Study Skills for Higher Education Corporate Social Responsibility

University of Suffolk

BA in Business Studies

(Foundation Year)

Assignment 2

Context of Business

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I declare that this assignment is all my own work and that I have acknowledged all materials used from the published or unpublished works of other people. All references have been duly cited.

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Introduction

Corporate social responsibility when it comes to ruling the competitive business world, has been ranked as one of the most effective tools, for decades this method has been incredibly efficient in delivering the promises it makes, which is ensuring corporate responsibilities’ awareness among the people (Kang, 2018). This is a concept that focuses on ensuring companies’ active activities and responsible actions towards the society and its people. The primal purpose of this concept is to determine social responsibility, responsiveness, appropriate actions and natural activities (French, 2019).

Literature review

Defining literature review

Literature review is basically a thorough, elaborated and systematic approach to a document, it can be a book or a journal, an article of any authentic sources, and it gives out a sophisticated understanding of the topic (Melé, 2019). Literature review is a process where critical justification of the research gets projected; this review should also focus on giving knowledge on the overall investigation regarding the topic. It should contain descriptive summary, critical analysis based on other researches and overall understanding of the research (Kolk, 2016).

This review should be able to critically evaluate the issues on the current research factors and finding the research objectives of it, it should be mindful of the differences that take place between book review and annotated bibliography, as they have diverse purposes and scopes to them (Miska, 2016). A literature can be both a separate element of the task or a significant part of a broader task depending on the need of the work itself. In order to make the entire task and literature review more potent and efficient, properly and precisely documenting the literature reviewing process is essential (Chapman, 2019).

In addition to this, the literature review must be able to contain important messages of the overall task in it, to make the literature review very resourceful, providing with a brief summary of the task, then giving data on social/science based factors in it, a little knowledge on the company activities and giving out a synthesis would be wise. A summary within literature review can provide with rationalization of the whole assignment, which can also include- the things that are to be done, why and how they can be added to the task, how to investigate the problems and what would be the solutions and so on (Dobson, 2019).

Purpose of literature review

Literature review has its reasons for its existence, it has specific purposes and ways to go about its activities, one of the most fundamental purposes of the literature review is to provide the researchers with a substantial amount of knowledge on the topic and what it has established so far (Rahul, 2019). Conduction of the literature review is about projecting the strengths and weaknesses of the topic and finding academic opinions, finding agreements and disagreements of the project as well. Positioning of the research project is dependent on the literature review and the data that it provides with, the readers get a great amount of data and knowledge on the subject and becomes able to understand it in a much broader spectrum (French, 2019).

literature review on CSR

Globalization is a very vast term and a very large area of knowledge which are interrelated to business organizations, their present and future opportunities, national and international marketing matters and growth and sustainability matters. Globalization is basically internationalization of a company, stepping into a new market and going overseas (Melé, 2019). Transactions of products and services of a company to a new market, with new organizational approaches and people is globalization. In this case, a company’s substantial globalization is dependent on corporate governance mechanisms in conjunction to corporate social responsibility (Kolk, 2016).

CSR across Organizations

CSR stands for corporate social responsibility but CSR also emphasizes on corporate citizenship, responsible business activities, sustainable business functions, corporate social performance management, corporation self-regulation, integrated business management and so on (Miska 2016). CSR does not just work to bring benefits and advantages to the company but it targets the society and wants to bring positive changes on the society through the business activities and ensuring better choices at life and livelihood. From Ghana to Philippines, CSR has determined social sustainability in superior manner (Kang, 2018). When it comes to the European model of CSR, the primal focus of it is to determine social responsibility by investing substantial amounts in business activities which are focused on doing voluntary activities for the betterment of the communities (Dobson, 2019).. Primarily and preferably, CSR is an activity that ensures self-regulation in terms of individual people and in terms of individual companies to support and practice law, to determine ethical activities and to restore norms (Rahul, 2019).

Views on CSR

CSR can be viewed in number of ways-

Skeptic view

Skeptic view in terms of CSR is a believer of CSR contrasting to democracy and freedom, in this case, wealth creation remains the primary focus (French, 2019). This CSR specifically focuses on bringing profit to the table (French, 2019).

Utopian view

When it comes to the Utopian CSR, it generally focuses on the companies’ activities and their focus on their stakeholders as oppose to their shareholders, they especially focus on the vulnerable stakeholders who might have been exploited by their companies in any way and this is the theory of Evan and Freeman. This theory mainly focuses on ensuring cooperation, work and efforts to be recognized, respecting each other and valuing one another (Kolk, 2016).