A Business Research Proposal On Corporate Social Responsibility

Types of Corporate Social Responsibility

Question:

What is the main reason of The business research proposal of throwing light on the management decisions of corporate firms.

The business research proposal throws light on the management decisions of corporate firms to implement Corporate Social Responsibility. In today’s world, many corporate sector companies are implementing different methods to win over their clients. Some of the corporate sector firms claim that they maintain strong loyalty with their clients. Apart from this another important aspect that the companies are paying attention to is a set of corporate social responsibilities. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a part of the business that the company does. The responsibility of the company to participate and promote initiatives from which the society can get some benefit is accounted as the corporate social responsibility of the company (Responsibility, 2015).

Studies have revealed that a lot of companies and organisations have been implementing various methods to encourage corporate social responsibility. The organisations pay serious attention to the issues regarding the society and environment while running the business. The corporate social responsibility of the company includes the role which the company play to allocate the resources available for different activities (Homburg, et al., 2013). Hence, one can observe that the corporate social responsibility of an organisation is a very important part of the company’s business.

In this business proposal the author writes a literature review on the topic of the corporate social responsibility of the organisations doing business. The literature review helps to understand the topic better. The concept of corporate social responsibility has been incorporated in the business of the organisations way back in 1917 (Bondy, et al., 2012). Some of the corporate social responsibilities that the companies perform include that they work for the welfare of the people, to generate profit and to utilize it judiciously. Some of the companies also aim at generating employment as a part of their corporate responsibility.

There are a few companies who give due importance to the interests of the stakeholders of the firm. The companies take care of the social well being of the stakeholders as well as that of their employees. All these form a part of the corporate social responsibility of the firm. The corporate social responsibilities of the companies involve finding new ways to make their customers happy with their services and also to generate heavy returns that would make their shareholders happy. Studies have shown that there exist a positive relation between the society and the business organisations (Aguinis & Glavas, 2012).

There are different types of corporate social responsibility that the business organisations all over the world practices. The author of the research proposal has listed below some of the corporate social responsibilities of the firms.

Environment: business corporations all over the world have huge carbon footprints. The business organisations make serious and sincere efforts to cut down those footprints from their business practices. This measure that the firms undertake is considered very positive both for the society as well as the company as a whole (Flammer, 2013).

Proposed Research and Analysis

Ethical practices for the employees: It forms a part of the duty of the companies all over the world to treat their employees equally with respect following professional ethics (Brammer, et al., 2012). This forms an important aspect of the corporate social responsibility of the company.

Philanthropy: some of the business corporations of the world engage in social activities like donating a portion of their profit to local and national charitable trusts. Apart from donating money to the charitable trusts, the business firms also have other resources that can benefit the programs held in the local communities (Cheng, et al., 2014).

One can observe that there are a lot of studies and researches going on even today to elaborate more on the corporate social responsibilities of the business organisations all over the world (Calabrese, et al., 2013). The researcher can pose the following questions to conduct the research on the corporate social responsibilities of the companies:

1. What are the management practices that the business organisations can follow to maintain corporate social responsibility?
2. What practices the corporate organisations follow to maintain uniqueness in their corporate social responsibility?
3. What are the reasons behind the emergence of the concept of the corporate social responsibility of the firms (Baden & Harwood, 2013)?

The researcher tries to find the answers to the above proposed questions through the research that the researcher is going to conduct.

The researcher performs an analysis for the in-depth investigation of the concept of corporate social responsibility. The researcher studies the concept under the light of qualitative methods (Crane, et al., 2013). The researcher and the analyst can perform the research in various ways. Here in this proposal the researcher has chosen a multinational company from China and makes a list of its branches at other locations outside China. The researcher also forms groups of two to three multinational companies, other than the one chosen. By doing so the researcher gets the opportunity to analyse and compare the different social responsibilities that these companies undertake.

The researcher has chosen the company named “Better and Happy world” for doing his research. The organisation is a private firm working with the objective to establish a system that is sustainable related to the supply of food. The company has its head office located in Belgium and it has many branches spread all over the world. The company obtain funds from different sources and encourages different projects that might bring about changes in the structure of the business of the firm. The researcher observed that the company does not incorporate any specific corporate social responsibility policy. However the researcher observed that the company maintains sustainable and integrated policies in all its departments (Kucukusta, et al., 2013).

The Gantt chart clearly describes the milestones of the research proposal. The Gantt chart denotes the duration for completing the literature review, duration for the collection of data and making the analysis report and the date on which the final research proposal will be submitted.

Task	Start date	Duration	End date
Literature Review	08th  June	15 days	23rd  June
Data Collection	24th June	60 days	24th Aug
Data Analysis	25th Aug	55 days	20th Oct
Final Report Submission	21st Oct	30 days	21st Nov

 The bar diagram above describes the milestones of the research proposal.

To conduct the research on the proposed topic, the researcher would consider the studies of different scholars related to the corporate social responsibilities of different business organisations. The studies of the scholars reveal a number of new theories that has been developed while studying the concept of corporate social responsibilities. The researcher would be taking into account a number of case studies on the topic to complete the research process. The case studies would help the researcher to understand the concept better. The researcher would select the data for performing the research following a theoretical method of sampling (Elo, et al., 2014).

Gantt Chart

The researcher would be implementing various methods to assess the problem of corporate social responsibility on the light of the business organisation chosen. The researcher would be employing a linear approach to understand the concept of CSR. The researcher has chosen the linear approach due to the difficulty of overlapping of various theories and concepts while doing the research (Baker, et al., 2013). The researcher would receive a solution to the research questions following the linear approach. The experimenter analyses the underlying concepts of the corporate social responsibility. The researcher visualizes the meaning of CSR to different people by conducting the research following the linear approach. The solutions that the researchers obtain from the linear approach to the problem would incorporate uniqueness to the aspect of corporate social responsibility.

The researcher has collected the data to conduct the research from different sources. The data from the different sources enables the researcher to differentiate between the corporate social responsibilities that the different business organisations perform. The experimenter has taken the interview of 20 to 25 people, which includes the workers of the management department. The employees who faced the interview included managers of the medium and the senior levels and also the employees from a few other departments. The interviewer also conducted the interview of the brand managers, communication managers and the employees from the human resource team.

The interviewer conducted the interviews through questionnaire that generated quantitative data. The experimenter further categorised the questions of the questionnaire into questions regarding the corporate vision of the company, questions regarding the policy of CSR of the company and other corporate missions and policies. The answers that the experimenter obtains by interviewing the employees of the firm pertain to the policy regarding the corporate social responsibility of the company. The researcher then analyses the data by qualitative methods (Tesch, 2013).

The researcher expects that by doing the research on the corporate social responsibilities he would be able to highlight the operational policies of the company to implement the corporate social responsibility within the structure of the business. The researcher expects to know the actions that the company need to take to implement the CSR policy. Through this research, the researcher expects to understand the ideas of the employees of the firm regarding the implementation of the CSR in the company. The researcher also expects to explain the role of the stakeholders of the company in performing the corporate social responsibilities (Csikszentmihalyi & Larson, 2014).

Conclusion

The research proposal mainly discusses the underlying concept of the corporate social responsibilities that different firms adopt. The research proposal highlights the implications of the CSR policy on the society. The research proposal has helped in developing a theoretical understanding of the issues regarding the governance of the CSR. One can conclude from the research proposal that while formulating the CSR policies the companies should keep in mind the interests of the stakeholders.

References:

Aguinis, H., & Glavas, A. (2012). What we know and don’t know about corporate social responsibility a review and research agenda. Journal of management, 38(4), 932-968.

Baden, D., & Harwood, I. A. (2013). Terminology matters: A critical exploration of corporate social responsibility terms. Journal of Business Ethics, 116(3), 615-627.

Baker, R., Brick, J. M., Bates, N. A., Battaglia, M., Couper, M. P., Dever, J. A., … & Tourangeau, R. (2013). Summary report of the AAPOR task force on non-probability sampling. Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology, 1(2), 90-143.

Bondy, K., Moon, J., & Matten, D. (2012). An institution of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in multi-national corporations (MNCs): Form and implications. Journal of Business Ethics, 111(2), 281-299.

Brammer, S., Jackson, G., & Matten, D. (2012). Corporate social responsibility and institutional theory: New perspectives on private governance. Socio-Economic Review, 10(1), 3-28.

Calabrese, A., Costa, R., Menichini, T., Rosati, F., & Sanfelice, G. (2013). Turning Corporate Social Responsibilityâ€Âdriven Opportunities in Competitive Advantages: a Twoâ€Âdimensional Model. Knowledge and Process Management, 20(1), 50-58.

Cheng, B., Ioannou, I., & Serafeim, G. (2014). Corporate social responsibility and access to finance. Strategic Management Journal, 35(1), 1-23.

Crane, A., Matten, D., & Spence, L. J. (2013). Corporate social responsibility in a global context. Chapter in: Crane, A., Matten, D., and Spence, LJ,’Corporate Social Responsibility: Readings and Cases in a Global Context, 2, 3-26.

Csikszentmihalyi, M., & Larson, R. (2014). Validity and reliability of the experience-sampling method. In Flow and the Foundations of Positive Psychology (pp. 35-54). Springer Netherlands.

Elo, S., Kääriäinen, M., Kanste, O., Pölkki, T., Utriainen, K., & Kyngäs, H. (2014). Qualitative content analysis. SAGE open, 4(1), 2158244014522633.

Flammer, C. (2013). Corporate social responsibility and shareholder reaction: The environmental awareness of investors. Academy of Management Journal, 56(3), 758-781.

Homburg, C., Stierl, M., & Bornemann, T. (2013). Corporate social responsibility in business-to-business markets: how organizational customers account for supplier corporate social responsibility engagement.Journal of Marketing, 77(6), 54-72.

Kucukusta, D., Mak, A., & Chan, X. (2013). Corporate social responsibility practices in four and five-star hotels: Perspectives from Hong Kong visitors.International Journal of Hospitality Management, 34, 19-30.