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ABSTRACT

Date: 2013-05-30

Level: Bachelor thesis in business administration, 15 hp

Institution: Mälardalens University, School of sustainable development of society and technology

Authors: John Andersson 19910320, Bing He 19870911

Tutor: Magnus Linderström

Keywords: CSR, Knowledge sharing, Code of conduct, Suppliers, Sharing of code of conduct, Barriers, Monitoring.

Research question: What barriers affect Swedish companies during the sharing of code of conduct to Chinese suppliers?

How do these barriers affect sharing the code of conduct?

How are trust and monitoring used when sharing the code of conduct?

Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to investigate what the barriers are when Swedish companies try to share their code of conduct to suppliers in China, and how these barriers influence the sharing of code of conduct. This study will also investigate the use of trust and monitoring within the sharing process.

Method: The qualitative approach has been used for this study, it was chosen since the subjects discussed in this thesis are often intangible and therefore easier to investigate with a qualitative study. Both secondary and primary data has been used. The primary data was gathered from face-to-face interviews and telephone interviews. The secondary data has been gathered trough company websites, academic articles, books, and earlier theses. The database ABI-Inform was used for gathering academic articles.

Conclusion: This study has shown various effects that these barriers have on the sharing of code of conduct. There is clear evidence that these barriers exist which have been shown with the help of theories from previous studies and also with the gathered empirical findings. This has also been shown with the owniideveloped multi-barriers model. This model can be used for identifying the barriers which is the first stage for companies to effectively deal with these barriers.