Search results

Louise Dejan was a successful real estate developer operating throughout northeast England. The city council of her hometown of Newcastle faced a problem common to many areas: how to encourage private investment into less attractive areas. In August 2012, Newcastle's East Pilgrim Street neighborhood remained an eyesore, despite its great location between the city's Central Station and city hall. It was a natural place for Dejan to build a typical urban office building over street-level retail building. On a particularly attractive site sat an asbestos-contaminated building, which was a former home to the Bank of England. The costs of remediation had kept developers like Dejan away for many years. To encourage redevelopment, the Newcastle City Council had recently designated the East Pilgrim Street neighborhood an Accelerated Development Zone (ADZ). This gave Dejan access to Tax Increment Financing (TIF), a method by which public funds could be spent to encourage private sector redevelopment of designated parcels of land. After studying the details of TIF and the financial projections of a potential new development, Dejan had to decide whether she should be the first to redevelop property in this well-located but seemingly forgotten neighborhood.

Business ethics, corporate social responsibility (CSR), corporate strategy and public administration.

Undergraduate (final year) and Master level course (e.g. MBA, EMBA, Master in management and Master in public administration).

This case accounts the experience of a Malaysian Governmental Development Agency cum City Council, Bintulu Development Authority (BDA), in organizing and strategizing its CSR initiatives so as to discharge its self-interests and societal expectations. BDA was established following the discovery of huge reserves of natural gas and oil offshore in Bintulu, an industrial town in the state of Sarawak, Malaysia. It serves as the governmental instrument to undertake and coordinate development initiatives in Bintulu. There have been several driving forces prompted BDA to be more vigilant in discharging its social obligations along with its statutory obligations as a development agency and municipal services provider. They are, namely, the BDA Ordinance 1978 that governs its legitimate existence, the emergence of social media era that alters the access of people to information, the growing ecological and social concerns, and the unpredictable geopolitical environment that makes the logic of long-term strategic planning questionable. To ensure discharging its statutory and social obligations, BDA articulated vision and mission statements with strong social orientation. Two master development plans, embedded with social and environmental considerations, have guided BDA in translating its strategic mission into real structured development and action plans from 1978 to present. Through institutionalization of CSR elements as part of the organization's core business routines, annual budget allocation, performance control and reward mechanisms, CSR becomes an organizational routine of value to BDA.

This case has three learning objectives: it assists students to understand the contextual background of the case so as to establish the strategic position of CSR initiatives within the organization; it assists students to assess the embeddedness of CSR in an organization's core business routines and its potential sources of value creation; and it encourages students to examine the possible critical factors that enable or impede the initiation and implementation of regular CSR programs in an organization.

Teaching notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

CF Industries’ products nitrogen fertilizers are a crucial input to making agriculture productive enough to feed the world. However, its products are undifferentiated commodities. Throughout parts of its history, CF has struggled to be consistently profitable, yet over the last decade it has been very profitable. The case provides an opportunity to examine how CF manages to create value and capture it as profits despite being in a commodity business.