Corporate Social Responsibility in the Hospitality Industry - Dissertation Example

?An investigation of corporate social responsibility in the hospitality industry Contents Background to the Study and Overall Research Aim 3 ResearchAim 4 Research Objectives 4 Initial Review of Relevant Literature 4 Research Methods: Justification and Description 6 Information to be collected 8 Method of information collection 8 Analysis Techniques 9 Timeline of Dissertation 9 References 12 Background to the Study and Overall Research Aim The travel and tourism sector relies to a great extent on the cultural and environmental reserves, making responsible trade approaches necessary to attain a sustainable hospitality industry. This study focuses on the issue of understanding the concept of corporate social responsibility and customer satisfaction in the hospitality industry. It observes the most recognizable corporate social responsibility (CSR) tasks and recognizes inhibitors and drivers involved in accomplishing those CSR. Business operations matching with the sustainability standards has turn out to be a significant issue for organizations and their stakeholders on a global level and is today the part of conventional business framework. Well-known as CSR, the concept requires a principled and dependable position in business operations to take account of the community’s well-being. Idea for a novel trade framework combining the ethics and business, lucidity, the surrounding, stakeholders and society are now widespread, needing dialog between society, government regulators and businesses. The significance of CSR within the travel and tourism sector has grown, especially, in the prevailing years along with the ecological issues of climate change, depletion of natural resources, degradation, fair trade, and human rights issues (Sheldon and Sun-Young, 2011).From the present study the tourism sector can gain relevant insight about the latest trends of the hospitality industry and thus they can formulate their upcoming strategies keeping in mind the needs and wants of the consumers. On the other hand the consumers who wish to avail such services can get to know about the corporate social responsibility of this sector and can also get access to other relevant information. Moreover this study would prove to be helpful for the stakeholders related to the industry who will get an idea about the future prospect of the industry and accordingly they would plan their investments into the sector. Research Aim The main aim of the current study is to explore the significance of Corporate Social Responsibility within the industry. Research Objectives The various objectives of the study are listed below- 1. To explore the impact of CSR on hospitality organizations and customer satisfaction 2. To analyse how hotel uses the CSR as a marketing tool 3. To investigate the barriers to CSR in hotels 4. To suggest recommendations for hotels regarding their CSR practices Initial Review of Relevant Literature Definition of CSR The term Corporate Social Responsibility represents a management notion whereby the firms combine the environmental and social aspects within their business activities and dealings with their shareholders and investors. It implies a scenario by the means of which the firm gains a balance between the environmental, social and economic necessity whilst at the same time meets the expectations of the stakeholders and shareholders (United Nations Industrial Development Organization, n.d.). The concept has received growing attention during the earlier decades, both amongst the academic fiction and practioners. The initial focus of the firms was on the “social” duties and responsibilities for instance community based programs, paying fair salary to the employees. However a recent inclusion to this concept is the responsibility towards the environment for instance the elimination of the carbon-dioxide emissions from the surrounding. The concept of “environmental CSR” has become an essential area of CSR and acts as an extremely important element in the corporate world (FLAMMER, 2013). According to the World Bank (2004), CSR is, “The commitment of businesses to contribute to sustainable economic development-working with employees, their families, the local community, and society at large to improve the quality of life, in ways that are good for business and good for development.” According to Wood (1991), the basis of CSR is the society and business and considering both the aspects as interrelated rather than individual entities (Jones, Comfort and Hillier, 2006). The study focuses at finding the emphasis of CSR in the hospitality sector. It is eventually embedded in the appreciation that business organizations are part of the community. The concept of CSR has the prospect to play an optimistic role in achieving the social aspirations and goals. Frankental (2001) has argued that “CSR is a vague and intangible term which can mean anything to anybody and therefore is effectively without meaning” (Jones, Comfort and Hillier, 2006). The travel and tourism organizations and firms have been among the early adopters and innovators of CRM and Internet Marketing. During 1987, Ritz Carlton received the award for being among the few who won Malcolm Baldridge awards for originality in the consumer service deliverance by the use of early database techniques to modify (and keep in mind) consumer’s needs and wishes. The loyalty points by airlines, hotels, car rentals and casinos and the direct promotion organizations like the Carlson Company, created direct marketing offerings that focused on the promotional parts and applied those on the segregated mass sectors and persuaded the consumers so that they become more brand loyal and make use of the services of the same brand often, by the means of incentives and benefits (Vogt, 2011). Encouraging the growth of the Travel & Tourism (T&T) industry is a much more significant topic in the recent era since it plays a vital role in creating jobs, during a period when so many nations across the world are going through high rate of the prevailing unemployment problem. The industry already responsible for 9% of the Gross Domestic Product, a sum of almost 6 trillion US Dollars, and it created direct employment opportunity for around 120 million people and a further 125 million people got engaged in some indirect jobs within the associated sectors. This implies that the business presently accounts for 1 in 11 jobs throughout the globe, a figure that could yet grow to 1 in 10 employment opportunities by the year 2022, as per the World Travel & Tourism Council (Blanke and Chiesa, 2013). The literature themes would also include the barriers to CSR, the CSR process and so on which will be discussed further in the final dissertation. Research Methods: Justification and Description While discussing about research methods, it is important to consider that the research for the dissertation can be either primary or secondary in nature. It can be said that in many cases for the purpose of gathering of data which is perfectly in line with the main theme of the research question, the secondary data sources are not always very relevant in nature. This naturally creates the demand for a research which is primary in nature. While focusing on the process of conducting a primary kind of a research, it needs to be considered that the entire process is more time consuming as well as largely resource exhaustive in nature. It also has to be stated that for properly handling the primary research, significant amount of investments has to be made in regards to finance and human resources (Smith & et.al, 2009, p. 57). It can be said that while focusing on the process of conducting the primary research from the primary data sources, various highly important things has to be decided. The most important thing that is needed for proceeding with the primary research is a survey instrument. It has to be said that while designing the survey instrument for the purpose of conducting the primary research, the researcher needs to decide on the category of the research. Apart from that, it also has to be said that the researcher needs to decide on what kind of data needs to be collected through the primary research (Hoekstra and Harteveld, 2012). The reason why secondary data sources are taken into consideration is because it has the ability to shed light on the previous research studies and research assignments, conducted by the fellow researchers. It has been realized that in many cases, the previously handled assignments provides significant amount of relevant information in regards to the current topic of research. By taking the necessary information from the relevant secondary data sources, the researcher can be highly successful in saving time and other crucial resources like finance and manpower. After considering and properly evaluating the existing secondary data sources, the researcher evaluates the need for primary data sources. It is important to mention that research methodology for a project can be exploratory, descriptive or causal in nature (Goddard & Melville, 2004). Exploratory research methodology is adopted by the researcher when he or she intends to find out new ideas and insights for the purpose of tackling the problem in hand (Ward and et. Al, 2012). Descriptive based research methodology is implemented by the researcher when the sole focus of conducting the research is to get a broad based idea of the nature of operations and details in regards to the research topic. The causal based research methodology is used to find the cause and effect relation in regards to the research problem (Malhotra & Dash, 2009, p. 81). The present study can be efficiently handled with the help of primary data collected directly from the consumers and the industry persons. Further it can be said that the study in hand is of descriptive nature. Information to be collected In the present dissertation it is required to gather data about the trends of the tourism and hospitality industry. The objective of the study has been already discussed in the earlier section. The information to be collected through the present study would include- The impact of CSR on hospitality organizations and customer satisfaction Analyzing the marketing tools used by the hotels in their CSR activities Evaluating the barriers to CSR in hotels Method of information collection For the present theme primary research appears to be a significant technique for collecting data. Primary Research is created through the preparation of questionnaires that are both unstructured and structured in pattern. The research will be conducted on the hotel managers and the customers. Structured questionnaire puts forth Close-Ended Questions or Open-Ended Questions that are often used for conducting interview based on an existing set of options while Open-Ended Questions put emphasis on extracting information from the participants in the form of open suggestions or views. The Open and Close-Ended kind of questionnaire thus organized can be implemented for the interview by the means of face to face interview, mailers communicated to the respondent groups or where the researcher obtains the assistance of the peripheral influence to perform direct interviews on the group of respondent (Nykiel, 2007, p.25-26). The information collection process will be a combination of quantitative and qualitative technique. Interviews are more structured in quantitative research method than in qualitative research. Therefore we have decided to take out the benefit of quantitative research methodology and gather the information on the basis of questionnaire that will be circulated while conducting the interview (Frels and Onwuegbuzie, 2013). In a structured interview, the researcher asks a typical set of questions by following the same manner applicable to all participants. For the present dissertation we will employ both open ended and close ended questionnaires. The sampling approach would be simple random sampling. Analysis Techniques The data hence collected will be evaluated by the means of both qualitative and quantitative techniques. For the qualitative analysis case study approach would prove to be suitable. In this method, the data collected is transformed into a case which requires detailed study. Case studies present enormous data to help the process of analysis. The quantitative analysis part would include pie diagrams and histograms which would exhibit the data and the calculation technique will be significantly based on the statistical tools like mean, median and mode. This process will prevent complication of data and will be easy to interpret (Lucko and Mitchell, 2010) . Timeline of Dissertation The entire dissertation consists of the following steps- 1. Proposal- In this stage the focus will be on preparing the proposal. The time taken will be 4 days i.e. starting from 11th November 2013 to 14th November 2013. 2. Questionnaire- The next stage would include the preparation of questionnaire which would take almost 4 days (15the November to 20th November). 3. Survey- The survey stage would be executed once the questionnaire is prepared as the questionnaire would help us to extract the necessary information. Time taken for conducting the survey will be around 7 days (21st November to 29th November) 4. Results- The findings will be gathered within another 7 days (from 2nd December to 10th December) 5. Secondary Data- Finding the appropriate secondary data from the websites and relating them with the primary data extracted. This process would take another 5 days i.e. from 11th December to 17th December. 6. Literature Review- The literature review part would include reviewing the work on similar topic by the eminent researchers. This would take almost 4 days i.e. from 18th December to 23rd December. 7. Data obtained- The data obtained will be analyzed and evaluated in this section. This process would take almost 4 days. (24th December to 27th December) 8. Conclusion- The conclusion from the findings and research will be presented in this part. It would require almost 2 days. (30th December to 31st December) References • Blanke, J. and Chiesa, T. 2013. The Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Report 2013. [Pdf] World Economic Forum. Available at [Accessed on 5th November 2013] • Frels, R, &Onwuegbuzie, A 2013, 'Administering Quantitative Instruments With Qualitative Interviews: A Mixed Research Approach', Journal Of Counseling& Development, 91, 2, pp. 184-194, Business Source Premier, EBSCOhost, viewed 5 November 2013. • Goddard, W. & Melville, S. 2004. Research Methodology: An Introduction. Juta and Company Ltd. • Hoekstra, R, ten Bosch, O, &Harteveld, F 2012, 'Automated data collection from web sources for official statistics: First experiences', Statistical Journal Of The IAOS, 28, 3/4, pp. 99-111, Business Source Premier, EBSCOhost, viewed 5 November 2013. • Jones P., Comfort D., and Hillier, D. 2006. Reporting and reflecting on corporate social responsibility in the hospitality industry: A case study of pub operators in the UK. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 18 (4), pp. 329-340. • Lucko, G, & Mitchell Jr., Z 2010, 'Quantitative Research: Preparation of Incongruous Economic Data Sets for Archival Data Analysis', Journal Of Construction Engineering & Management, 136, 1, pp. 49-57, Business Source Premier, EBSCOhost, viewed 5 November 2013. • Malhotra, N. K. and Dash, S. 2009. Marketing Research: An Applied Orientation. 5th ed. India: Dorling Kindersley India Pvt. Ltd. • Schmidt, M 2010, 'Quantification of transcripts from depth interviews, open-ended responses and focus groups',International Journal Of Market Research, 52, 4, pp. 483-508, Business Source Premier, EBSCOhost, viewed 5 November 2013. • Sheldon, P, & Sun-Young, P 2011, 'An Exploratory Study of Corporate Social Responsibility in the U.S. Travel Industry', Journal Of Travel Research, 50, 4, pp. 392-407, Business Source Premier, EBSCOhost, viewed 5th November 2013. • Smith, K., and et.al, 2009. Doing Your Undergraduate Social Science Dissertation. USA: Routledge. • Vogt, CA 2011, 'Customer Relationship Management in Tourism: Management Needs and Research Applications', Journal Of Travel Research, 50, 4, pp. 356-364, Business Source Premier, EBSCOhost, viewed 5th November 2013. • Ward, P, Clark, T, Zabriskie, R, & Morris, T 2012, 'Paper/Pencil Versus Online Data Collection: An Exploratory Study’, Journal Of Leisure Research, 44, 4, pp. 507-530, Business Source Premier, EBSCOhost, viewed 5 November 2013. United Nations Industrial Development Organization, n.d. What is CSR? [Online] Available at < http://www.unido.org/en/what-we-do/trade/csr/what-is-csr.html> [Accessed on 16/11/2013] FLAMMER, C 2013, 'CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY AND SHAREHOLDER REACTION: THE ENVIRONMENTAL AWARENESS OF INVESTORS', Academy Of Management Journal, 56, 3, pp. 758-781, Business Source Premier, EBSCOhost, viewed 16 November 2013. Jones P., Comfort D., Hillier D. 2006. ‘Reporting and reflecting on corporate social responsibility in the hospitality industry: A case study of pub operators in the UK’, International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 18 (4), pp. 329-340. Nykiel, R., 2007. Handbook of Marketing Research Methodologies for Hospitality and Tourism. New York: Routledge. Read More