Dissertation Proposal: Title: Evaluate the core competitiveness(sustainable growth) of contemporary enterprise
Research Objective: For this research, five objectives will be presented.
First of all, this study investigate the current situation of contemporary enterprise and use Coca-Cola as a case study. To evaluate a company, it is the primary part to analyze the current situation, that enables a more accurate analysis of the political and economic environment faced by the company.
The second research objective state that to prove the necessity of enterprise competitiveness. As a top international corporation, it should have its own core competitiveness and enterprise culture, that ensure the companies in a dominant position in the competition and keep its flag flying for decades.
The third objective state that to find out Coca-Cola's core competitiveness and make analysis. This is the most important objective of this research, according the findings, analyze why and how this company adopt these strategies as their coer competitiveness.
The fourth objective state that analyze and compare the difference core competitiveness between developing and developed country in Coca-Cola. Case by case, the core competitiveness may different when stand in the different area. The most obvious example is the distinction between developing and developed country.
The last objective state that to advise the contemporary enterprise and give an assumption. Through the knowledge we had learn to make recommendations to the Coca-Cola, even the other companies in the meantime. And make some assumptions which enable to promote the core competitiveness in a company.
Background
In 1988, R. Norgaard's had stated that: "Environmentalists want environmental systems sustained. Consumers want consumption sustained Workers want jobs sustained, Capitalists and socialists have 'isms' while aristocrats, autocrats, bureaucrats and technocrats have their 'cracies.' All are threatened... with the term meaning something different to everyone, the quest for sustainable development is off to a cacophonous start". In Norgaard's words, it reveals that in today's world, sustainable growth is being a heat topic to influence the society. What is more, the importance of sustainable growth is causing attention to various social groups. More and more companies implement sustainable development as their core competitiveness. As the representative theory, the triple bottom line has aroused general concern and been applied widely today.
Recently, a report shows that in 2003, United State produced 236 million tons municipal solid waste, including 30.6% for recycling, 15% for land filling and 55% for burning. (Blatt, 2011) A large number of landfills and incineration of waste materials increased environmental degradation, and this would inevitably lead to increasing scarcity of resources. In addition, the public awareness of environmental protection is rising. This not only happen in the developed countries any more, even in an amount of developing countries, people also have a stronger environmental awareness than in the past. Moreover, a lot of environmental regulations have been promulgated and implemented in these years. All these facts referred above illustrates that sustainable development is an urgent and central issue that business should face it now. Implementing sustainable development strategy is considered to play an indispensable role in a business development.
Research Question
With the research background, it is found that sustainable development has significant role in an enterprise operation. In order to explore and research this most efficient core competitiveness, there are three questions asked as following:
1. What is sustainable development as core competitiveness in business? As the first question, it will introduce the meaning of this concept, and list several revelant theory to support it.
2. Who use the sustainable development strategy and when did they start to implement? For this question, this article use Coca-Cola company as an example, describe the historical origin of sustainable development in Coca-Cola.
3. Why and how do Coca-Cola adopt sustainable development strategy? Through three dimensions (economic, social and environment) to analyze the significance and specific measures in sustainable way.
Research Structure
Technological development enable to promote the strategies implementation and apply the standards of sustainable competitive positioning and long-term success for sustainable business (Barbian, 2013) In Barbian' view, an enterprise should carry out the sustainable development strategy to ensure its furure prosperity. This article will be based on the idea of sustainable development to elaborate the contemporary enterprise's competitiveness and literature review will be applied to demonstrate the importance of the strategy of sustainable development to a company's growth. There are five chapters in this research.
Chapter 1 is the introduction part. It illustrates the importance of this study and its questions to be answered, as well as the descriptions on the research aim and objectives. It provides the information as the basic overview of the whole research as well.
Chapter 2 is the literature review part. It is going to give the definition of a company's core competitiveness. After draw a viewpoint that sustainable development plays an important role in core competitiveness, the concept of sustainable development will be presented. And then the relevant theory, triple bottom line, and its analysis will be proposed. Followed by analyzing and discussing GRI, which is an important part to push sustainable growth.
Chapter 3 is the part of research methodology. In this part, it will critically discuss the research philosophy of this dissertation as positivism, the strategies applied in this dissertation as qualitative and quantitative ones, the research design methods as questionnaire-based survey, as well as the hypotheses held for data analysis. All these methods have the same purpose as providing the theoretical and practical approaches for data collection and analysis.
Chapter 4 is the findings and discussion part. In this part, the data collected will be analyzed and presented with the charts and induction. The results will be discussed with the explanation of the causes of the relationship. The results of literature review would be combined in order to explain the outcomes in the empirical analysis.
Chapter 5 is the final part of the whole dissertation. It has the purpose as concluding the results of the whole process, providing the findings of the dissertation, as well as the limitations which may lead to the errors for the results and the recommendations for the future studies.
Short Literature Review
1. Sustainability
Sustainable development started through the World Conservation Strategy (1980) by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), which was founded in 1948 (Barbian, 2013). The concept is described by WCED (1987) as: "Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the current generation without compromising the needs of futrue generations."
2. Triple bottom line
The triple bottom line was first put forward in 1998 by John Elkington, who was the president of the British company named Sustain Ability. From the point of view of the micro economy for this is during the process of company seeking its own development, the business need to meet economic prosperity, social welfare and environmental protection these three aspects balanced development (Elkington,1998).
3. GRI
Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) is the best-known framework for voluntary reporting of environmental and social performance by business and other organizations worldwide (Brown, De Jong, Lessifrenska, 2007). In order to promote global business to better fulfill corporate social responsibility, publishing sustainable development report more normative, and improving the worldwide reports' comparability and credibility, in 1997, a non-governmental organization in USA, called CERES [Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economics, and UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme)] co-founded GRI. The role of GRI is to formulate, promote and spread Sustainability Reporting Guidelines. GRI is providing a common framework to global enterprises on the sustainable development report, so that to conventionalize such reports which are about economy, environment and society performance as the financial report.
Short Methodology Introduce
1. Research philosophy: Positivism and Anti-positivism
2. Research strategies: Quantitative Strategy and Qualitative Strategy
3. Research design: case study, focus group interview, face to face interview, experiment, telephone interview and questionnaire based survey
4. Data collection methods: investigate and questionnaire
5. Data analysis methods: ratio analysis and hypothesis test