Assignment Brief

This case study describes how a mining company desires to continue to be business-sustainable, i.e. to continue to make money.  However, as it turns out, the mining company has been heavily criticised on social media, news outlets, and experienced criticisms and support from different sides of the political divide. As part of the exploration phase, the company has decided to engage the community to prepare them for the new mining activity. Some members of the community welcomed the new investment, welcoming jobs, the influx of new workers and therefore anticipated an increase in economic activity.

The company has embarked on a social sustainability initiative. The mining company has established a new function to develop community relations through contributing to a school initiative and also other community actions, e.g. charities, donations, public sporting events.  However, members of the public flooded the company’s social media page with complaints about the company disrespect and accused the company of being hypocritical in their intentions.  The accusations were about the use of a charity to increase their market share. The company did not have any plan to respond and this  vitriolic attack came as a surprise. The company shut down its social media page and withdrew from the campaign.

You have been engaged by the company to do a study on this failed campaign and to write a report. The purpose of this is to enable the company to learn from what occurred and for proposals to be considered to avoid this situation.

Prepare a report, to your executives, highlighting to them some of the points of view that may not have been considered in their campaign.

Your report should be 2500 words maximum, excluding references and appendices.

As a guide, you should consider these points:

1. Propose a risk management framework that may be incorporated into future projects at planning stage;
2. using Neohumanism as one of the two conflict based perspectives, explain the methodology for avoiding, as best as possible, individual employees from being partisan to this conflict;
3. using Radical Structuralist the second conflict based perspective, explain in your report why there is a predicable negative backlash from the public against this marketing campaign;
4. propose a set of questions that the project teams may ask in the future, to avoid the pressure in individuals;
5. make well argued proposals, that are well grounded in literature, that would help future campaigns;
6. demonstrate your ability to research this topic through the identification of at least 10 journal articles to support your work.

To repeat, it is necessary for you to demonstrate your ability to present the issues by selecting the appropriate perspectives to support your recommendations, or why you are offering a few competing viewpoints.