend. Please use sources as you would in an academic essay, but put them in footnotes to avoid breaking the flow of your writing and argument. Building on our discussion a few weeks ago on university education, we are trying to improve three things – your ability to communicate clearly, to think critically, and to develop complex reasoning. This essay is a vehicle for you to demonstrate these qualities.
Topic 1:
- Critically analyse the concepts of doughnut economics as a strategy for development towards 2050.
This topic is covered at several points in this lecture series. If you are very interested in this area I would recommend you getting hold of Kate Raworth’s recent book Doughnut Economics … which came out last year. She has written about the concept in many places – we have encountered one print source in the Cockpit-ism paper. Her book has precipitated a series of reviews, many positive, which may be helpful to investigate. O’Neil’ et als. 2018 paper (in lecture 8 readings) is worth investigating as it shows how demanding the doughnut model actually is and how no country at present is currently completely in the safe and just operating space.
Topic 2:
- ‘Looking at the bottom of the wealth distribution, 3.5 billion people – corresponding to 70% of all adults in the world – own less than USD 10,000. Those with low wealth tend to be disproportionately found among the younger age groups, who have had little chance to accumulate assets, but we find that millennials face particularly challenging c circumstances compared to other generations.’
(Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report 2017:2)
Assess the significance of inequality for future wellbeing towards 2050
We have considered this topic in some detail in lecture five and inequality keeps reoccurring in many other lectures too. It is a highly interesting and rather troubling topic. You can see that there are many aspects that may be considered: does the evidence stack up?; is it an issue of geography – the lottery of where you are born?; is it a topic of intergenerational equity?; what has happened to notions of meritocracy which inform much of what we do – it is, for example, a leading reason why students come to university; and so on. Again, the issue here is not the availability of material but one of deciding what angle you wish to consider in more depth. Many sources are on Blackboard and they are not all in the folder for lecture five.
Essay Points
These points guide my assessment of the essay.
Structure
Appropriate format, coherence, narrative development, logical sequencing of parts; distinct self-contained paragraphs; opening and closing sections; signposts; headings
Writing style and presentation
clarity; precision; conciseness; grammar, spelling and punctuation; readable style; proof reading.
Reading, library research, referencing
Research into relevant sources; evaluation of sources; accurate referencing; adequate referencing.
Relevance
Keeping specific issues in focus, avoidance of verbosity
Scope/breadth of approach
Adequate coverage of topic; background material; appropriate scope; balanced development of the different elements
Depth of approach
Sufficiency of detail in development of major points; avoidance of superficiality, vagueness and repetition
Example of the Style required for the Essay
In this essay I ask you to write in a readable style (you may use the personal pronoun if you wish) about an aspect of one of three essay topics. You will notice that each essay question is open ended and cannot be answered in sufficient depth if you try to address the question head on. Instead you should focus on a specific aspect of the question that you find interesting and make the case as to why that interpretation of the overall question is important.
I would like you to use footnotes[1] in this essay. Footnotes, for those of you who are unfamiliar with their use, can be found in the references tab of Word. I hope that the essay allows you the scope to demonstrate three skills – written communication, complex reasoning and a critical approach – which are argued (quite rightly) to be central to a university education.[2] A footnote allows the source of an argument or a piece of evidence to be referenced without diverting the reader and is a good way of enabling you to write in a more accessible style. Each footnote appears at the bottom of the relevant page and should give a citation and perhaps some other information. At the end of the essay you should have the normal Harvard style complete references in a reference list.
Reference
Arum, R., and Roksa, J., (2011) Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses University of Chicago Press, Chicago, US.
[1] A footnote is a numbered note at the bottom of the page it relates to. It is not an endnote which is found at the end of an essay.
[2] For example, Arum and Roksa (2011)
