MG4F9      Half Unit
Organisational Behaviour and Marketing for Social Entrepreneurs

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

The course is a rigorous examination of key insights, concepts and theoretical frameworks that are essential in understanding social innovation and enterprises from the perspectives of Marketing and Organisational Behaviour (OB). Students learn to understand, synthesise and relate these insights, concepts and theoretical frameworks to real-life phenomena and problems through interactive lectures, cases, and empirical studies. In a very practical sense, students will test this knowledge by application to cases relating to different types of social enterprises as well as by applying to social change in relation to such topics as motivation, team management, and organisational culture, in the Organisational Behaviour portion of the course, and segmentation, positioning and product adoption in the Marketing portion of the course.

More specifically, students learn:

• Key theoretical approaches (through the lenses of Organisational Behaviour and Marketing) to understanding social innovations and entrepreneurship;
• Empirical findings on how Organisational Behaviour and Marketing aspects of social innovations and enterprises are associated with social impact;
• A rigorous synthesis of the most important Organisational Behaviour and Marketing insights, concepts, and theoretical approaches to set-up, manage, and scale up social innovation and enterprises;
• How to relate theoretical and methodological insights, concepts and frameworks for social innovation and enterprise to real world phenomena and social problems through applied case-based analysis in both Organisational Behaviour and Marketing;
• Essential knowledge and tools for the capstone/dissertation course.

30 hours of seminars in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn Term.

Five weeks (15hrs) will focus on Organisational Behaviour and five weeks (15hrs) will focus on Marketing.

In its Ethics Code, LSE upholds a commitment to intellectual freedom. This means we will protect the freedom of expression of our students and staff and the right to engage in healthy debate in the classroom.

For the Organisational Behaviour portion of the course, students will be expected to provide a proposal for the summative project. For the Marketing portion of the course, students will be required to answer questions on a specific case.

• Madeline Powell, Stephen P. Osborne, "Can Marketing contribute to sustainable social enterprise?", Social Enterprise Journal, (2015) Vol. 11 Iss: 1, pp. 24-46.
• Bargsted, M., Picon, M., Salazar, A., & Rojas, Y. (2013). Psychosocial characterization of social entrepreneurs: A comparative study. Journal of Social Entrepreneurship, 4(3),331–346.
• Davis, G. & White, C. (2015). How your company can change the world. Harvard Business Review (5), 48-55.

Project (50%)

Essay (50%)

The essay assignment will include an observed oral assessment. For detailed assessment information, including all deadlines and timings, please see the relevant course Moodle page. Assessment timings will be available at the start of each term.