Does everething in business have to have a ''business case'' - Term Paper Example

The research question for this paper is a variation of the same theme: what is the business of business?  What is the purpose of a business?  Does a business exist only to produce a profit, or does it exist to meet the needs of society?  Are those needs limited to the product or service the business supplies, or should the business go beyond these products and services and discover other needs that it can serve?  How far should a business go beyond what it does?  What is the real meaning of the term ‘business case’?

These questions are but a few that lie on the surface of a set of questions that countless people have asked, and continue to ask, due to the growing social power that businesses have gained through the centuries.  Many claims that businesses, being a part of human society, must be subjected to the same demands made of the humans who created those businesses and who manage them, namely accountability and sense of responsibility for their actions, modes of ethical behavior, and the search for a noble purpose for existence.

In other words, must a business perform an activity only if there is a ‘business case’, that is, the activity earns a profit to keep the business owner happy, satisfied, and busy, employed and earning an income?  And what if no business case exists, what should the business owner do?  Does he close shop and do something else? The debate is interesting, not only because of the answers being given to these questions and the words used in asking them but because of the persons who do the asking.

  Over the past decades, terms such as corporate social responsibility (CSR), sustainable development, socially responsible investments (SRI), business ethics, social entrepreneurship, and corporate philanthropy, among several others, have been used to ask these questions. Those who have done the asking – Nobel Prize winners, corporate chieftains, academics in finance, economics, and sociology, government leaders, left-, center-, and right-wing activists, and students like this researcher – are curious to find answers to the question: what is the purpose of a business?