Corporate Social Responsibility in Starbucks Corporation
Starbucks Corporation is an American coffee company, currently operating 23800 locations globally. The company offers to its customer’s high-quality coffee beverages, whole bean coffee and various snacks such as chips and crackers. Starbucks is believed to be one of the world’s largest food companies, possessing #389 of World’s Biggest Public Companies list, according to Forbes (2016). What is more, Starbucks holds #45 in the list of the World’s Most Valuable Brands, and #80 in the list of America’s Best Employers. For the FY 2015, the company has managed to earn $19,162 million total revenues.
The Corporate Social Responsibility Concept
The Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) refers to business practices involving initiatives that benefit society. A CSR concept can be applied to business in a wide variety of ways. Generally, the CSR concept has a few broad categories including environmental efforts, philanthropy, ethical labor practices and volunteering. Due to the variety of approaches that companies use to demonstrate responsibility towards the environment, business scholars have not yet still provided the standard definition of CSR. However, adopting social responsibility policies assumes adopting values and norms along with organizational processes to minimize the negative impact and increase the positive on stakeholder issues. Practically, organizations are now under pressure to demonstrate the initiatives and practical implementations that include stakeholder’s interests (Maignam, Ferrel and Ferrel, 2005). At the same time, simply engaging the CSR activities is not enough for them to take an effect on the company’s performance. The concept implementation is not enough for the company, in case if it is not supported by the public demonstration of implementing policies. Therefore, the CSR concept is the subject for PR practitioners. The content of the CSR messages that are delivered to the stakeholders and customers clarifies the level of the company’s involvement in the activities, by emphasizing the factors of commitment, impact, and motives. Companies support the factors to take advantage of framing the attributes and responsibility. In fact, Starbucks company demonstrates the successful implementation of CSR concepts.
The implementation of CSR concepts
Since the corporate social responsibility concept has a broad definition and various ways of implementation, it is first needed to identify the main stakeholder’s concerns and company’s mission. Starbucks states that its main corporate mission is “to inspire and nurture the human spirit- one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time”. Starbucks claims the following values:
To create a culture of warmth and belonging, where everyone is welcome
Acting with courage, challenging the status quo and finding new ways to grow our company and each other
Being present, connecting with transparency, dignity, and respect
Delivering our very best in all we do, holding ourselves accountable for results.
One of the earliest company’s concerns was to establish responsibility policies to improve the supply chain. This is how in 1994 Starbucks has established C.A.F.E. practices, that implied a rating system for the suppliers. Practically, the system implied to pay higher prices for the product to those suppliers, that receive a higher score. The ratings …
