Business Research Methods
Subject: How important is Corporate Social Responsibility for Tesco? Why is it important?
How important is Corporate Social Responsibility for Tesco?
Why is it important?
Introduction
In last couple of years everything has been changing and developing because of globalisation. As a result of high technology development environmental and social responsible issues are became hot topic for both society and organisations. Many people believe that in today’s business environment, successful organisation should be ethical and responsible for their actions. Sometimes it is not really good when your company’s profits are high which will bring your responsible high as well. Because people believe that being socially responsible means spend how much company earn they should spend the similar amount of money on environment and social issues. Socially responsible issues are not new to public and examples can be found even from earliest day of industrial revolution.
Corporate social responsibility is an action that maximise its force in providing necessary amounts of quality goods and services at minimum financial and social costs as well as less usage of environmental resources. It is more than just providing goods and services. It may be difficult for organisations however all of them supposed to provide this kind of strategy in order to be successful.
Objectives
There are some basic problems when defining corporate social responsibility such as socially responsible actions necessarily reflects moral values, the substance of which cannot be determined apart from particular situations. It does not mean all the actions that other companies take are responsible. Business should have their corporate system that makes social and economic sense. When firms want to be socially responsible they need to have some system which suggests what society wants them to do. CSR shows to others that company behave ethically and improve their image to society.
The main reason why I chose Tesco is the company is one of the most profitable and socially responsible companies in United Kingdom. According to Simms A, (2007) in recent years, there has been growing interest for Tesco rendering them more socially active and involved in addressing social problems. Tesco has done many social actions such as reducing the wastage using their buy one get one free offers, decreasing plastic bags with their �Green bag” projects and supporting many different charities. Their strategy helps many environment issues.
Literature review
The beginning of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), firms think that being ethical means only building houses for their employees and schools for their children (Farmer and Hogue 1985). Since, the middle 90s, corporate social responsibilities get more interests and companies have gained more strength. Many firms are starting to realize that they cannot ignore social expectations from society. Many firms struggled with the problem of how to act as good corporate citizens. CSR became main concept on the public agenda and getting more attentions. (Zu L, 2009). Being ethical is really great in moral principle, but when principle is become to practice things always changes. There are many questions came up such as which is the right way to act responsible and how to express it. Things get difficult when different part of society expect different things from firms (Hall et al. 2000). Being socially responsible costs a lot to firms however, if you do not be responsible for your society it also costs. For example, if business does not behave ethically it may occur their stakeholders to reconsider their communication with the firm. It may bring results like suppliers stop providing with goods or customers stop buying and using your products which would be loss for the organisation. That is why it is really important that company should balance both being ethical and spending money on it.
Methodology
Methodologies that people use for research are really important for getting useful information. In order to get useful information about Tesco’s CSR, i need to use different kind of research methods and combine them together. Using only literature review is not enough at all. People do academic research because reading literature review is not enough information we should connect both practice and theory together. Practice shows what is happening in the real case and they can analyse theories based on case study. There are gaps between literature reviews and the real cases. There are ranges of research methods that applied for collecting data.
Firstly, in order to get valuable information about Tesco’s Corporate Social Responsibility I need to do research. Business and management research has many different traditions, one of the most fundamental of which is the distinction between quantitative and qualitative research. Both researches involve helpful way of categorizing different approaches of business research. Using both qualitative and quantitative research is really helpful for analysing the findings. There are some major differences between quantitative and qualitative researches.
The quantitative research is research strategy that mostly consider on collection of data. It may easy to understand because it based on numbers instead of words and theories. It helps to test the relationship between theory and research.
On the other side, qualitative research is a strategy that usually concentrates words rather than the collection of numbers and data. According to Bryman and Bell (2007 pp401-402) qualitative research is �Predominantly emphasizes an inductive approach to the relationship between theory and research, in which the emphasis is placed on the generation of theories’.
Next method that i should use is both secondary and primary data. I cannot base my writing on secondary data or primary only. Because there are many disadvantages using just only one of them. For example, secondary data can be false, and you do not know whether it is true or not as long as you do the primary data for yourself. Secondary data is the information that someone else already collected. Such as internet sources, newspaper and journal articles. It may be easier to find and cheaper however, it is not up to date. That is why we should not use only secondary data for our research. People use primary data in order to confirm their secondary data is correct or not. (Bryman and Bell 2007),
Primary data is information that you collected it by yourself and it is not exceeded anywhere else. It is just what you have been collecting from original sources. Examples of primary data are interviews and questionnaires. Primary data can be difficult to find, expensive and take longer time than secondary date. However, linking primary data with secondary data makes the best research. In order to do my primary data i can interview some of employees from Tesco and ask their opinion about Tesco’s CSR with open questions. Open type questions help people to analyse. Because it gives more information than closed questions which may answered by one or two words. Interviewing customers’ opinion about Tesco’s social responsibility also may useful for my research. Moreover, questionnaires are very helpful as well as surveys from stakeholders. Their opinions about CSR can lead me to the right conclusion.
All in all the best way to do my research is choosing right method for my research and get data from trustful sources such as journals, books and analyse them with my own words. Harvard referencing is really important. Otherwise it may occur plagiarism.
References
1. Bryman and Bell (2007), Business Research Methods (2nd edn), Oxford University Press Inc, New York.
2. Farmer and Hogue (1985), Corporate Social Responsibility (2nd edn), D.C Heath and Company, United States of America
3. Hall et al. (2000), Business Studies (2nd edn), Legoprint, Italy
4. Simms A, (2007), Tescopoly, Constable and Robinson Ltd , Great Britain.
5. Zu L, (2009), Corporate Social Responsibility, Corporate Restructuring and Firm’s Performance, Springer-Verlag, Berlin
Bibliography
1. Davis. D (2000), Business Research for Decision Making (5th edn), Duxbury, United States.