CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

Introduction

The field of corporate public affairs, social responsibility and public affairs is multifaceted; involving complex interactions with multiple constituencies, various resources, differing interests, and serendipity. It remains as much an art as a science, even after four decades of empirical and theoretical studies from academics and professionals alike. A company maintains a social identity and repute for which profitability may not be the only criterion of success.

A corporate entity has to be aware and cautious about the social changes occurring in its environment, while controlling its own actions and policies for positive, societal contributions. For this purpose, the corporation must be aware about its ethical foundations, social responsibilities towards the citizenship, and its won measures of corporate governance. This is a very complex task to achieve, and often leads to conflicts and rifts between different members of the company. This conflict affects the internal and external environments alike, leading the company to jeopardy. While anticipatory, risk-based analysis allows for reaction on some issues, holistic, strategic understanding remains undeveloped but in demand.

Discussion

This study is based on the following few objectives:

This paper discusses an understanding about corporate social responsibilities of McDonalds, corporate social responsibility and corporate governance along with its obligations and implications. To see how a conflict between corporate ethics, corporate social responsibilities and corporate governance can lead to issues in companies, especially the agency problems. To see how the business growth, performance and competitive advantage is affected by such consequences. To identify and evaluate McDonalds as a subject, to see how well this company adopts various considerations for each of the mentioned concepts while pursuing profitable initiatives.

The company is covering general merchandise sector and food sector. The general merchandise is divided into menswear, women's clothing, home and beauty. All these units have contributed in shaping up company's vision stating that they want to set a standard through which other company should be measured. These units are centralized by the values of McDonald's. These include trust, service, value and innovation (Utting, 2007, 11-13).

Each of the units has developed its specific strategies of Corporate Social Responsibility that is based on the brand-value of trust. The issues that are tackled in the strategies were identified through customer research, understanding within business and by interacting with important stakeholders, government, NGO's etc. An action plan is developed for handling each issue that arises in order to balance ...