Good Research Paper About Corporate Social Responsibility Of Coca Cola

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Introduction
Although it is believed that one of the fundamental issues about business is making money and gaining profit, the society expects that companies follow all the moral and ethical principles regarding the employees, suppliers and other interested groups. Despite various scandals and difficult situations related to the violation of corporate social responsibility, the number of business institutions which manage their companies in accordance with all the norms of international trade law is rather small. There are many cases involving international corporations which locate their production capacities on the territory of the Third World countries and their activity result in the violation of human rights, negligence of safety conditions at the workplace environmental degradation. The society has already used to the exceptional value of money by the majority of people.
The leaders who care about the personnel are perceived as something out of this world. That is the main reason for the great interest and heated debates connected with many leading corporations. However, as for this paper, it is mainly aimed at conducting a survey of a multinational food and beverage corporation Coca Cola; the paper basically aims to look into the issue of Coca Cola’s corporate social responsibility. To be precise, such objectives as the review of the society on the reputation of Coca Cola as the corporate citizen, steps taken by Coca Cola in order to become an efficient corporate citizen as well as the stakeholder’s review on the steps taken by the company are determined in order to distinguish the precise entity of the abovementioned international manufacturing giant.

Company Background

Coca Cola is the international brand, standing for a carbonated soft drink that is usually sold in shops, stores, vending machines and restaurants. Daily, it pours nearly 3% of beverages served by the humanity. Once Henry Miller said, “Without a Coca-Cola life is unthinkable.” Because of high levels of customer loyalty, the company maintains rather moderate prices for its products on the market. But, currently, there are many factors that jeopardize the overall business.
Coca Cola is viewed as the world leader in selling beverages. It possesses the absolute market leadership. The company has the advanced joint business models as the result of being a member of different partnerships. It constantly continues to participate in the new lines of beverages, effectively advertising its products. It maintains the strong competitive advantage in USA, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Panama, Columbia, Mexico and China. The fact that company exists for many decades speaks volumes of the powerful brand portfolio. It attracts customers by means of carbonated soft drinks, bottled water and energy drinks. Additionally, knowledge management totally depends upon collaborative customer relationships. It aids the company authorities to effectively conduct client value management to determine the levels of their satisfaction. Multi-segmentation helps Coca Cola offer the diversity of products within portfolio in all markets worldwide. The prices are determined on the ground of customers' profiles and geographical areas. This provides effective balance between distribution and sales, where every particular product can be sold at reasonable and affordable prices. When determining the extent of the market share, one should make mention that popularity of Coca Cola is very huge and currently it holds nearly ninety percent of the entire soft drinks beverage market in America. Furthermore, quality is offered at clear prices, which provides relatively high reputation.

Stakeholders of the Organization

Leading Corporate Citizenship implies bearing full responsibility for the actions of employees and suppliers, maintaining the strict code of ethics and human rights. Every particular employee is a value for Coca Cola Company and is expected to act on behalf of the company. Coca Cola Company is targeted to act ethically, offering high quality products and not only pursue exclusively commercial goals. This way, the company is likely to possess two great values of accountability and workforce principles. All such principles are applied to all business stakeholders: employees, owners, customers and suppliers. So, to become a strong and leading corporate citizen requires building and promoting strong, trusting and long-lasting relationships with stakeholders (Waddock, 2002). Additionally, risks and opportunities are always based upon stakeholder expectations. Value added for leading corporate citizenship needs to be based upon the involvement of every employee in the working process. They need to be stimulated and motivate to score better and at full potential. Respectively, their value should be supported by financial aid, benefits and wages.
Being an international organization, it is aimed to face the action-oriented goals, make constant commitments to the improvement of the inner management system and establishment of mutually beneficial relationships with all stakeholders, starting from customers, employees, suppliers, shareholders and, finishing with society and government. The company states that balancing stakeholders’ interests by means of empowerment of all employees can aid the staff concentrate more on value-added activities. Moreover, Coca Cola Company is always targeted to increase the production capacity and respectively get more profits.

The Importance of CSR

Corporate social responsibility is a form of corporate self-regulation that is usually integrated into a business mode of the organization. CSR is implemented on the internal level to take control over active compliance with ethical code, spirit of law and international standards. The effective business ethics allows developing strong and reliable leaders who are able to handle all moral and ethical problems in the business environment. By customizing leadership training programs, the company will manage to improve fundamental communication and skills that are the integral part of solid leadership. Strong leaders always reflect their corporal social responsibility by their independent thinking (Saether, 2008). They are able to handle their problems and conflicts by means of their creative attitudes. In most cases, strong leaders are also intended to take full responsibility for their decisions and their consequences (Ferrell, 2001). Respectively, they need to be successful in decision-making and implementation. Seeing themselves as the instruments for a deeper purpose that rests upon code of ethics and law will have the powerful influence on management and will satisfy the needs of customers.
Indisputably, the strategy adopted by superiors is considered to be the milestone of the case. Corporate Social Responsibility in Coca Cola Company has been supported by three disparate groups: by government authorities, non-government organizations (national industry groups and charities) and businesses (mostly medium-sized and large corporations). Such enhanced admiration from all possible parties makes many businesses conscious about their policies and programs that are aimed at reflecting their commitment to community, environment and society. One of the most important rules of international integration is dedication to corporate culture, knowledge management and right distribution of priorities. Due to the fact that those issues have never before been observed and analyzed in the light of CSR, numerous studies are carried out and many seminars are arranged by academics, CSR professionals, CSR consultancy agencies, business associations, government authorities and non-profit organizations with the purpose of building the accurate CSR framework to be considered on every business management stage (Korschun 2011, p. 55). This way, CSR constantly gains acceptance both like a social contribution and a business tool. Considering Coca Cola Company, one should take into account the fact its management entails a wide range of CSR practices like charitable donations, business strategies addressing community and environmental aspects, and cause-related branding.
Taking a view of Coca Cola Company, it is necessary to make mention that this enterprise unlike many others remaining to be rather silent in terms of announcing the new products and services as well as extending their markets, appears to obey completely difffent principles of its policy. The thing is that the company proved not to fail to implement the CSR training programs at their offices (Pendergrast, 2000). The number of training programs can aid the employers to increase the labor efficiency and, respectively, their output.
The recent practice in European countries shows that CSR training programs accelerate the management processes and provide the effective chain between decision-making and implementation stages within the organization. Concerning Coca Cola Company, it is necessary to draw attention to that its business is aimed at enhancing their reputation through customer service and by means of facilitating the regulatory compliance. This indicates that the problem of CSR implementation in the United States of America is tightly bound to the failure to adequately distribute the priorities within the organization. The authorities exemplify this challenge by stating that for most American companies the brand promotion is more significant than CSR. Additionally, they prove that most U.S. organizations tend to prioritize managing community expectations in order to shape and strengthen the impacts of their business on regional markets.
The second challenge of Corporate Social Responsibility in the U.S. is that most organizations deserve to understand it in traditional terms, pursuing traditional goals. Living in the world after Globalization 2.0 most businesses begin to take into account the general factors that can be relevant to their business. For instance, almost forty percent of American companies strive hard to create a new value for their business by means of discovering new CSR opportunities. For example, the practice shows that CSR is effective for meeting the consumer desires for socially responsible and environmentally friendly products or services. But, the majority of American organizations still do not treat CSR as a serious and important phenomenon, regarding that this is unpractical way of defining and revising goals, which may only suffer additional expenditures.
Almost all American organizations unanimously agree that the lack of awareness of CSR is a great hindrance to change in pursuit of value (Gray, 1987). That is why they constantly refer to CSR as one of two most important business goals that is targeted to reduce environmental impact upon organizations and customers. Having the firm and concise understanding of CRS will definitely change the organization attitudes, policies and strategies, which on the whole will contribute to the improvement of business management.

Peculiarities of CSR after the example of Coca Cola

Having collected the information on CSR, it is possible to distinguish certain peculiarities that are typical for the discussion company. The thing is that the companies with formal policies based upon written goals and CSR reports have higher internal and external accountability for establishing the CSR programs. On the contrary, organizations with informal structures fail to seriously consider CSR because of their poor accountability and social responsibility. This creates a huge gap, where weaker companies lose their profits and medium-sized and huge one only prosper from their domination on the market. As the result of such competitive advantage, they may benefit from CSR programs and initiatives.

The Construct of Corporate Framework

When managing the business processes, one should consider financial, human and material resources, which are directly linked to business, functional and master strategies. That is why the HRM is considered to be market oriented corporate system. As for the United Kingdom, it is necessary to indicate that the relations management is considered to be quite a sophisticated pattern, since it is characterized by inefficient post-war financial situation. In view of the United States business experts, the corporate strategy has to be focused on managing the workers and their freedom. The efficient means of achieving corporate objectives is to create the successful business models that are likely to aid the superiors to take into account the factors that impact the performance process.
The strategic HRM appeared to be focused on implementing the management principles as well the actions. While evaluating the effectiveness of the strategic human resource management from the perspective of the United States, it is advisable to use the comparative method that will help the company collate two basic management models like strategic and not-strategic ones. Under non-strategic model Industrial Relations Management is implied. In the United States it is centered upon short-term solutions as well as critical business situations. In other words, the IRM tends to manage all organizational departments in advance, for example, to distribute the policies within the departments so that each manager that is in charge of his department should respectively attract customers’ attention, provide the proper advertising campaign and signing of the contracts with the supplies. This non-strategic model has the drawback in terms of not being ready to cope with long-term implications. To provide the effective realization of long-term management tools, each organization should revisit the barrier and interaction between management process and employees. Moreover, the company directors should be what they are, the interested leaders of the departments in order to accelerate the decision-making processes and enhance the stable interrelation in terms of long-run goals. Strategic change to business product market orientation will help manager provide the competitive advantage. The long-term investigation of the customers’ behavior and demand will aid the staff to make the right policies. The managers’ skills should lead their business, relying on their motivation and ability to take the necessary actions in accordance with the company’s corporate response. The bargaining policies of each company can be observed either on corporate or plant levels.
Providing the overwhelming control over the staff, the better performance of the managers can be expected. This is practiced in UK. Management should not be observed in congruence with business. The bargaining policies have to be chosen due to the types of the marketing products. If the company has typical products, then the market is stable and it should consider the operational and integration management. In case with heterogeneous products, we investigate turbulent markets as usual, so the differentiation should be taken into account.
As the result of this, it is suggested to provide the congruence between the quality of the products and the employees in some companies. Other organizations should consider product development and, respectively, the competitive advantage. If the organization has a huge cash-flow, it should its productivity levels. One product business companies should apply the highly proactive and encouraging corporate identification, because their contributions can lead to the financial success. But all the steps depend on the market orientation and demand.

Conclusion

In case with Coca Cola Company attempting to balance stakeholder interests, it is necessary to acknowledge that they follow ethical decision-making strategy. The key is corporate social responsibility, because all stakeholders are doing their job very well. Secondly, they are constantly involved in numerous social projects related to preservation of community interests in terms of pollutions and environment.
That is why their new concept of Social Responsibility and Business Ethics allowed them creating reputation of value. Among the major Coca Cola Company’s social contributions it is possible to make mention of financial aid to African children for maintaining good health and hygiene and spending 10 million to Donald Danforth Plant Science Center to develop a research capacity in Africa. Furthermore, farmers cannot save seeds for future growth, which shows the quality of services and products. On the other hand, Starbuck’s ethical considerations are also appreciated. They used a “clustering” strategy, closing some of their locations to revise their consumer’s needs during economic recession. Attempting to prosper, they also became a cost-saving opportunity for many people and now are respected.

References

Ferrell, C. (2001). Business Ethics: Ethical Decision Making & Cases. Ninth Edition.
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Customer Orientation? Melbourne Press.
Paragon Financial Limited. (2011). SodaStream and Coca-Cola -- Different Models, Same
Growth. Retrieved from http://finance.yahoo.com/news/SodaStream-Coca-Cola-iw-751042083.html
Pendergrast, M. (2000). For God, Country and Coca-Cola. Basic Books. p. 25. ISBN 978-0-
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