BMAN72262 15 Semester 2 Postgraduate Taught Level 7 Nuno Gil Unit coordinator Alliance Manchester Business School 1 FHEQ level (Framework for Higher Education Qualifications) ' Masters/Integrated Masters P4 ' European Credit Transfer & Accumulation System Rating : 7.5 <p>This course equips students to make the judgment calls required to exercise leadership and governance in organizations committed to tackling grand societal challenges. Leadership is conceptualized as a process of design: leaders are framed as “designers” of the governance structures and processes that shape decision-making on resource acquisition and allocation, dispute resolution, and exchanges with contributing and non-contributing stakeholders. The focus will be on how managers can foster norms of collaboration—such as trust, reciprocity, and compromise—with contributing and non-contributing stakeholders and mitigate holdup risks.</p><p>The course emphasizes the managerial role in designing governance structures, development processes, contracting strategies, and communication approaches suited to complex, multi-party environments. Students are equipped with a diversified toolbox of frameworks and methods, alongside an understanding of key contingencies—such as institutional strength and social norms—that condition the relationship between managerial action and societal impact.</p><p>Teaching follows a Socratic, case-based approach aimed at sharpening students’ ability to formulate defensible arguments and derive actionable managerial insights. The cases span sectors and contexts, ranging from the development of large-scale public and private goods in advanced economies (e.g., expanding UK rail capacity, deploying AI factories for the next industrial transformation) to addressing rapid urban growth and infectious diseases such as hepatitis B in the Global South.</p> <p>This course equips students to make the judgment calls required to exercise leadership and governance in organizations committed to tackling grand societal challenges. Leadership is conceptualized as a process of design: leaders are framed as “designers” of the governance structures and processes that shape decision-making on resource acquisition and allocation, dispute resolution, and exchanges with contributing and non-contributing stakeholders. The focus will be on how managers can foster norms of collaboration—such as trust, reciprocity, and compromise—with contributing and non-contributing stakeholders and mitigate holdup risks.</p><p>The course emphasizes the managerial role in designing governance structures, development processes, contracting strategies, and communication approaches suited to complex, multi-party environments. Students are equipped with a diversified toolbox of frameworks and methods, alongside an understanding of key contingencies—such as institutional strength and social norms—that condition the relationship between managerial action and societal impact.</p><p>Teaching follows a Socratic, case-based approach aimed at sharpening students’ ability to formulate defensible arguments and derive actionable managerial insights. The cases span sectors and contexts, ranging from the development of large-scale public and private goods in advanced economies (e.g., expanding UK rail capacity, deploying AI factories for the next industrial transformation) to addressing rapid urban growth and infectious diseases such as hepatitis B in the Global South.</p> <p>This course introduces frameworks and methods relevant to graduate-level students (e.g., planning, management, economics, engineering) who aspire to leadership roles in organizations committed to addressing grand societal challenges. These challenges—such as climate change, the shortage of affordable housing, antibiotic resistance, social inequality, and Africa’s rapid population growth—are complex “wicked” problems that cannot be solved by any single actor or sector. Progress requires sustained intersectoral cooperation among public, private, and nonprofit organizations unified by a shared goal albeit differing subgoals, interests, and values.</p><p>Addressing grand challenges entails creating interorganizational forms of organizing to develop both private and public goods. These include new institutions (e.g., laws, policies, international treaties) and large-scale systems and assets, such as transport and energy networks, AI factories and data centers, social infrastructure (e.g., prisons, schools, hospitals), defence systems, and major scientific facilities (e.g., telescopes, particle accelerators).</p><p>To succeed, these multi-party organizational arrangements must assemble bundles of complementary resources. Some resources can be obtained through exchange with contributing stakeholders willing to make relationship-specific investments, such as employees, suppliers, financiers, and property owners. Other critical resources—such as regulatory approvals, political consent, and social legitimacy—are controlled by “non-contributing” stakeholders, including regulators, communities, and civil society groups, who do not directly participate in production or innovation. These nonmarket resources are often difficult to define, measure, and monetize because they are governed by political and regulatory processes rather than market mechanisms, making them costly and uncertain to acquire through transactions.</p><p>As a result, tackling wicked problems requires combining multiple governance structures: (1) strategic alliances among resourceful actors; (2) bilateral agreements with market and nonmarket stakeholders; and (3) consensus-oriented forms of collective action.</p><p>To equip students to lead organizations engaged in grand challenges, the course draws on organizational economics (including property rights theory and transaction cost economics), organizational design and stakeholder scholarship, and the project management literature. Throughout the course, empirical cases and practical exercises are used to sharpen students’ intuition and translate theory into actionable leadership insights.</p> <p data-start="33" data-end="118">Analyse the characteristics of wicked problems relevant to grand societal challenges.</p><p data-start="120" data-end="225">Analyse the governance structures used to coordinate efforts across public, private and nonprofit actors.</p><p data-start="227" data-end="348">Evaluate how transaction cost economics and relational contracting guide decisions about collaboration under uncertainty.</p> <p data-start="376" data-end="479">Critique organisational economics theories to interpret managerial choices in multi-actor environments.</p><p data-start="481" data-end="572">Design governance adaptation strategies that support legitimate and fair value co-creation.</p><p data-start="574" data-end="684">Appraise stakeholder governance theories to judge their applicability in complex interorganisational contexts.</p> <p>Communicate clear, evidence-based insights about governance and collaboration strategies to a professional audience.</p> <p>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.</p><p>CLASS PREPARATION</p><p>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.</p><p>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:</p><p>• Is the participant a good listener? is there willingness to participate?</p><p>• Are points made relevant to discussion and linked to comments of other?</p><p>• Is there willingness to test new ideas, or are all comments “safe”?</p><p>• Do comments show clear evidence of appropriate and insightful analysis of the case data?</p><p>• Do comments clarify and highlight the important aspects of earlier comments?</p> 0 Other 100% <p style="margin-left:5.7pt;">Group project (30%)</p><p style="margin-left:5.7pt;">Group assessment (30%)</p><p style="margin-left:5.7pt;">Individual assignment (40%)</p> <div> Informal advice and discussion during a lecture, seminar, workshop or lab.</div><div> &nbsp;</div><div> Responses to student emails and questions from a member of staff including feedback provided to a group via an online discussion forum.</div><div> &nbsp;</div><div> Specific course related feedback sessions.</div><div> &nbsp;</div><div> Written and/or verbal comments on assessed or non-assessed coursework.</div><div> &nbsp;</div><div> Written and/or verbal comments after students have given a group or individual presentation.</div><div> &nbsp;</div><div> &nbsp;</div> BMAN72262 Programme Req: BMAN72262 is only available as an elective to students on MSc Operations, Project and Supply Chain Management, MSc Management and Implementation of Development Projects, MSc Data Science (Bus&Man)<p>Msc Operations, Project and Supply Chain Management</p> MSc Ops, Project & SC Mgt MSc Ops, Project & SC Mgt PGDT Taught Component Optional N <p>Hartford, T. 2013. Do you believe in sharing? Financial Times. Aug 30<br><a href="https://www.ft.com/content/afc5377e-1026-11e3-a258-00144feabdc0">https://www.ft.com/content/afc5377e-1026-11e3-a258-00144feabdc0</a></p><p>He V F, Puranam, P 2021. Collaborative Conflict Management. INSEAD working paper 2021/69/STR</p><p>McGahan, AM 2023. The New Stakeholder Theory on Organizational Purpose. Strategy Science</p><p>Gil and Yongcheng 2022. Megaproject Performance, Value Creation and Value Distribution: An Organizational Governance Perspective, AM Discoveries</p><p>Grodal, S., &amp; O’Mahony, S. (2017). How does a grand challenge become displaced? Explaining the duality of field mobilization. Academy of Management Journal, 60(5), 1801–1828. <a href="https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2015.0890">https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2015.0890</a></p><p>Williamson, O.E. (1979). Transaction-Cost Economics: The Governance of Contractual Relations. Journal of Law and Economics, 22 (2) 233-261</p><p>Gil, Stafford, Musonda. 2019. Introduction in Duality by Design: The Global Race to Build Africa´s Infrastructure</p><p>Miller R T 2025. Stakeholder Theory and the Challenge of Welfare Economics European Corporate Governance Institute - Law Working Paper No. 828/2025 U Iowa Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2025-1</p><p>Elinor Ostrom. 2010. A Long Polycentric Journey. Annual Review Political Science. 13:1-23.</p><p>Hardin, G. (1968). The Tragedy of the Commons. Science, 162(3859), 1243–1248.</p><p>Colfer LJ Baldwin CY, 2016 The mirroring hypothesis: theory, evidence and exceptions</p> Lectures 33 0 117 <div> &nbsp;</div><div> <strong><span style="font-size: 12px;">Informal Contact Methods</span></strong></div><div> &nbsp;</div><div> Office Hours</div><div> &nbsp;</div><div> <span style="font-size: 12px;">Drop in Surgeries (extra help sessions for students on material they may be struggling with)</span></div>