Starbucks Ethical Sourcing

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Multiple factors play an essential part when determining a company’s success and its relationships with other organizations within the network. Interorganizational relationships and social capital can help facilitate organizational recovery while also furthering relationships along. This can be seen through the example of networks comings together post-Hurricane Katrina and during the incidence of Starbucks being criticized for unethical sourcing of its coffeebeans. However, the key to a company’s success is its relationships with other networks (Doerfel, 2017). Through interorganizational relations and social capital (SC) enables an organization to further their networks and relationships; however, SC can negatively affect organizational …show more content…

This further helps an organization to survive in the community. Many researchers find that SC is a “vital driver of alliance formation” while others view SC as “related to group effectiveness (Doerfel, Lai & Chewning, 2010).” One prime example would be the Starbucks’s crisis of ethical sourcing. Starbucks, one of the largest coffeehouses in the country, received negative lash back on not using ethical sourcing. In 2015, Starbucks announced their advanced efforts in research for ethical sourcing of its coffee beans. Through collaborative support and trust, Starbucks and other environmentalist groups such as Costa Rican Coffee Institute (ICAFE) and Coffee and Farmer Equity (C.A.F.E) enabled for Starbucks to bounce back from the negative attention ("Starbucks Shares a Decade of Research, Verifies 99% of Coffee Ethically Sourced", 2015). While this specific example does not use an open network ideally, Starbucks engaged with other networks within the coffee industry to find a solution to a problem that threatened its status as one of the largest coffeehouses. Using cognitive SC, Starbucks could understand the level of understanding between it and its partners. They both had the need to find a solution to the problem, create new methods to ensure ethical sourcing, and environmental needs. In the end, Starbucks coffee beans are now 99% ethically sourced, which has created stronger relationships between Starbucks and other networks through the means of shared concerns and knowledge to create the eco-friendly

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