Case Study Instructions – CSR Profile of a Global Hospitality or Tourism Company 

NOTE: You should start thinking about this assignment in Week 3 (decide on a company), looking for information in Week 4, and writing it up in Week 5. It will be due at the end of Module 5. If you leave it all to the end of Module 5 it will be much harder to locate good information and write it up in the way I require.

Week 3:  In Week 3 you will select a 

global hospitality or tourism company
 to profile.  As we start to get into what 

CSR 
Is all about and as we learn about different 

social issues and causes
, I would like you to try to determine if your chosen company’s 

current CSR strategy 
includes any of these. 

Week 4: By Week 4 you should be doing some 

internet digging 
to get some basic information on the company as well as to find out what your chosen company is currently doing in the way of CSR. 

You can start by doing a general Library search for information on your company.   Go to Libraries.fiu.edu,  choose the FIND button on the yellow menu bar,  Using the A-Z function and choose H or type in Hospitality and you should find two databases for Hospitality & Tourism.  The first Hospitality & Tourism Complete can be used to look for research papers but I would rather suggest you go to the second one 

Hospitality, Tourism & Leisure Collection
.   Type in your company on the first line, then other key words like CSR, Social Responsibility, Sustainability, etc. to see what comes up.  Explore a little and find some articles or websites that discuss what your company is/has been doing in the way of CSR.   

After your library search you should go through the company’s website thoroughly and look for their 

Mission, Vision, Values, Goals, Creed, Culture,
anything that will tell you what cultural foundation the company has and promotes to its employees and stakeholders.  You need to include that sort of information in the first part of your Case Study.  Next, look on the company website for any tabs for 

CSR, Corporate Social Responsibility, Corporate Citizenship, Sustainability, etc.
 and open that tab. See if the company has published a report on their CSR (or whatever name they use) activities of the past year. If the company didn’t produce a specific CSR report they should at least have some descriptions of their CSR strategy, initiatives and so forth.  Almost all major, and some small companies do this but they will vary greatly from just a link to a couple of pages, up to a huge report to the shareholders and stakeholders.

In addition to the corporate website, you can also go to finance.yahoo.com or money.msn.com or any other financial website, type in the company’s name or stock ticker code and see what you can find.  

One place to get good information on CSR is in the 

Press Releases
 section of the website since most companies like to spread the word about the good things they may be doing.

Tip:  Save everything you think you can use in a separate folder as you’ll most likely use it again later in the semester for your CSR Plan.  

Week 5:  You should be writing your paper based on the research you found in Week 4.  Remember this will be 

submitted via Turnitin
 so unless you are directly quoting a mission statement, you must write 

everything in your own words
. The 
Turnitin score must be no higher than 20%! 

The specific assignment is for you to complete and submit a short (3-4 pages) 

original paper
 answering the following questions/prompts:

Prepare an introductory section about the selected company
 detailing size, locations (number, international, domestic, etc.), type of company, main competitors, place in the market (leading the segment, trailing, etc.). 

Identify the company’s stated mission and values.
 Most companies publish this on their websites and they could be called Mission Statement, Values Statement, Vision Statement, Credo or possibly even something else. This is difficult to write in a limited number of words and time should be devoted to refining this paragraph until the student is certain that all of these items are included.

In a second section you should review the company’s social responsibility (CSR) strategy;
 mention briefly all of the company’s current CSR initiatives. In this same paragraph, you should identify the cause, or various causes being addressed by the company’s current CSR activities. Use vocabulary from the textbook and other class readings to demonstrate a thorough understanding of the concepts and your ability to identify them within a hospitality or tourism company.

Select one initiative to describe in more detail in a third section
. Here you should analyze the one selected initiative in terms of 

strengths, weaknesses, benefits, concerns, and keys to success

In a 4th section you should provide your personal evaluation of whether or not the initiative is strategically aligned with the company’s mission and business values
.anything you might have done differently if you were running the company and support your statements with specific reasoning.

Include a References (bibliography) section at the end

 which should mention all sources of information that you have used to prepare your Case Study. If you obtained the information from a website, you should include the URL and indicate the date you accessed the information. For help from FIU Libraries on this topic go to: http://libguides.fiu.edu/citation. You may submit your references in any of the styles mentioned. I prefer APA only because that’s what I use in my work but if you are already accustomed to MLA or one of the other styles that are perfectly acceptable.

Label
 (put a heading at the beginning of) 

each section

 which should be a minimum of one very solid paragraph and a 

maximum of one page each
. 

Even though you will have collected a lot of interesting information about your company and its cause(s) do not submit more than what I’ve described above. Please 

just cover in this assignment exactly what I’m asking for and save the researched information.
 Save everything you don’t use because some of this material will become the foundation of your CSR Plan where you will go into detail on CSR initiatives as a part of your recommendation to the company for its CSR Strategic Plan.

Submit your paper via the link in the heading of the Case Study section of module 5

 which should take you to a dropbox for Turnitin. Learn how to submit a test draft of your paper so you can view the Originality Report. If your originality report says that your paper is more than 20% unoriginal then you need to go back and take a close look at exactly what it says is similar to other works. If what is shown is something you have in quotes, or in a references section, then no worries, of course, it’s not going to be original. An example of this would be where you have included a company’s Mission, Vision, Core Values, Creed, etc. in your paper.  Simply make sure that you have placed the item in quotation marks, and include the source of the statements in your References (bibliography) section. But otherwise, if the report says that something is not your original work, you should try to rewrite it in your own words. NOTE: I will be deducting points for work in your papers that is substantially unoriginal and un-referenced!

As always, let me know if you have questions via Canvas Inbox or Discussion Forum Q&A and good luck with your internet research!