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Literature Essays

International Business

Literature Essay Guidelines for International Business

Literature Essay is the possibility to cover 1 - 2 credit points missing from your degree by reading literature on a topic that is important for your Bachelor's Thesis or for your current working life situation to improve your skills in a certain field of business.

You are reporting your learning in essay form by reflecting your real-life experiences with the ideas presented in literature and articles.

Literature Essays

As a TAMK Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) in International Business student, you can include 1 - 2 credits worth of essays based on reading literature into your Free-Choice Studies. In the Free-Choice Studies section you have a course by the same name with the code Literature Essays 3B00CX30.

Eligible Books

You should choose the books on which you base your essay from the List of Literature by Johannes Partanen (Jyväskylä TeamAcademy). The name of the book collected by Mister Johannes Partanen is called "Tiimiyrittäjän ja tiimivalmentajan parhaat kirjatValintaopas 2016" (you can also use versions from earlier years). Even though the name of the book is in Finnish, you can find a lot of suggested literature in English in it as well.

The books in the List of Literature have been given 1, 2 or 3 book points according to how demanding they are. Three (3) book points equals one (1) credit point. The List of Literature covers topics such as Leadership, Marketing, Innovation, Community Building, Learning, and Personal Development. As an International Business student, you can include a maximum of five points of Literature Essays in your Individual Study Plan.

You can borrow the List of Literature by Johannes Partanen (Jyväskylä TeamAcademy), "Tiimiyrittäjän ja tiimivalmentajan parhaat kirjat, valintaopas 2016" in TAMK Library. There is also one copy of it for review in the TAMK Reference Library.

Instructions

A Literature Essay must not be a summary of a book, but instead in your essay you will need to compare the contents of the book with, or reflect on, your experiences from working life. It is more important to focus on the contents instead of the length of the essay. You need to pay attention to the true findings that you gain during the reading. The essay must, however, meet the minimum requirement of two pages + the cover.

On the cover you need to identify:

  • your name
  • student number
  • the name of the book
  • the number of book points listed in the List of Literature (by Mister Johannes Partanen)

To get 1 credit point, the book(s) you have read must be worth three (3) book points.

Contact Person, Submission and Grading

You can also suggest a book outside of the List of Literature. The suggested book cannot, however, be one of your International Business course books.

Students of International Business return their essays as an e-mail attachment to Senior Lecturer, Mr. Matti Karlsson, matti.karlsson [at] tuni.fi.

The Literature Essays will be graded with the grade "S" (= Pass). You will receive feedback on your essays.

The Writing Guidelines for Literature Essays (International Business)

You write a book essay so that it covers a certain book using a consistent and personal approach. Consistent approach refers to writing the essay using a clear structure that holds throughout the essay. Personal approach means that the topic is discussed from a creative and new point of view.

Approaching the Topic

Discuss the topic of the essay creatively and in an original manner. Deal with the topic by using your own views and experiences, for example, based on work experience, as the backbone. Furthermore, a book essay is not a piece of text that refers to implications presented in the source material, but rather it analyses and questions them. Instead of you merely presenting their opinions and views, you will also have to be able to justify yourself.

You also have to familiarize yourself with the book and compare your views on the matter with the views of the author(s) of the book. You can utilize your work experience, practical training experience, other books or other things you have learned to compare your knowledge with that of the book.

References

In the process of writing a book essay, you need proper referencing and summarising skills, as the essay is based on a source text. Referencing means discussing an article or a piece of work in one's own words so that the relevant information is conveyed to the reader. The original content of the material and your own thoughts must not be mixed: this means you must distinguish clearly between your own thought and that of the source material. You have to understand the source material well enough to point out the order of importance and correlation between different matters in your essay, even in a summarized form.

Prioritization

You must also indicate the topics that are important, the ones that are less important and the overall correlations and consequences of different issues. When summarising the essay, you are required to include the most important topics of the source material, and narrow down the details and demonstrations that can be understood even without the core content. The order of presenting matters in the book essay can change substantially from the original. However, the book essay is not meant to be a summary of the entire book, but only the parts that are addressed in the essay.

Paragraphs

Your essay must be consistent and uniform throughout. This means that the entire essay is to be divided into clear paragraphs and the paragraphs must be in a justified order. All things dealt with in the essay you need to directly link to the topic. The most conventional discussion order starts with a paragraph explaining a list of topics that the essay talks about and each of the ensuing paragraphs discusses a part of the list. The essay structure can be based on presenting the cause and effect, comparison, classification or chronology.

Each paragraph must distinctly discuss only one matter, and each matter discussed has to relate to the essay topic directly. Sentences in the paragraph are to be written so that each of them has at least one element referring to the previous sentence. This can be done using a pronoun, conjunction, synonym, a repeated word or a repeated part of a word. It also makes it clear whether the author is referencing the source material or expressing their own views and thoughts.

Requirements

The essay must be at least two pages long and written on a computer.

The cover page is to feature

  • the name of the book,
  • its author,
  • the student's name (your name) and student number,
  • the book topic (each book topic is marked on the book list) and
  • the book's value in points (as listed in the List of Literature by Johannes Partanen; "Tiimiyrittäjän ja tiimivalmentajan parhaat kirjatValintaopas 2016").
Published: 11.6.2019
Updated: 10.6.2022