Our teaching

This course takes a critical look at diverse and alternative forms of economy, exploring the changing landscape of contemporary consumption and production.  This includes considering: 

• Theories of diverse economies and modes of provision
• The political economy of the household
• Community economies, neoliberal policy and activism
• Illicit economies
• Cultural and creative economies
• Sharing economies, collaborative consumption and communing
• Circular economies, prosumption and ‘slow consumption’

Course unit leader

• Helen Holmes

Find out more

• Alternative economies: ordinary economies

This course unit will introduce you to some of the key historical, theoretical and practical dimensions of environmental politics and policy. It explores:

• challenges posed by environmental issues to political institutions
• connections between local and global environmental issues
• power relationships between developed and developing countries, and between social groups within political communities
• the political nature of environmental problems and controversies
• the diverse historical, political, and cultural roots of contemporary environmental problems and controversies
• the various strategies and tactics used for environmental advocacy and change.

Course unit leaders

• Sherilyn MacGregor
• Mat Paterson

Find out more

• Environmental Politics

This course will introduce students to a range of current social issues affecting human society on a large scale, such as: 

• Inequalities in a Global Age
• The Corporation in Global Society
• Climate Change and Capitalism
• Sustainable Development in an Unequal World
• Population Ageing as a Global Challenge
• Global Protest

Students will discover a sociological approach to major social challenges through emphases on:

• Understanding pressing social problems through reference to their social and cultural dimensions.
• Analysing competing explanations for contemporary global social issues.
• Assessing potential solutions to contemporary social challenges in relation to the ways in which they are embedded in society and culture.

Course unit leader

• Dan Welch

Find out more

• Global Social Challenges

This course will discuss the dynamics of climate change politics. Climate change is both one of the most significant consequences of and challenges for contemporary politics. We explore climate politics through three distinctive framings of what type of problem it is: as a collective action problem; a problem of complexity; and a problem of capitalism. These frames are used to generate the focus in the second part of the course on a set of specific themes in climate change politics.

The course is also designed to develop your research skills. Correspondingly, the first part of the course will outline these three ways of understanding climate change as a problem, while the second will enable you to explore, individually and in small groups, a particular theme in climate change politics in detail.

Course unit leader

• Mat Paterson

Find out more

• Politics of Climate Change

Politics of the Global Economy sets out to provide an introduction to the academic discipline of International Political Economy (IPE). The course will introduce you to the study of the global political economy particularly in the context of globalization, neoliberalism and the recent global financial crisis.

It will help you to think about how the main features of the global economy are changing and will familiarise you with the recent history of the global economy. The course is also particularly concerned with how these changes are having an impact on the present.

Unlike many introductory courses that outline a set of particular topics that you need to learn about an academic discipline, this course is built around the research areas of members of the Politics Global Political Economy Research Cluster. All of us are concerned with a set of problems in the global economy and how they influence the lives of ordinary people all around the world.

We will introduce you to the problems and issues that we think are crucial to understanding how the world is now, how it could be, and how it should be in the twenty first century - your future.

Course unit leader

• Mat Paterson

Find out more

• Politics of the Global Economy

Sustainability is one of the most challenging and important issues of our time. It relates to numerous issues affecting the very future of humankind, including:

• climate change
• economic growth
• global inequalities and social justice
• the depletion of natural resources.

These concerns are currently being addressed in debates about the nature, necessity and possibility of sustainable consumption, and so this course will introduce you to the ways in which consumers, businesses and governments are responding to these challenges.

Through research articles, case studies, web resources and real-world initiatives, you will study several topics including:

• consumer culture
• fair trade
• food systems
• global commodity chains
• political consumption.

Course unit leader

• Dan Welch

Find out more

• Sustainability, Consumption and Global Responsibilities

An understanding of sustainability allows us to recognise why our ability to prosper now and in the future requires attention not just to economic and social progress but also conserving (and enhancing) the natural environment. There has never been a more important time to understand how government, industry and society can respond to this challenge.

The Sustainable Business module looks at the bigger picture but focuses on how companies can respond by changing what they are doing - both strategically and operationally - to gain or maintain a competitive advantage whilst improving their sustainability performance.

The course aims to motivate the students to integrate notions of sustainability into their business approach by combining a thorough understanding of the issues surrounding sustainable development and climate change with knowledge of how business can respond to these opportunities and challenges by embedding sustainability into an organisation’s strategy and operations.

Course unit leader

• Michael Hodson

Find out more

• Sustainable Business

Society is facing a number of pressing “grand challenges” including climate change, dwindling biodiversity and resource depletion, poverty, environmental pollution, malnutrition, and obesity.  Many business leaders already recognise that commercial organisations must play a key role in addressing these problems. In this context successful managers are moving beyond the mindset of limiting harm and managing risk, to proactively driving the adoption of environmentally sustainable and socially responsible products, services and practices within and beyond their own organisations. This re-imagining of the role of business requires knowledge of novel conceptual frameworks to better understand the connections between firm strategies, intra-industry relationships, business model innovation and longer-term socio-technical transitions to more sustainable societies. The course draws on the range of world-class sustainability expertise at AMBS to introduce and develop cutting edge ideas and research toward the development of advanced knowledge in sustainability.

Course unit leader

• Josephine Mylan

Find out more

• Sustainable Business in Society

This course will introduce you to the study of environmental politics in the contemporary world. It covers some of the most important challenges facing human societies, including climate change, biodiversity loss, resource scarcity, and unsustainable consumption. It also explores some of the concepts, frameworks and discourses that environmental theorists have used to understand and explain these issues, including political ecology, ecofeminism, biopolitics, the Anthropocene, colonialism, (un)sustainability, risk society, and environmental justice.

The central challenges of the course will include exploring the relationships between society and environments/nature in contemporary politics, and the role of individuals, communities, movements, NGOs, elites, corporations, political parties, states and international institutions in responding to environmental crises.

Course unit leaders

• Sherilyn MacGregor
• Mat Paterson

Find out more 

• Critical Environmental Politics

The purpose of this course unit is to introduce students to a range of foundational concepts in understanding relationships between innovation and society. It will explore the characteristics of knowledge, the processes and institutions that generate progress in knowledge and the development of innovations, and the spread of innovations throughout society.

The course tackles key approaches and theoretical perspectives from the sociology and history of science, technology and innovation to build a view of how economies are transformed through successive gales of creative destruction.

Course unit leader

• Andrew McMeekin

Find out more

• Entrepreneurship, Technology and Society

Innovation provides the basis for corporate efficiency, profitability and national wealth. It can enhance our quality of life (living and working conditions, health and communications) and protect the environment. This course unit explores the nature, determinants and consequences of innovation for environmental sustainability. It focuses on the strategic challenges facing firms with respect to eco-innovation, and assesses how successful firms have overcome them. Drawing upon interdisciplinary theoretical approaches and empirical research, some of which has been undertaken at MIoIR, it explores the key issues that inform our understanding of eco-innovation, innovation for sustainable consumption, and sustainability transitions, and assesses the methods, tools and techniques firms use to embed sustainability into their innovation strategy.

Course unit leader

• Josephine Mylan

Find out more

• Innovation for Sustainability

This course will discuss the dynamics of climate change politics. Climate change is both one of the most significant consequences of and challenges for contemporary politics. We explore climate politics primarily through a political economy lens, focused on the dynamics of capitalism, but explore the limits of this lens in particular in relation to questions of culture and everyday life, the role of the state, and international cooperation. The course is organised sequentially to get you to think about three distinct questions about climate change politics: the political-economic origins of climate change; the political economy of responses to climate change; and the sort of transformational politics that thinking about the future in a climate-changed world entails.

The course is also designed to develop your research skills. The principal piece of assessment is a substantial research-based essay,

Course unit leader

• Mat Paterson

Find out more

• Politics of Global Climate Change

This course unit studies the emergence and development of the sociology of consumption, a key sub-discipline within sociology.

You will examine key theoretical texts and recent research in the field, including themes such as:

• consumer politics
• critiques of consumerism
• cultural theory
• material culture
• political economy
• stratification and taste
• sustainable consumption.

Course unit leader

• Luke Yates

Find out more

• Sociology of Consumption