Business and Society

Business and society is a discipline that refuses to treat commercial life in isolation from the world around it. Where conventional business education focuses primarily on profit, markets, and organisational efficiency, business and society asks harder questions: what obligations do firms have to their workers, communities, and environments? How do public policy choices shape what businesses can and cannot do?

What role should the voluntary and public sectors play in addressing challenges that markets alone cannot solve? These are not merely philosophical questions; they shape the decisions of managers, regulators, investors, and policymakers every day.

At York this three-year full-time BA brings together concepts and evidence from business and management studies and from social and public policy, treating them as genuinely interconnected rather than separate fields. You will examine how private, public, and voluntary sector organisations respond to challenges including inclusive economic growth, social justice, ethical business practices, and democratic decision-making. The programme is designed to develop both analytical rigour and practical insight, preparing you to think carefully about complex problems and to contribute substantively to their resolution.

A sandwich year is available within the programme, along with a year abroad, and work placement experience is embedded in the degree. These features mean you can complement your academic development with sustained experience of how organisations actually operate across different contexts, and with the international perspective that a year in a different country provides.

Graduates move into roles in business and management, social enterprise, government, public policy, the voluntary sector, sustainability, consultancy, and international organisations. The degree's distinctive focus on the relationship between business and the wider social good makes graduates particularly well suited to roles that require both commercial competence and an awareness of the broader context in which organisations operate. Many also go on to postgraduate study in business, public policy, or social science.