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In Navigating Stakeholders in Global Business, IBA students will acquire core skills and knowledge to successfully manage the challenges placed upon international businesses by an increasingly diverse set of internal (e.g., culturally diverse employees) and external (e.g., social movement and governmental) stakeholders. The track focuses on international business in the complex global context.

This track will include the courses below. More information per course will be provided at a later time. 

BT3T1101 International Business and External Stakeholder Management (5)

International business takes place in a broader societal context with a multitude of stakeholders who demand responsive business conduct. For example, social movements play an increasingly significant role in pressuring multinational firms to improve their social and environmental impact in many countries across the globe, often through their engagement with national and transnational institutions. In this course, students will learn how to manage these stakeholder relationships and learn why engaging effectively with global stakeholders is key to business success. Students are provided with tools and theories to optimize complex international stakeholder relationships, ensuring both society and international firms profit.

Learning goals 

1. Understand the social and environmental outcomes associated with multinational business activities.
2. Analyze global stakeholders with an eye to improve business and societal outcomes.
3. Create a holistic global stakeholder engagement strategy. 

BT3T1102 Managing an International Workforce (5)

This is a course on how to create, foster, and manage internationally oriented organizations so that their people thrive and perform at their best. It proposes that (and provides evidence why) employee and group flourishing is key to organizational excellence in a quickly changing, interconnected, and ambiguous world. The challenge emerging from this perspective is how to develop contexts (e.g., jobs, organizational cultures, structures, and processes across multiple subsidiaries in different countries) that enable employees and groups to thrive within these challenging conditions and in light of their diverse backgrounds. The concomitant challenge at a more personal level is how to find and/or create a context in which students themselves can thrive and manage at their best when pursuing an international career. This course provides tools to successfully address these challenges.

Learning goals

1. Understand how to enhance a sense of purpose and meaning in an interconnected and quickly changing world.
2. Evaluate the utility of theories from the field of positive organizational scholarship for international organizations.
3. Learn about the relationship of employees’ flourishing and organizations’ interactions with external stakeholders.

BT3T1103 BSc Project Navigating Stakeholders in Global Business (7)

The core of the project is research, and what type of research will vary by track. The Bachelor Project follows all steps of a research cycle: A managerial problem, a knowledge question, review of evidence, research design, data collection, data analysis, answer to the question, recommendation to management. “Management” should be read as “stakeholder from practice”. The outcome can be a design, hypothesis test, conceptual framework, and in all cases is translated into an answer to a managerial problem. The data can be quantitative or qualitative, primary or secondary, empirical or simulated.

To successfully complete the Bachelor Project, we assume that students participate in the course Advanced Research Skills (ARS, previously ARM, B3101) in parallel or have already completed this course. Moreover, we assume that students have active knowledge of the concepts covered in Research Project (BT2103) or Onderzoeksproject (BK2103). Lastly, the course builds on a lot of knowledge that you should have acquired in previous methods-related courses (e.g., statistics, mathematics). It is your responsibility to dust off this knowledge. Look at material from these courses when things are not top of mind. Do not expect your supervisor to act like a tutor on such topics.

Learning goals

1. Collect and critically assess academic and professional literature on a specific topic
2. Write a critical synthesis of the academic and professional literature
   
3. Identify a relevant managerial problem and translate the managerial question into a research question
   
4. Design a research project that can be executed in the available timeframe
   
5. Collect and analyse data that is needed to answer the research question
   
6. Present research results and defend the choices made
7. Critically evaluate and discuss research results