Home > The Effectiveness of Corporate Social Responsibility and Stakeholder Management Strategies: A Case Study of Analyzing the Private Sector Management in Khyber
The Effectiveness of Corporate Social Responsibility and Stakeholder Management Strategies: A Case Study of Analyzing the Private Sector Management in Khyber
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is practiced from time immemorial but got popularity in the early 1930s. Stakeholder management is an important area of CSR having overwhelming impact on the CSR strategies and practices. The idea of an ideal world is to develop such a society in which all the stakeholders like government, non-government organizations and businesses organizations integrate coordinate and work together for the welfare of the society. This concept is gaining popularity being closely associated with benefits of the society as a whole. This concept sees the businesses as the corporate social organizations working for the welfare of the society. The research was aimed to investigate and describe the current status of CSR practices of firms and the effectiveness of stakeholder management strategies in the food, beverages and tobacco industrial sector, the biggest private industrial sector, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and generalize the results to all the private sector industries of the province. The areas related to understanding of the firms about CSR, Business Management’s attitude towards CSR, practical measures taken by the firms for implementation of CSR, current stakeholders’ management strategies of the firms, and the perceptions of the firms towards the actions of different stakeholders in that particular private sector were studied. The overall investigation of all these areas of CSR helped to identify the direction of the businesses in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa towards practical implementation of CSR practices in this specific area. The research problem was investigated by applying the qualitative research methodology. Interview schedule method was used for data collection from the top management of the firms through face-to-face discussion by using a pre-structured open and close ended questionnaire. All the private sector firms were the study universe, all functional industrial units of the food, beverages and tobacco sector of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa were population of the study, out of which a sample of 108 firms was selected for research using stratified random sampling technique. Key findings of the research revealed that CSR as a concept is understood and practiced by the firms but the CSR practices are not properly planned, coordinated, integrated andare done on a smaller scale by the firms, resulting in low impact on the overall development of the society. The CSR practices are mostly focused on the primary stakeholders especially on employees’ welfare. Moreover, the management of the firms has an idea of its key stakeholders but fails to differentiate between its primary and secondary stakeholders. There were no dedicated and permanent set ups, budget allocations and training programs in CSR which resulted into informal CSR practices. Finally, the perception of the management towards different actions of some of the key stakeholders was positive. It was recommended that the firms need to take more practical steps like having an independent CSR unit, separate budget allocations and trainings in CSR for the management in order to practice CSR more effectively. Moreover, the role of the government is important for coordination, registration and supervision of the CSR activities in order to avoid duplication of the resources and enable the firms to play their role more effectively in the overall development of the society.
Background and Aims: The COVID-19 outbreak is the biggest global crisis in generations having severe and far-reaching repercussions for the health system, creating high prevalence of severe posttraumatic stress symptoms for physical therapists, highlighting the need for psychological help. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate how resilience functions as a mediator in the relationship between anxiety and personality among Karachi based physiotherapists.
Methodology: A cross-sectional study was conducted among physiotherapists of Karachi using a convenience sampling technique from August to December 2021. The data was collected using a 10-Item Personality Inventory, Brief Resilience Scale, and Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale questionnaire.
Results: Among 70 participants, the emotional stability trait (7.6±1.4) had higher mean values on the TIPI. On the HAM-A scale, 81.4% physiotherapists had moderate to severe anxiety followed by 15.7% mild to moderate anxiety whereas 92.9% were shown to have normal resilience. Despite all correlations being negligible, only the association between agreeableness and resilience was non-significantly higher (r=0.83).
Conclusion: It was concluded that there was no association between the anxiety state and resilience among physiotherapists, although there was a non-significantly higher relationship between agreeableness and openness to experiences personality traits. A high prevalence of moderate to severe anxiety was noted while using a standard resilience strategy.
The enormous and unprecedented spread of English has made it difficult for the so- called ‘Native Speakers of English’ to exercise their control over it. The non-native varieties of English are establishing their niche alongside the standard varieties of English. A paradigm shift can be noticed from ‘EFL, ESL, ENL’ to EIL paradigm. The non-native varieties of English have initiated their codification and description. In this scenario, this research studies Pakistani English as a non-native institutionalized variety and aims at identifying various features of it. The lexico-grammatical features of noun phrase in Pakistani English have been explored from six aspects. A corpus of written Pakistani English (PWE), 2.1 million words, has been compiled as a research tool. PWE comprises 29 text categories to enhance the representativeness of the corpus. PWE has been used to identify the features on the basis of actual instances or corpus evidence. BoE, BNC, Brown, Frown, LOB, and FLOB corpora have been used as reference corpora. This investigation is mainly a corpus driven research and the components of this research are based on corpus evidence observed during the study. One inference can be drawn from all the components of the present research that the differences between Pakistani English and the Standard varieties of English are not so wide as to create any serious problems in mutual intelligibility. But the differences seem wider than those between the British and American Englishes. The chapter 1 introduces the research and chapter 2 explores the theoretical undercurrents related to World Englishes and Pakistani English. It discusses the spread of English and the emergence of non-native varieties, conflicting standards among varieties, role of English in non-native context, the impact of pluricintricity, language policy and which model Pakistani English should follow etc. Chapter 3 is the survey of literature and links the present research with the research already done in the areas of Pakistani English, corpus linguistics, collocations, lexico-grammar, and noun phrase. Chapter 4 discusses the steps taken in the compilation of the corpus and introduces the corpus (PWE). Methodological framework has been kept separate from methodology. Chapter 5 describes the methodological framework of the research and explores the paradigm this research is II aligned with. Due to the complex methodology of the six components of the research, the methodology (a guide for the replication of the research) has been discussed in each component of the noun phrase before analysis in Chapter 6. The sixth chapter comprises six components of research and presents their analysis. The first component deals with mechanics i.e. hyphenated compounds in PWE, and highlights the differences from BNC and also addresses the importance of such issues in the context of Non-native varieties of English. The second component, Urduization, is the study of Urdu words in PWE and tabulates the data in various domains to show how Pakistani English as a non-native variety of English is bound in socio-cultural make up of the community. The third component, Noun Noun Compounds explores nine trends in the noun compounds and reveals hundreds of examples to identify trends in PWE. The fourth component, Modifying Adjectives, uses Yibin Ni’s (2004) model to explore lexico- grammatical and semantic categories of the modifying adjectives of 50 nouns selected on the basis of frequency and detailed consistency. The quantitative differences of this component have been further explored in the fifth component of the research. The same 50 nouns have been used as nodes of concordance lines to study the 1R and 1L collocates. These collocates have been grouped into lexical fields. The results of this component loudly pronounce that the real differences between Pakistani English and other varieties of English are mainly of collocations. One hundred nouns in PWE, which have been identified as vocabulary differences between British and American Englishes by Davies (2005), have been studied in the final component of the research. Chapter 7 concludes the research and shares some observations I made during the research. Chapter 8 is forward looking and introduces various researchable areas the present research has identified. In the light of the detailed discussion on theoretical undercurrents, it can be assumed that the results obtained in the data analysis are significant for description of Pakistani English and establishing the status of Pakistani English. Moreover, the results are insightful in ELT because they can show the difference between what is taught and what is being used. The information obtained as the results of the data analysis can be used in lexicographical activities. A supplement can be added to the already existing dictionaries.