Contemporary Issues in the Business Environment

Overview

This course examines external factors that affect the strategy and operations of business. It enables delegates to develop a critical awareness of the implications of these factors and facilitates their development of an academic and practical understanding of the strategic and operational implications for business organisations. It also provides delegates with the opportunity to develop skills of analysis and problem solving for use within their own organisation.

Content and Modules

This course covers the following subject areas:

Constraints on the external environment

• Consideration of the changing economic, legal, political and social forces which influence an organisation’s external environment.
• Mechanisms by which regulation, both at the national and supranational levels, responds to such changes.

Analysis of the implications for business of change in the external environment

• Macro and microeconomic policy measures available to governments and their impact on business
• Legal factors affecting the business and its external environment, including the law relating to agreements, employment, civil liability generally and the form of the business organisation

Contemporary issues

Consideration, from the legal and economic perspectives, will be given to developments relating to issues such as:

• Globalisation including the UK’s productivity gap, outsourcing, offshoring, migration and labour cost issues, world trade imbalances
• The regulation of competition
• Ecological developments
• Contract: formation, validity, implied terms, standard form contracts, the ending of contractual duties, remedies for breach of a contract
• Agency: formation and termination, rights and duties, authority of agent
• Tort: negligence, occupiers’ liability, defamation, vicarious liability
• The form, characteristics (and implications) of the different types of business organisations
• The role of employment law in business.
• The rights of employees within the work place, including unfair dismissal and discrimination
• Health and safety at work

Further Information