Awareness and Sustainability of Small Business in Whyalla

This selected journal article is mainly about a research that investigating the awareness and sustainability of small business in Whyalla ( an industrial city in South Australia) through social and environmental responsibility. It was jointly conducted by the University of South Australia and the Whyalla Economic Development Board (WEDB).

The authors firstly defined the term - Corporate social responsibility (CSR) by illustrating five key elements of CSR, and two different perspectives from shareholders and stakeholders. Then, the authors represented the linkage between the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and corporate social responsibility, stating the difficulties and pressure of SMEs to effectively implement corporate social responsibility by comparing with large-scale companies. Next the importance of corporate social responsibility was mentioned, accompanying that was some details about the research, including the research purpose, the research methods as well as the research results. Finally, the authors drew on conclusion, representing that a remarkable number of businesses has made some efforts to minimize the environmental damage, but the approaches they used are very limited.

On considering the features of methods used by the authors in the research, it had both strength and weakness. In terms of the research merits, it was firstly conducted by using face-to-face interviews, which enabled researcher to get rich and comprehensive data that offered them valuable insights and understanding (Sweeney,2007). In addition, the interview involved in research was mainly on the basis of the participants' personal experience, allowing the owners or managers of the small business to define their own terms the challenges, opportunities and initiatives the business confronted and adopted related to their own environment (Sawyer & Evans ,2010), which made the information more subjective and relevant to the reality. Last but not least, the question listed in interview covered comprehensive dimension of the relationship between SMEs owners and CRS, and all the statements were audio-recorded and the transcription was systematically categorized through NVivo8 software ( Sawyer & Evans,2010), which made the information more visual to be analyzed and reviewed.

However, there were several drawbacks existing in the research. First of all, the sample size is too small and limited. Most the participants involved in the research were the owners and managers of small business with fewer than 20 employees operating in Whyalla, which ignored the ambiguity of the criterion of small business ( Perhaps some small businesses have a working staff over 20). Besides, the types of small businesses investigated in research were only confined to retail and services sector within Whyalla, which omitted other genres of small businesses, such as individual proprietorship or partnership in Whyalla. Thirdly, there was no further investigation focusing on small businesses in other countries, which was impossible to make a benchmarking and failed to observe the degree in which the small businesses devoted themselves to CRS. Consequently, although the methodology of the research was modern and feasible, it had many limitations and lacked generalization, which could not be persuasive to some degree.

Overall, article effectively answered the questions listed in the topic outline. Firstly, it clearly de fined