The Body Shop: Ethical Values, Partnership with L'Oreal, and Organizational Culture

This presentation discusses the ethical values, partnership with L'Oreal, and organizational culture of The Body Shop. It explores how these factors affect the company's image, employee values, and production level. The Body Shop is a British cosmetics company founded by Dame Anita Roddick in 1976.

Body shop
The Body shop international limited is British cosmetics, perfume
and skin care company established in the year 1976. It presently
offers more than 1000 products which it sells in more the 3,050
franchised and owned stores globally around 66 countries (Brunk,
2017). The company was founded by a late British human rights
and environmental campaigner Dame Anita Roddick. The
company was started as a small store in Brighton selling only 25
products. Customers were motivated to recycle packaging and
there was a real emphasis on natural ingredients that were
sourced ethically and free of cruelty (Hasan, 2018).

Structuralist Paradigm
Body shop uses radical structuralism approach which involves
the macro or external elements of the society for example race or
social class (Banville and Torres, 2017). Body shop focuses on the
objective reality of societal structure, most essentially
structuralism provides a foundation for directing the subjective
and transformative practice of radical humanism. The change and
transformation developed through humanism results in structural
and societal change. Body shop follows radical structuralist
paradigm by objective entities and experiments of their products
so that it can not harm any consumer. On the other hand other
paradigms are much more critical of mainstream theories and
generally criticize the general natures of organization such as
their structure, culture, ethics or power & control.

CONTINUE..

Exploitation of Ethical
Values & Staff
Organizational culture plays an important role. It is the culture that
directly influences the company's overall structure such as as per the
case scenario, Body shop faces some conflicts of their employees and
the ethical values of the company are also exploited. And as a result,
this creates negative impact upon their employees and as a result, it
affect the employee values and decreases the production level of a
company too (Wickert, Vaccaro and Cornelissen, 2017). It shows that
if the organizational culture of the quoted company in positive then it
will be helpful to maximizes the production level and also contribute in
company's unique social and psychological environment(Shah, Murphy
and McIntosh, 2017).

Partnership with L'Oreal
Although, Body shop perform its business functions on core values
and ethics it faced a critical issue related to the animal testing
method. Body shop does not support and promote animal testing
methods for their products that demonstrate the ethical values and
culture of the company(Supardi, 2017). But when the company
develop partnership with L'Oreal it faced a lot of issues related to
animal protection. L'Oreal was experimenting is products on
animals in order to identify any negative impact on the skin of
consumers (Gasparski, 2017). The partnership between Body shop
and L'Oreal also negatively affected the image of Body shop and
resulted in the reduction of sales and profit

CONTINUE..
 Later, Both the companies started focusing on new
technologies to test the products such as development of
synthetic human skin known as EpiSkin. The companies
stated using this synthetic human skin in laboratory to test
new products and to analyze the sensitivities or
effectiveness of the products (Traer, 2018). In order to
sustain a positive image in the market Body shop needs to
perform ethical functions or activities so that customers
stay connected with the company and the organization does
not develop a negative image in the marketplace (Komatsu
and Cipriani, 2017).

REFERENCES
Hasan, R. A. (2018). Consumerism In Cosmetics Industry: The Case Study Of Corporate Social Responsibility Practices Of
The Body Shop In Pakistan. PEOPLE: International Journal of Social Sciences, 3(3).
Wickert, C., Vaccaro, A., & Cornelissen, J. (2017). “Buying” corporate social responsibility: organisational identity
orientation as a determinant of practice adoption. Journal of Business Ethics, 142(3), 497-514.
Gasparski, W. W. (2017). Understanding Different Interpretations of Corporate Social Responsibility in the United States. In
Business Students Focus on Ethics (pp. 53-66). Routledge.
Brunk, K. H. (2017). Shedding Light on the Ethical Consumer Debate: Evidence from a Qualitative Investigation of Body
Shop Consumers. In The Customer is NOT Always Right? Marketing Orientationsin a Dynamic Business World (pp.
292-300). Springer, Cham.
Banville, M. S., & Torres, J. (2017). On embracing an immanent ethics in urban planning: Pursuing our Body-without-
Organs. Planning Theory, 16(3), 255-274.
Wickert, C., Vaccaro, A. and Cornelissen, J., (2017). “Buying” corporate social responsibility: organisational identity
orientation as a determinant of practice adoption. Journal of Business Ethics, 142(3), pp.497-514.
Supardi, N., (2017). The Influence of Brand Personality Dimensions Towards Brand Loyalty: A Study at The Body Shop
Lampung (Doctoral dissertation, UNIVERSITAS LAMPUNG).
Shah, R., Murphy, D. and McIntosh, M. eds., (2017). Something to believe in: creating trust and hope in organisations:
stories of transparency, accountability and governance. Routledge.
Komatsu Cipriani, T. (2017). The emerging challenge of brand design and brand management in social innovations. The
Design Journal, 20(sup1), S3536-S3545.
Traer, R. (2018). Doing environmental ethics. Routledge.

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