Contemporary Issues in Business (BS729) — Reflective Portfolio: Case Trends, Stakeholder Perspectives and Management Frameworks
This Level 7 portfolio accumulates across a semester of case-based workshops and is submitted as a single document combining reflective writing with sustained critical discussion. The assessment rewards demonstrable personal development as much as analytical knowledge, so the writing is first-person where it needs to be and evidential throughout. The reflective component presents six workshop reflections, each no longer than 150 words and each structured through one of the established reflective models introduced in the module — Gibbs' Reflective Cycle, Kolb's Learning Cycle, Schön's framework or the ERA framework. These are not summaries of what the case was about. Each one identifies where the analysis could have been sharper, what was missed in the live discussion and why, what will be repeated and what will be done differently, with the emphasis falling on transferable learning about how business problems are diagnosed and decisions taken under uncertainty rather than on the particulars of any single case. The larger critical component works through three connected questions. The first examines how contemporary trends studied in the module affect businesses both positively and negatively, drawing on two specific cases but deliberately reaching beyond them to consider consequences across whole industries — the trend, not the company, is the unit of analysis. The second addresses why identifying stakeholders and understanding their perspectives is critical to sound decision-making, using one module case to demonstrate it. Competing interests are mapped explicitly, the power and legitimacy of each group considered, and stakeholder theory used to argue why a manager who weighs only shareholder interest arrives at a worse decision. The third question turns to the management tools and frameworks applied during the module, using two cases to show how a particular tool was selected, what it revealed that unstructured analysis would have missed, and equally where it fell short. This includes judgement about when each framework is and is not appropriate, since selecting the right tool for the problem is itself the skill being assessed. Harvard referencing is applied consistently across all sections, with academic sources supporting the theoretical claims and practitioner sources grounding the industry discussion. Portfolio items are collected through PebblePad across the semester and consolidated into one file for submission, the class participation element being tracked separately by the lecturer across the case discussion sessions.
Read Model Answer →