Contents

• This assignment is based on the following assignment description –
• SECTION 1: Introduction
• You must write a 150 word introduction outlining the topic of your essay and stating the approach you are going to take in discussing this topic.
• SECTION 2: Management Literature on Corporate Social Responsibility
• This section of the assignment requires you to demonstrate your understanding of ethics or corporate social responsibility based on your reading of the management literature.
• You must find three scholarly articles published in academic journals which relate to (corporate social responsibility (if you wish to analyse the BP oil spill). Your articles must be published in journals on the approved list of journals below. You do not need to choose your three articles from three different approved journals. However, you cannot choose an article from a journal not on the approved list. These journals have been chosen because they represent high quality, peer reviewed scholarly research in the field of management. In addition, each article you choose must be published in the years 2000 to 2010.
• After you have found your three articles, you must write 250 words on each article discussing the insights it offers into ethics or corporate social responsibility. You should avoid merely summarising the content of your articles. Rather, you should analyse what you learned about ethics or corporate social responsibility from reading the article. You must not use more than 25 words in direct quotes per article. When writing your essay, paraphrase the author’s ideas and insights into your own words. The following approach can help. What question is the author(s) trying to answer in their research? What did they find? How are their findings interesting and relevant to ethics or corporate social responsibility? What new insights does the article offer? Note: You must submit a copy of the first page of each journal article in an appendix.
• SECTION 3: Ethics or Corporate Social Responsibility in Practice
• This section requires you to apply the insights you learned from the articles you found in Section 2 to analyse the BP oil spill. Good sources of information are articles in newspapers, business magazines and company web sites.
• You must write a 500 word analysis of the ethical issues involved in the corporate social responsibility issues involved in the BP oil spill in the Gulf of New Mexico. You should avoid merely describing the actions of the managers of the BP. Rather, you should try to demonstrate how academic theories about ethics and corporate social responsibility can be applied to understand how the managers responded to ethical dilemmas and questions of corporate social responsibility in these organisations. Again this section must not contain more than 10% of direct quotes from the article (ie 50 words).
• SECTION 4: Conclusion and Reflections
• In the concluding section of your essay, you should reflect on what you have learned from writing Section 2 and Section 3 about how real organisations deal with ethical and corporate social responsibility issues in practice. This section must include your reflections on the following questions:
• How would you have responded if you were a manager in one of the organisations?
• What lessons can be learned from the case of the BP oil spill to ensure that organisations maintain high standards of ethics and corporate social responsibility?
• How can we ensure that the theoretical insights into ethics and corporate social responsibility published in the scholarly management literature inform better practice in real organisations?
• You may use additional references to support your conclusions and reflections if you desire.

Description

The operations of organizations have at times caused harm to people, society and environment. The reasons of organization caused disasters could be many. However, it appears that in most of the cases human negligence, use of cheaper material, not adhering to safety standards have caused these mishaps. The paper discusses the issues related to corporate social responsibility such as professional ethical standards, corporate social responsibility, ethics, corporate social reporting and importantly the paper discusses as to how effective corporate social responsibility practices still benefit the corporate world despite perceived opposition from stakeholders with the help of three scholarly articles. This paper then tries to apply the theory to the incident and after effects of oil leak in Gulf of Mexico from the rig owned by BP. The paper then tries to analyze as to how best the social responsibility could have been practices prior to the incident and even after the incident from this author’s viewpoint.