London School of Economics

The course is an introduction to politics in a globalized world, with a focus on how political science tries to understand and explain cross-country and cross-time differences. The course begins by introducing students to some of the main empirical variations in political behavior, political institutions, and outcomes across the world, focusing mainly on democratic and partially democratic countries (in both the developed and developing world), and introduces students to some of the basic theoretical ideas and research methods in political science. Each subsequent week is devoted to a substantive topic, where a more detailed analysis of political behavior, political institutions, or political outcomes are presented and various theoretical explanations are assessed.

The course provides students with an understanding of organizational change as a multifaceted phenomenon and equips them with skills to adopt a reflective, multi-dimensional approach when managing change in their future careers. In their everyday jobs, managers need to identify when change is needed, manage its implementation or guide others through it. In this course students learn about theories, strategies, skills, and techniques for leading successful change.

This course addresses various topics in management research which encourage creative and logical thinking, structuring of clear arguments, and critical assessment of evidence. The intellectual backbone of the course is applied and empirical economics, including behavioral economics and finance, but wherever appropriate, the course discusses contributions from the psychology, sociology, and management literature. Students mainly deal with issues which are amenable to rigorous empirical investigation. Examples of questions considered are whether pain killers are more effective when they are expensive, whether successful entrepreneurs tend to have been juvenile delinquents, and gender differences in negotiation.

The course introduces and develops an economic framework for business analysis and corporate valuation. The main focus is on integrating key concepts of economics, accounting, and finance in order to effectively evaluate the information content of financial reports; develop up-to-date applied knowledge of fundamental valuation techniques; and successfully implement investment strategies.

This course examines the idea of the communication revolution from two perspectives. First, how have changes in communications technology altered the speed and nature of communication between individuals and societies? The course explores how inventions such as the printing press, the camera and the radio helped connect Latin Americans to national and international networks and gave rise to new political and cultural identities. Second, how have individuals and groups used mass communication to both push for and resist revolutionary change? Examples include the role of print culture in the Atlantic Revolutions, printmaking in the Mexican Revolution and the pioneering use of radio education in the Andean countryside during the 1960s. 

The course examines the inter-relationships between the development of the international economy and the growth of national economies until the late 19th century. The course introduces students not only to a wide variety of topics and issues, but also to the wide variety of approaches used by historians. The course includes analyses of the original leading nation, Britain, and its replacement, the United States, as well as the catch-up of areas such as continental Europe, and the failure to catch-up of earlier well-placed areas such as Latin America. 

Employing the theory of Bourdieu throughout the course, students examine the interrelatedness of economy, governance, and society in influencing the choice of where we live. Students focus on the role of culture in nuancing class-based explanations of the relationship between people and place. We consider how housing choices can confer social advantage or disadvantage on individual households. Students discuss the significance for policy makers of placing the social at the center of our understanding of housing choices. We use a series of place-based typologies and phenomenon to relate theory to practice. Examples might include but are not limited to suburbanization, rural second homes, and gentrification.

This course introduces students to selected ways in which human geographers seek to understand cities. It explores the relationship between people and place. Primarily engaging with London, students consider how the city has been shaped over time by its people and how, in turn the city experience has shaped and continues to shape the lives of those who live there. Students consider how the city is described, imagined, and planned through official discourses, and how people create a sense of place, of self, and of others in the city. In the fall semester, students explore the relationship between planning, architecture, design, and people’s identities. In the spring semester, students explore the relationship between infrastructure and people. Throughout students consider how human geographers engage with the lived experience of the city through the lens of, for example, ethnicity, class, and sexual identity.

The first half of the course explores classic epistemology. It begins with the argument for skepticism about the external world, and in seeking to solve this problem considers a range of positions and arguments in epistemology, including: the JTB account; the causal theory of knowing; reliabilism; internalism and externalism; contextualism, and semantic externalism. The second half of the course focuses on modern formal epistemology. Moving from a qualitative to a quantitative concept of belief, it explores Bayesian epistemology – a powerful account of rational degrees of belief or credence. Students consider a series of puzzles for Bayesian epistemologists: the sleeping beauty problem; imprecise probabilities; awareness growth; and the surprise exam paradox.