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The Paragon Corporation : Exploring Corporate Responsibility and Shared Value for Profitability

This thesis is a two-part exploratory inquiry into how actions of Corporate Responsibility (CR) create economic value for the company performing them, in addition to social/environmental value. The purpose of the thesis is to describe the CR initiatives of a theoretical “paragon corporation”: a corporation that excels in its CR initiatives and sees financial gain in it. The report starts by going over literature, describing the CR context that companies operate in today, and similar work. A model for describing CR activities as business activities is drawn from Nancy Bocken’s concept Business Model Archetypes, and it is proposed as a possible tool for describing economic value creation from CR activities. The first part of the study is a word frequency analysis of the annual financial reports of the companies listed on the FTSE 100, where words connected to CR are counted. The sustainability reports of the five companies that have mentioned CR terminology most in the first study are analyzed in detail during the second study, and are characterized using Bocken’s archetypes. Findings show that the paragon corporation should have CR initiatives that can be modeled after the archetypes, enabling the CR initiatives to create direct economic value for the company. The archetypes can be used when formulating a CR strategy from the ground up, or evaluating existing CR strategy. The thesis ends with suggestions for how this can be explored further.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:kth-123713
Date January 2013
CreatorsPaulsson, John
PublisherKTH, Industriell ekonomi och organisation (Inst.)
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
RelationExamensarbete INDEK ; 2013:93

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