King's College London

Family firms are the dominant organizational form worldwide, yet a distinctive field of study due to the potential tensions and synergies between family and business systems. This course explores these tensions and synergies, which are manifested in the resources, governance, succession planning, and most important the entrepreneurial orientation and transgenerational value creation potential of family businesses. While research has found consensus on some general trends and characteristics of family firms, there are some surprising outcomes that challenge existing theories. 

This course explores the relationship between literary texts and their precursors. The course moves from the ancient world of classical Greece, Rome, and the Middle East to the present day. Students focus on the transhistorical, however, not chronological. The course introduces some of the ways in which writers speak to one another across and through time, considering what it means for a writer to invoke other literary texts in their work. Students explore different theoretical models for thinking about this relationship, moving beyond ideas of influence to instead consider more creative ways in which texts have existed in relation to one another. 

In this course, students read, view, and analyze a selection of plays, performances, and other texts that pose gender as a central problem. In conjunction with these performance texts, students also read a variety of theoretical texts that offer methods both for interpreting gender in performance and for understanding gender as performance. The course focuses on theatre and performance works produced from the 1950s to the present and covers a range of performance forms, including dramatic realism, experimental theatre, performance art, and drag performance. 

In this course, students learn how to use a range of marketing analytics techniques to analyze, visualize, and interpret data from various sources such as surveys, transaction data, and data from social media platforms. To effectively analyze these data, students learn how to use typical software packages to develop practical solutions to specific marketing problems. In contrast to other marketing courses, particular emphasis is placed in guiding students step-by-step on how to conduct specific data analyses using suitable software. Students learn how various marketing analytical techniques, tools, metrics, and data sources can be used to address fundamental challenges marketing managers face today in the age of Big Data. 

The course educates students in the main features of the art form, how to achieve them on the page, and how to recognize and appreciate the literary contexts out of which they emerge. Students work through their notebooks and workshops to recognize their own poetic impulses and render them with greater precision in what they write. Students are encouraged to write poems in the workshops, to be discussed by the group. 

To give students the opportunity to understand the key aspects of chemistry that are relevant to biochemistry, including the important structural implications of biologically relevant macromolecules, thermodynamics, and chemical reactions together with their reaction kinetics.

This course starts from the theology of Augustine of Hippo as that which has been formative of the Christian tradition. It explores his characterization of the will, of sin, of grace, and of freedom. Drawing on these Augustinian resources, the course asks how the Christian theological imagination can shape the way that contemporary societal phenomena, such as capitalism and climate change, are diagnosed and addressed. Are these examples of "structural sin"? What sort of agency is possible within these contexts?

The Reformation, which began with Martin Luther in early sixteenth-century Germany, was one of the great turning-points of modern European history, splitting Catholic Christendom and giving rise to many different strands of Protestantism. Using primary sources extant from the period, in English translation if necessary, this course addresses this development in a mixture of lecture and seminar formats. With a broad chronological span, and a geographical scope stretching across much of Western Europe, it offers the stimulating intellectual challenge of learning how to relate key theological concepts to the experiences of the people, in all their diversity.
 

The course explores some of the principles and doctrines underlying the criminal law. It investigates some of the theoretical (and particularly, ethical) problems that criminal law raises. The course increases students’ understanding of many of the principles underlying the criminal law, especially those concerning the scope of criminal prohibitions and the criteria for attributing responsibility and blame to individual wrongdoers. With increased understanding of those principles, students learn to integrate analysis of general issues and principles with argument about particular rules and doctrines in the criminal law.

The course introduces the broad field of Health Technology Assessment (HTA). HTA is a collection of methodologies used to make evidenced-based assessment of the value added by new technologies to inform policy and decision making. The course introduces the full life-cycle of a new medical technology from the perspective of a device inventor and a government regulator, including safety regulations. It covers methodologies including systematic reviewing, decision theory, evidence synthesis, health economics, and the overall methodology used for HTA in practice.