Q1. How much of pretax profits may businesses in the United States declare as tax-deductible contributions?

a. 2%

b. 5%

c. 10%

d. 20%

e. None

 

Q2. How could the value of employee volunteer programs be enhanced for a firm to better align these programs with strategic philanthropy goals?

a. Firms could heavily advertise their volunteer efforts to create a more favorable public image.

b. Volunteer programs could be oriented to benefit the immediate community surrounding the firm.

c. Programs should emphasize synergies between employees’ current and future job-related aptitudes and nonprofit needs.

d. Volunteer programs should be mandatory for all employees so as to encourage all employees to think about social causes.

e. Programs could be geared toward improving the morale of the employees who participate.

 

Q3. You are the Director of Social Responsibility for a major athletic shoe and apparel company. Which of the following options would most closely fulfill the objectives of strategic social responsibility for your company?

a. Allowing employees to volunteer at a local charity of choice on company time for one hour per week

b. Donating athletic shoes to a professional athletic team in order to increase the company’s exposure

c. Giving athletic shoes and apparel to disadvantaged youths

d. Having employees volunteer at a youth shelter and delivering athletic shoes for their sports programs

e. Sponsoring a charity-oriented golf tournament by donating monetary funds to the cause

 

Q4. What type of document is likely to be the most reliable and objective source of information in a social audit?

a. Externally generated and circulated document from an external stakeholder group

b. Internally generated and externally circulated document regarding social responsibility activities

c. Internally generated and circulated document about the company’s social responsibilities

d. Report about the volunteer hours of staff members that is internally generated

e. Internally and externally generated documents are usually equally reliable because it is difficult to falsify these records

 

Q5. Which of the following best defines the natural environment from a business perspective?

a. Any entity or combination of entities that has an impact on the way that organizations conduct their business

b. The physical world, including all biological entities, as well as the interaction between nature and individuals, organizations, and business strategies

c. Any resource that is found in limited quantity and requires protection through national or state regulation

d. The physical world including all biological and geological entities

e. Plants, animals, human beings, oceans and other waterways, land, and the atmosphere

 

Q6. What is the real difficulty in conducting a risk analysis?

a. Measuring the costs and benefits of environmental decisions, especially in the eyes of interested stakeholders

b. Identifying which stakeholder groups have concerns about various environmental issues

c. Conducting government or industry research as part of the response to environmental concerns

d. Identifying the environmental issues that might be related to any one type of company or product

e. Determining the specific environmental factors that could impact a business decision

 

Q7. Which of the following best describes the reasons that companies want to conduct social audits?

a. Companies exceed their legally prescribed duties and conduct social audits for a variety of reasons that lie along a vast spectrum.

b. A firm may want an official audit so it will be able to project a good image to hide corrupt ways.

c. A company may want to make its closest competitors look bad in order to attract more customers and increase market share.

d. Firms are genuinely interested in understanding performance in order to improve and achieve the best social performance possible.

e. A company may simply feel pressure to conduct an audit on its social responsibilities because many other companies are doing it.

 

Q8. What is the current trend concerning monitoring employee communications in the workplace?

a. The courts have ruled that monitoring employee communications, such as phone calls and e-mails, is unconstitutional.

b. Many companies are now monitoring employee communications including phone calls, e-mails, and Internet usage.

c. Few companies are monitoring unacceptable uses of technology by their employees because these abuses are nearly impossible to detect.

d. Fewer companies are monitoring employee communications because its sends a message of a lack of trust.

e. Companies are cutting back on the number of employees having access to computers in order to limit abuses of the Internet and e-mail.

 

Q9. Which of the following indicators are most useful for assessing employee issues?

a. Turnover and satisfaction

b. Ethical climate and promotion policy

c. Patronage and interview

d. Salaries and seniority

e. Job classification and turnover

 

Q10. How does the level of job-related stress and fatigue in the United States generally compare to that in Japan?

a. The United States experiences a much higher level of stress-related symptoms from work than does Japan.

b. Both countries experience nearly the same high levels of work-related stress and fatigue problems.

c. Due to the relatively slack work effort in both the United States and Japan, work-related stress and fatigue are uncommon.

d. The overall work-related stress and fatigue in the United States is moderate compared to the high levels in Japan.

e. Although they are quite comparable, the United States workers experience slightly more stress-related problems than Japanese workers.

 

Q11. Which of the following statements best describes international initiatives on privacy?

a. Russia is on the forefront of privacy regulation and has taken drastic measures to protect the privacy of its citizens within Russia and around the world.

b. Japan has demonstrated rather little concern about protecting the privacy of its citizens and has few regulations about online privacy.

c. In the international realm of privacy regulation, the United States is not the strictest but does attempt to protect its citizens’ privacy.

d. Although many other countries have regulations and restrictions on privacy and the Internet, none are as stringent as those in the United States.

e. In general, European privacy regulations are less stringent than those of the United States and Japan.

 

Q12. By the 1980s, what type of analogy was being used to describe the workplace?

a. Master-servant

b. Prison

c. Social club

d. Athletic team

e. Family

 

Q13. What is the most influential regulatory agency concerning environmental issues in the United States?

a. Earth Day Council

b. FIFRA

c. NAAQS

d. FTC

e. EPA

 

Q14. What is ISO 14000?

a. International regulatory body that is responsible for punishing companies who are not in compliance with global environmental standards

b. National environmental standards that promote a cleaner and safer environment for all Americans

c. The required standard for reporting information about environmental performance to stakeholders

d. A comprehensive set of environmental standards that encourage a cleaner, safer, and healthier world

e. A standardized auditing process that evaluates a company’s environmental performance

 

Q15. What did the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) of 1974 do?

a. It developed standards for the minimum wages a company could pay its employees in order to fulfill Social Security retirement obligations.

b. It mandated that companies create a financially sound employee pension plan for full and part-time employees.

c. It set uniform minimum standards to assure that employee benefit plans are established and maintained in a fair and financially sound manner.

d. It detailed what benefits a company must offer its employees.

e. It implemented a plan for job-sharing and flextime arrangements with employees who are paid on an hourly basis.

 

Q16. What experiences effectively ended the loyalty and commitment-based contract that employees had developed with employers?

a. Employers began to say that employees were not that valuable to the company’s success.

b. Employers took steps to cut costs through workforce reduction as the demands for global competitiveness increased.

c. Employers began to offer work-life balance perks to lure talented workers away from their current employers, and loyalty suffered.

d. Employees’ desire for job security changed, and they no longer had a psychological need for security.

e. Employers felt that employees were not living up to the conditions of their psychological contracts.

 

Q17. Which of the following describes the contagion effect that can occur when one business moves into an area?

a. A move can signal to other firms that the area is congested and not worth entering.

b. The overall skill level of employees in the community will improve, which may lead other companies to recruit workers from this community.

c. New jobs will be created in the community, which will decrease unemployment and boost the overall economy.

d. The community will be grateful to the company for locating within its limits and reward it with certain property tax benefits.

e. A move can signal to other firms that the area is a viable and attractive place for others to locate, and more businesses will follow.

 

Q18. Which area of law refers to a business’s legal responsibility for the performance of its products?

a. Lemon laws

b. Strict accountability

c. Product liability

d. Product misuse

e. Warranties

 

Q19. Which of the following provides the best description of the community stakeholder for an organization?

a. The entire county in which the organization is located is the community stakeholder because the impact of the organization reaches beyond the city to the entire county.

b. The community aspect of the stakeholder model includes the entire region in which the company operates.

c. The entire city in which the organization operates will be affected by the organization, and therefore this defines the community stakeholder.

d. The community includes those members of society who are aware of, concerned by, or in some way affected by the operations and outputs of the organization.

e. The community to be concerned with is the immediate neighborhood where most of the organization’s patrons live and work.

 

Q20. Why is it difficult for the government to hire and retain forensic computer experts to control the activities of cyber criminals?

a. The highly skilled experts are hired away by firms who pay much higher salaries than the government.

b. Crimes committed online seem mild and unimportant compared to other types of white-collar crime.

c. The government does not have the jurisdiction to seek out and punish those who commit online crimes.

d. The government is not concerned with these issues and leaves the control up to the private sector.

e. There are less than fifty high-caliber forensic computer experts in the country.

 

Q21. Which of the following best describes the relationship between drinking water quality and water pollution?

a. Very few drinking water systems in the United States are in violation of federal safety standards as these water pollution problems are found only in less industrialized countries.

b. Water pollution is generally less of a factor in industrialized areas, because most industries carefully clean potentially harmful discharges in order to protect drinking water quality.

c. Water pollution most likely affects the quality of drinking water from surface reservoirs such as rivers and lakes since these are the primary sources of our drinking water supplies.

d. Although water pollution usually affects the fish, animals, and plants living in and near the bodies of water, it rarely impacts the quality of the drinking water directly.

e. Water from surface reservoirs and water from underground aquifers can both be harmed by water pollution.

 

Q22. Which of the following situations may constitute quid pro quo sexual harassment?

a. A male coworker makes unwelcomed sexual advances toward a female coworker, which causes her to feel that her job is threatened.

b. A male manager suggests to one of his female employees that she will receive a raise if she wears shorter skirts and works ‘overtime’ once a week.

c. Many male employees of a company make repeated remarks about how men are more intelligent than women, which makes the environment difficult for female employees.

d. A female employee asks one of her subordinates out to dinner over and over again even though he always tells her no, and he is beginning to feel uncomfortable around her.

e. A male employee often disseminates e-mails of a sexual nature to his coworkers that creates an awkward atmosphere for a couple of his female coworkers.

 

Q23. What does saying ‘technology has a self-sustaining nature’ mean?

a. The money received from new technologies will fund additional future advances.

b. Technology acts as a catalyst to spur even faster development.

c. Technology helps companies meet stakeholders’ needs more efficiently.

d. People begin to rely on technology and cannot function without it.

e. Technology has become an indispensable aspect of life and society.

 

Q24. Which of the following is one of the arguments for banning human cloning?

a. Human cloning does not have the potential to enhance human life in any way and therefore is not worth the money it costs.

b. When cloning is used to treat a patient, an actual fully developed human must be destroyed.

c. Cloning has the potential to revolutionize the treatment of diseases and create replacement organs.

d. Cloning is unethical because it involves humans meddling with nature.

e. Banning human cloning could threaten important research, especially in the areas of infertility and cancer treatment.

 

Q25. Which of the following statements best describes the current view on genetically modified foods?

a. Many important companies in the United States and abroad are requiring the suppliers of their food to use genetic modification in order to decrease prices.

b. GM foods have gained wide acceptance throughout the world as people realize the improvements that can be made from genetic modifications.

c. Although a small group of consumers are boycotting GM foods, most countries have widely adopted and encouraged their development.

d. Several countries have opposed GM foods, and some large companies have stopped using them in their products.

e. Nearly all countries are banning the use of GM products.

 

Q26. When sellers bid on their own items in order to heighten interest in an online auction, this is known as __________ bidding.

a. shill

b. competitive

c. illegal

d. owner’s

e. fraudulent

 

Q27. _____ involves the sharing of business information, maintaining business relationships, and conducting business transactions by means of telecommunications networks.

a. Web-based relational approach

b. Internet marketing

c. E-commerce

d. Commerce online

e. Internet data interchange

 

Q28. When can the origins of the Internet be traced back to?

a. 1930s

b. 1950s

c. 1970s

d. 1980s

e. 1990s

 

Q29. How could the relationship between employer and employee be best characterized until the early 1900s?

a. Supportive

b. Teamwork

c. Mother-daughter

d. Father-son

e. Master-servant

 

Q30. Which of the following statements is true?

a. The social auditing process is voluntary, whereas financial audits are mandatory for publicly traded corporations.

b. Law for publicly traded companies requires both financial audits and social audits.

c. The social auditing and the financial auditing processes are both voluntary processes that can provide great benefit to the company.

d. The financial auditing process and the social auditing process are both primarily concerned with the company’s financial performance.

e. Financial auditing is generally optional for a corporation, whereas social auditing is mandatory for publicly traded corporations.

 

Q31. Which of the following best describes the social auditing process?

a. A company should choose the standard social auditing process used by other companies in its industry.

b. A company should conduct a social audit every year at the end of its fiscal year to match its financial audit cycle.

c. A company should begin with a very formalized, comprehensive social audit.

d. A social audit should be unique to each company based on its size, industry, commitment of top managers, and other factors.

e. A company should abide by the federal guidelines for conducting social audits in order to comply with the law.

 

Q32. Increasing amounts of carbon dioxide and methane in the earth’s atmosphere can result in which negative environmental impact?

a. Air pollution

b. Acid rain

c. Greenhouse melting

d. Global warming

e. Kyoto gases

 

Q33. Which of the following is a positive effect associated with the ease of collecting personal data online?

a. New technology makes it more difficult for law enforcement agents to catch criminals and banks to detect fraud.

b. Customers may receive special offers based on their past purchases with companies that are specifically tailored to their interests.

c. Because of the ease of access, unauthorized use of personal information may occur.

d. Companies are able to sell information collected online to advertisers and others without the consumer’s consent.

e. Old or inaccurate data may misclassify a customer and in return, poorer customer service is received.

 

Q34. How can cause-related marketing on a global basis best be described?

a. Most countries do not allow cause-related marketing; therefore, its use is not widespread.

b. This particular marketing tool is used exclusively in the United States.

c. Companies in Western European developed cause-related marketing, although it is beginning to gain acceptance in other select regions.

d. Cause-related marketing originated in Japan and has recently found its way to the United States and Europe.

e. Although cause-related marketing has its roots in the United States, it is gaining usage on a global scale.