Oxford MSc Management Supplemental Essay Example: Avoiding Vague Answers (Score 93)

The piece I submit is a 4,200-word excerpt drawn from a longer applied project completed in my third year at the Universidad Central del Ecuador, in which I examined how a mid-sized cooperative of Andean flower exporters in Pichincha Province was attempting to formalise its social-impact commitments without a coherent measurement framework. I chose this excerpt rather than the full document for two reasons: it contains the sharpest analytical section, where I move from descriptive stakeholder mapping to a structured critique of the cooperative's impact-reporting logic, and it sits within the word ceiling the department specifies. The personal statement explains my broader motivation for the MSc; this note speaks only to what the writing demonstrates. The excerpt applies a stakeholder-salience model, drawing on Mitchell, Agle, and Wood's power-legitimacy-urgency framework, to interrogate why the cooperative's management committee consistently prioritised export-buyer demands over smallholder supplier welfare when allocating its social-investment budget. My central argument is that the committee's decision-making reflected an implicit but unexamined hierarchy of stakeholder legitimacy, one that the organisation's own mission statement formally contradicted. I traced this tension through three consecutive budget cycles using internal meeting minutes and semi-structured interviews with four committee members and six supplier households in the Cayambe basin. The analysis shows that without a formalised impact-measurement protocol, managerial discretion reproduces the very inequities the cooperative was constituted to address — a finding I connect to wider literature on mission drift in hybrid organisations. I recognise the work's limits honestly. The sample size constrains generalisability, and my quantitative treatment of budget-allocation data is descriptive rather than inferential; I lacked the econometric training to model the distributional effects rigorously. The literature review also engages unevenly with institutional-theory perspectives that would have strengthened the argument. These are precisely the gaps I expect the MSc's core methods sequence and the electives in organisational behaviour and social enterprise management to address. I am particularly interested in how Oxford's teaching on hybrid-organisation governance could give the analytical moves I attempted here a more defensible methodological foundation. The full project is available on request. If the department permits a brief methodological appendix — the interview protocol and the budget-cycle coding schema — I am happy to supply it as a separate attachment; otherwise the excerpt stands alone as submitted.