Market Mechanism, Government Engagement, and Political Environments in Business Operations

Understanding the Essay Question

Your task is to:

Explain how the market mechanism operates with regard to the allocation of resources, and critically analyse the importance of government engagement concerning climate change.

Explain the importance of different political environments in which businesses operate.  Critically analyse these differences, citing examples of how they might influence business in either positive or negative ways.

Since you are required to write a continuous 2,000 word continuous essay using Harvard referencing using a range of tools of analysis, your first task will be to understand what the question is asking you to do.

Once you are satisfied that you understand the question, formulate an essay plan. You need an introduction, which sets out your terms of reference.  You need to define technical terms.  You need to consider the order in which you are going to present your discussion.  This is an important aspect of essay writing, as you need to be able to link paragraphs without the use of bullet points or sub-headers.  You will need to provide a conclusion, which acts as a brief summary of your findings.

Having established what you are going to do to answer the question, you now need to collect sufficient data, from text books, journal articles, the Economist or quality press to use in the essay.

Identify the lecture and seminar sessions, which cover the topic in the Module Information Pack.  Look at the readings listed as a starting point for your research.

Keep a detailed note of the sources you use to obtain your ideas and support for your answer.  Note, you should avoid cutting and pasting material.  This practice is dangerous, as it may lead to the academic offence of plagiarism.  Write the ideas down in your own words.  Give a reference to recognise where the original idea, or the support for your argument came from. E.g: Sloman (2017) suggested that there is a relationship between free markets and poor social cohesion.  Whilst you are only paraphrasing the many lines of text used to convey the argument in the original text, you are showing that you have understood the idea, and have acknowledged that it originally came from Sloman and not from you.

Try to avoid using direct quotes.  They should be used very sparingly for emphasis only.  There is very little value added in a string of quotes.  If you must use direct quotes, you must use quotation marks and provide additional details of the page on which the quote appears.

Try to identify relevant graphs, data or other tools of analysis to supplement your answer.  When using such diagrams, remember to use your own numbering system.  The first diagram you use will be Figure 1 – even if it is Figure 7 in your source material!

Such a diagram should be fully labelled, titled and the source provided. This source, along with all other references used should be included in the bibliography at the end of the essay.