Corporate Sustainability Impact on Firm Profitability in the UK

Description of the Assessment

This assessment is a piece of summative piece of work (essay/report). The word count for this summative piece of work is 3,000 words (excluding footnotes).

Weighting

This assessed task is worth 50%of your overall mark for this module.

Assessment Content

Assessment Criteria

Assessment criteria are descriptive statements designed to identify the specific properties/characteristics/aspects of your work the marker will consider when marking/grading it. In other words assessment criteria are designed to answer the question: ‘What am I being assessed on?’

To complete this assessed task to the requisite standard students will need to:

• Demonstrate substantive knowledge of the relevant issues, and how they relate to sustainability
• Demonstrate an ability to engage with issues in an innovative and original context through independent research.
• Demonstrate a capacity for analysis by using their ideas to resolve relevant issues in an ethical and sustainable context; and
• Communicate their ideas effectively in writing.

Competences Developed

By completing this assessment, students will be able to evidence competency in the following areas:

• Commercial Awareness
• Creativity
• Global citizenship
• Enterprise and innovation

Furthermore, this assessed task gives students an opportunity to develop and demonstrate their competency in the following transferrable skills:

• Research
• Problem solving
• Communication and literacy

Further information about graduate competencies/transferable skills can be found in the ‘Student Assessment Handbook: Coursework’.

Support Arrangements

The point of contact for this Assessment is Dr Eghosa Ekhator. Eghosa will help students to understand the requirements of this assessed task by:

• Discussing the assessment criteria with students in class

Giving a talk on the assessment questions

Assessment Task

Answer ANY ONE of the following questions:

Question 1

1. Does corporate sustainability impact firm profitability in the UK? Discuss with evidence from the UK.

Task

You are expected to discuss (generally) if corporate sustainability has positive or negative impacts on the profits of UK based firms. In addition, you should also analyse one large UK company and one small UK company in this regard

2. Is the CISG a successful experiment in the harmonization of international sales? Discuss the utility of the CISG.

Task

Discuss the various arguments whether the CISG has been a successful experiment or not in promoting harmonization of international sales.

3. In many parts of the world, CSR is underpinned by voluntarism or voluntary in nature. Should CSR be made mandatory? Discuss.

Task

The focus in this question is on CSR initiatives in countries. Students are expected to pick one country and discuss the utility or otherwise of making CSR mandatory.

Requirements

General Requirements

Your work must be word processed using Microsoft Word.  Your work should be formatted in line with the following requirements:

1. Use a sans-serif font (e.g. Arial, Calibri, Tahoma or Verdana);
2. Do not use a font size smaller than 12 pt; 
3. Set your page margins to ‘normal’; 
4. Set your line spacing to ‘1.5 lines’; and
5. Include page numbers at the foot of your page.  

You may make use of headings/sub-headings within your work.  You may include your Student ID number (e.g. ‘Student ID: 1003XXXX’) in the header of your word document. 

Once you have completed your work you should save it in one of the following formats: Microsoft Word. 

Practicalities

General Guidelines

• All material submitted must be entirely the work of the student. As work is scanned automatically for plagiarism, from the moment you submit, please make sure that your work is not plagiarised.  Failure to do so will in result in an investigation for plagiarism and potentially a zero mark in the module.

• Work must contain the student ID number only at the top left-hand corner of each page and consecutive page numbers at the bottom of each page. The module title, module code, assessment title, student ID and word count should be provided on the first title page.

• Use the Oxford Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities (OSCOLA) 2012– 4^th edn for the proper citation of all authorities which you use in your exercises.  OSCOLA is available at this link: http://www.law.ox.ac.uk/published/OSCOLA_4th_edn_Hart_2012.pdf

• For support with electronic submission please refer to the eSub website www.derby.ac.uk/esub, which contains detailed information on esubmission.