Students’ Perceptions of Company Apple’s Csr

Students’ perceptions of Company Apple’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) policies and activities with regard to Stakeholder Suppliers

Abstract

In recent years, an increasing number of people pay attention to CSR. This report is going to discover students’ perceptions of Company Apple’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) policies and activities with regard to Stakeholder Suppliers. Findings on influence that CSR has on business financial performance and perceived product performance will be provided.

1.0 Introduction

1.1 Background

CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) has been attracting an increasing concern since 1960s (George, 2011) and a number of studies proved a positive correlation between CSR and a company’s financial performance (Orlitzky, Schmidt & Rynes, 2003). Consequently, not only business scholar but corporations as well have been attaching attention to CSR.

Carroll (1979) pointed out that the notion of CSR refers to the obligation that corporations are supposed to meet the economics, ethics and other expectations that the society has on them. According to Freeman (1984)’s stakeholder theory, corporations are responsible to the stakeholders who are legally, economically or by other means associated with. Moreover, it was also stressed that stakeholders are widely involved, including shareholders, employees, suppliers, customers, the local community, environment and other entities that are interconnected with the corporations. Among all the stakeholders, the effects of CSR towards suppliers can be easily underestimated for the reason that a large number of companies, especially large corporations outsource the manufacturing work and suppliers holds the view that CSR policies do not help to keep contracts with buyers (Lai, 2006).

Apple Inc., headquartered in California, is famous for its products, such as iPhone, iPod and Mac and has won a financial success due to its marketing and products (Kerry, 2014). According to...