business essay questions

business essay questions

Exploring Key Concepts in Modern Business Practices

1. Introduction to Business Studies

Nowadays, we live in a world where businesses are present in almost every part of our life. We buy groceries from supermarkets and watch movie clips on YouTube. We go to school. Governments build infrastructure to make life easy. Each of them plays a role in improving our life. At the same time, we occasionally hear stories about businesses making a lot of money but mistreating their employees, or businesses taking bribes to secure contracts. This leads to us questioning: Is business good or bad? Should they only be driven by profit, or should they also serve the public? These questions at the fundamental level concern the reasons why businesses are set up and how they are expected to operate. We cannot hope to get answers to these questions without understanding some fundamental concepts about business.

Business is a complex field that draws different concepts from economics, accounting, marketing, and more. These concepts enable us to understand, and in some cases influence, how companies are run, how everyone contributes to the economy, and how consumers and the public can play their part. During your study of business, these concepts will pop up again and again. This guide will help you become familiar with them.

2. The Role of Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility in Business

Businesses can only make profits effectively and efficiently by, in Chris Argyris’s compelling phrase, ‘doing the right things’. This expression has a broader meaning than simply ‘following the rules’ or ‘abiding by the law’, these being the minima of ethics in business. The role of business in society is defined in terms of its responsibilities to the people in the community or areas in which it operates. The question of whether a business person has a moral duty towards society had already been raised by Ben Franklin in the 18th century; however, responses had failed to formulate those duties in a precise manner. To the contrary, other thinkers, including Milton Friedman, the well-known economist, had in many cases warned of the formation of a tax on business if its activities supposedly designed for the common good were unlimited, was an act of corporativism, and were infantilising the free market. Be it as it may, the broader ethical obligations of business today are not only about obeying the law but are also about doing what is moral, that is, what is right or reasonable in terms of the social and economic functioning and performance of business. Indeed, business enterprise has an ethical obligation in society, and this is a new voice in business that has not been present in the early stages of this development. The idea that businesses and business people should act in certain ways is relatively new to business as a formal field, at least in comparison to the study of other domains of human activity and its implications for business theory.

Ethics, a long-established field in the social sciences and the humanities, can be applied in a tangible way to business practice. Businesses make and carry out decisions that have effects on others. Good businesses act in the interests of others, and the right kind of decision-making will be a hallmark of successful business. In today’s knowledge-based and customer-oriented economy, the ability of companies to act in a socially responsible way has a direct impact on their success and bottom-line results. Corporate social responsibility has been described as corporate good citizenship, which translates into companies behaving responsibly toward their key stakeholders, including customers, employees, shareholders, the broader community, and the environment. No matter what the sector or the location, responsible companies share some baseline respect for others – they care about stakeholders. They understand and use socially responsible practices. They respond well to public pressures for social responsibility and accountability.

3. Innovation and Technology in Driving Business Success

Technology – its development, method of incorporation into products, and the way it is used in businesses – is the other major component of innovation. It is no longer simply what is brought into a product or system, but how a product is developed and manufactured. Modern technology cannot stand alone and requires all aspects to work together to be successful. The ability to convert ideas that have a value into operating technology or products that increase the probability of superiority is one definition of technology achievement. The real driver, in the final analysis, of a successful business is a combination of technology skill that leads to the sustained development of superior products and the business skill to be able to compete in the marketplace.

Innovation does not necessarily mean overhauling what has existed for years. When it comes to a business strategy, innovation takes on two components that enable and move the business forward. It is how ideas are harnessed and how they are brought into reality in products. It is the way things are done. A successful company is one that is continually developing products that explore new ideas and paradigms, and it also takes that extra step which adds a certain value or transforms a market. This expectation of certain added functionality is what companies strive for in the development of new products, and where they look to recoup the costs of development.

4. Globalization and International Business Strategies

Challenges posed by international operations include currency risks, volatile prices of supplies, political risk, trade restrictions, and cultural and management differences in coping with the seemingly opposing requirements of international operations. The multinational corporation must reassess the value of useful social and environmental disclosure in its role as a trader in different host countries. The multinational can use internal environmental scanning, market analysis, and targeting, and the establishment of new product development groups incorporating familiarity with different technologies, environments, and social values typical of different societies if it is to help shape its international strategy. Indeed, the multinational can be viewed as a model of corporate pluralism with its own built-in checks and balances when different parts seek dominance. However, other conflicts can arise when overseas operations are less than fully integrated when it comes to corporate social and environmental policy.

A distinctive aspect of the modern business organization of the last half of the 20th century has been the emergence of the multinational corporation, the corporation that considers the world as its marketplace and establishes production and marketing facilities on a global basis. This emergence has been fostered by numerous factors: the decline in international trade barriers, changing consumer tastes, the increased mobility of capital in response to rapid changes in technology and resource scarcity, the desire of some nations to reduce their dependence on volatile world markets, and movements aimed at establishing supranational trading or economic communities. The drive for global economies of scale and the bargaining power that large trading/demand blocs, such as the ultimate European Economic Community (EEC), suggest will command also have a powerful influence on corporate strategies.

5. Conclusion and Future Trends in Business

We believe a key thematic priority for future researchers of S-D logic and EM is making EM domain research more actionable for managers, policymakers, entrepreneurs, and other stakeholders. In 2010, writing about ‘The Manufacturing Imperative’, P. Kaminski suggests “a focus of smart policies can help leverage the private-sector led recovery that will spur the ease that recovery”. We suggest more research focus specialty stands on new ways to spur marketing ingenuity, by studying it in institutional, service, and resource-based perspectives. These expanded vistas can keep business practices flexible and innovative, while SM and other researchers continue to advocate for more responsible methodologies.

In conclusion, there is consensus among business stakeholders, including practitioners, educators, and researchers, that service-dominant (S-D) logic and EM are increasingly important concepts in practice and academia. Firms are working to transition from a goods-dominant (G-D) logic perspective. But the evidence indicates that ever-increasing numbers of companies continue to use and adapt production, product, and place policies to the digital age, a signal that G-D logic is far from extinct. To achieve a more balanced ecosystem among industry, academia, government, and society, concurrent research in service science, business analytics, informatics, computer science, and other disciplines, along with curricula and degree programs that include these broad and requisite areas to sustain business agility, is also increasingly important.