Question

In this unit, you will complete a project topic on Amazon, in which you present your company and give a brief introduction to the company. Present some basic information about the size of the company, its history, and how it is organized. In addition, present some information about the corporate social responsibility (CSR) of the company. Does the company follow Friedman’s or Carroll’s view of social responsibility?

Answer 1

answer-

Amazon.com, Inc. is an American multinational technology company based in Seattle, Washington, that focuses on e-commerce, cloud computing, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos on July 5, 1994, in Bellevue, Washington. In May 1997, the organization went public. The company initially started as an online marketplace for books but later expanded to sell electronics, software, video games, apparel, furniture, food, toys, and jewelry. Amazon is set to clear $258.22 billion in US retail sales in 2018, according to eMarketer's figures, which will work out to 49.1 percent of all online retail spend in the country, and 5 percent of all retail sales.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a self-regulating business model that helps a company be socially accountable — to itself, its stakeholders, and the public. so In Context of amazon, Company follows Carroll’s view of social responsibility .In Carrol term, Corporate social responsibility encompasses the economic, legal, ethical, and discretionary (philanthropic) expectations that society has of organizations at a given point in time.

Analyzing each of the levels for amazon, on economic responsibilities. Amazon has a market cap of $815 Billion, reported by cnn money on February 6th, and it has made a 49,000% Return on investment on its 20the anniversary, which is translated into a very good check mark on the economic responsibility column of the Carrol model.

Next, we have the legal responsibilities ,where we can find some problems, for example in 2014, it was reported by the guardian that Amazon.co.uk the biggest online retailer generated more than £3.3 bn but paid no corporation tax on any of the profits from that income and even got under investigation by U.K. tax authorities (The guardian, 2014). In this technological and global age, it is hard to comply with all legalities, especially on big corporations with multinational accounts and different currencies but on most of the time amazon does comply with law.

Moving on to the next concept, the Ethical responsibilities is more subjective criteria, what can be considered good for someone can be considered wrong for someone else. However, looking at the human rights theory which involves a definition by “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”as United Nations (UN) suggests. Then two things can be said about Amazon, the first is that when talking about blue collar employees this company does not meet ethical criteria based on the UN definition of human rights, but on white collar employees this company can meet criteria on certain levels of its organization.

Finally, on the last level of the Carrol model, the philanthropic aspect of the model. We can clearly see donation from Amazon to charity organizations, they even have a web page “smile amazon”. This web page makes a difference by giving to your charity of choice part of the cost of the product you are buying, without costing you any extra. However, this type of donations more often than not, provide fiscal incentives such as tax deduction questioning if the company actually cares about the society or they only want to pay less taxes or maybe both. Amazon does have these types of donations in their Amazon Smile page.