Assignment:
You are required to write a research paper on the sustainability and corporate social responsibility issues that are most important in Canada. More specifically you need to cover the following areas
1. What is sustainability?
2. What are the main sustainability issues that Canada and Ontario in particular are facing today?
3. Which of those sustainability challenges are most relevant to businesses in Canada and Ontario? Why are they relevant?
4. What are Canadian businesses doing to tackle those challenges? What practices are being implemented?
5. How does current Canadian business sustainability/CSR practice compare to other countries?
6. Do you think that Canadian sustainability/CSR practices are adequate? Why? What do you think they could do better?
Question 1: When referring to the sustainability challenges you should use the Sustainable Development Goals to frame your findings, unless you want to use another sustainability framework (e.g. ISO 26000).
Question 2: When analyzing the current Canadian sustainability practice, you should focus on what businesses do (or say they do). You may refer to what other actors such as the government or other organizations do to help businesses in this area, but this is not what is being asked here.
Assignment structure:
5 to 7 single-spaced pages
1.Descriptive Title
The title of your paper should be as informative as possible and should clearly identify both the general field of the paper and the branch of it under consideration.
2. Abstract
An abstract is a synthesis of your paper and should briefly describe its significance. It is a summary of the paper. It should enable the readers to take in the nature and results of the paper quickly and decidewhether they wish to read further. It serves as a brief review of the paper's contents and contributions.Make it clear and concise. Use full sentences and avoid references and technicalities. It should be about half a page in length and separate from the rest of your paper. The abstract is not part of the page count. At the end of the abstract, you should include 5 to 6 important keywords and/or phrases
3. Introduction
The introductory section should provide a bridge from the abstract to the remaining discussion sections or the body of the paper. The first paragraph should be comprehensible to anyone interested in sustainability and CSR and should pinpoint the location of the subject matter. You should define/describe the questions and/or the topic that you will address. By defining and establishing the objectives of your paper in the introductory section, you clarify the goal and set the direction for the rest of the paper. At the end of this section, it is essential to indicate the scope of your paper, define the audience and describe the organization of your paper so that the readers know what to expect.
4. Research
This is the main part of your assignment where you present the findings of your research. You may use the research questions (1 through 5) as the basis to structure this part. Your description of your research must be well-documented. Make liberal use of tables, figures, and diagrams, and include literature references appropriately. Be concise and informative.
5. Your Opinion/Viewpoint
This section should present your opinions and viewpoints on the research that you conducted. Describe any self-learning that took place. This and the earlier section should constitute the bulk of your research paper. This is essentially answering the last research question.
6. Conclusions
The conclusions section is placed at the end of the document, right before the bibliography. It concludes the paper by pointing out its major contributions and perhaps indicating interesting areas of researchrelated to the paper's topic that have not been addressed by you, but deserve future investigation.
7. References/Bibliography
The conclusions are followed by a list of references (or bibliography) items. Please use the MLA Style.
It is expected that 5 to 10 references are adequate for this kind of assignment.