Question 1
Environmentalism is traditionally not only concerned with the capability of existing political arrangements and institutions to successfully address the environmental challenge. It also entails or suggests a different conception of the good society. In addition to solving environmental problems, environmentalism is also, maybe even primarily, concerned with an analysis of the nature of such problems. In addition to a concern with acting effectively within a given political institutional context, environmentalism is also engaged in redefining and reshaping that context. And in addition to its concern with institutional design, environmentalism is also engaged in specifying and defining the environmental goals those institutions should promote, goals like the preservation of a self-sustaining nature or natural biodiversity (Barton, 2002). In other words, prior to its instrumental dimension environmentalism has a normative and moral dimension determining the way in which the whole environmental issue makes sense to people. Environmentalism could mean the theoretical realm that addresses the moral, normative and philosophical issues stemming from ecological awareness. Environmentalism opened the way to significant changes on the political, ideological and theoretical levels. However, the instrumental role of the environment was often misunderstood as a singular political issue, or as a comprehensive world view (Thiele, 2002).
Some analysis demonstrated that while environmentalism was a facilitator of new politics and contributed to challenging some of the dominant approaches to political analysis, facilitated the emergence of a new type of ideology and extended moral theory beyond humanity’s boundaries, these challenges are hard to meet in a democratic system which is adaptable and resilient enough. The strength of advanced industrial democracies is in their very ability to co-opt new cleavages and issues into the existing political patterns (Levy & Wissenburg, 2004). Central, and probably most significant, to environmentalist political thought is its systematic account of the ethical relations between human beings and their natural environment, and the implications of those relations for the basic political arrangements of society. Environmentalism is built on a metaphysical dualistic view of a human society facing an independent non-human world, the good or interests of which human society ought to respect and promote. As such, environmentalist political thought is not only concerned with the capability of existing political arrangements to successfully address the environmental challenge; it also suggests a different conception of the political ends of environmentalism (Milton, 1996). Environmentalism is a social movement and philosophy that focus on environmental conservation and gradual or immediate improvement in environmental state. The move towards environmental concerns is one of the social changes faced by oil companies like Total Group. Environmentalism forces Total Group to make sure that the gases it would create and sell to people would not harm the environment. Environmentalism uses various concepts and ideas to force companies like total to be responsible enough and refrain from having dangerous substances. Environmentalism forces Total group to think of changing the components of their products and think of means to make sure that their product would not harm the environment. Environmentalism makes companies see that there is a need to protect the environment and protect the welfare of the people.
Question 2
One of the technologies that gave problems to Total Group is the use of Ships to transfer oil products. Due to natural or manmade causes oil spill happens and this causes a huge problem to Total Group. Oil spill creates expenses for the repairs of the ship and compensation to those affected. It causes a negative image for the company. One of the major sources of oil entering the marine environment as a consequence of normal shipping operations is the discharge of crude oil and products during tank cleaning, a problem caused primarily by older, single-hulled, tankers that use tanks for both cargo and ballast water. The relative importance of accidental and other discharges will naturally vary from year to year, depending on the severity of tanker accidents (Nixon, 1994). As a long-term trend, however, significant reductions in both accidental and operational pollution should occur as a reflection of improved technologies and regulation. All ships encounter leakages from machinery, whether routinely or during maintenance. This oil will tend to collect in the ship’s bilges, where it may lie or be transferred to a bilge water holding tank. Larger ships, or those trading in designated special areas such as the Baltic, are also required to monitor the concentration of oil in water and to cease discharging if the oil-in-water threshold is reached. Additional treatment, such as the use of filtration to further reduce the oil content of the water discharged, is sometimes used, but this is rare at present (Shojai, 1995). All discharges are subject to restrictions in terms of distance from land and location outside special, environmentally vulnerable, areas. Other oily wastes such as the sludge resulting from fuel purification, which cannot be passed through the oily water separator, will be stored on board in a dedicated tank until they can be discharged ashore. In order to reduce operational oil pollution associated with the cleaning of cargo/ballast tanks, procedures have been developed by the oil industry and subsequently incorporated into international legislation. These include a particular sequence of tank washing, termed the load on top procedure, which acts to minimize the discharge of oil to the sea in tank washings. A system of crude oil washing has also been developed whereby cargo tanks are washed with cargo using highly controllable tank washing machines. In this process the lighter fraction of the crude oil acts as a solvent, washing the heavier fractions from the tank walls. By this means, cargo out-turn can be greatly increased (Pinder & Slack, 2004).
A positive technology for Total group is the use of nuclear technology to create nuclear power. The creation of nuclear power would reduce the need for creation of oil products. It would still give the company a product, but the product would be in line with the calls for environmentalism. The creation of nuclear power would reduce the need for shipping oil to various countries. The use of nuclear technology and creation of nuclear power would give a positive image to the firm. Nuclear power, as a complex technology that demands large organizations for its development was more prone to this sort of business momentum than most. And nowhere was it more obvious than during what came to be known as the Great Bandwagon Market. In the early part of the 1960s, the nuclear industry found itself at a critical point. Nuclear power clearly worked nuclear plants were already providing power for several electrical utilities but the technology had not proven itself as a commercial product (Laird, 2001). Existing nuclear plants were not economically competitive with coal-fired plants, and although nuclear power costs were dropping, no one knew when, or even if, nuclear costs would catch up with coal. Nuclear power, which had seemed so promising in the 1950s, now looked as if it might turn out to be nothing special. But suddenly, within just a few years, much of the electric utility industry climbed onto a nuclear bandwagon. In 1966 and 1967, almost half of all new plants ordered by electrical utilities were nuclear. The reasons given at the time were purely economic: nuclear power, the utilities said, was now their cheapest option for generating electricity. It wasn’t that simple, however. Years later, when it became obvious that the nuclear power cost estimates were hopelessly optimistic, people took a second look at the industry decision to go nuclear. What they discovered was that the biggest turning point in the history of nuclear power was born not of some technical breakthrough but instead of a number of business factors, the most important of which was cutthroat competition between the manufacturers of nuclear reactors (Brannigan & Goldenberg, 2000). With every new technological product, whether it is a word-processing program or telephone-switching software, a steam engine or a nuclear power plant, there is a learning curve. The designers, the manufacturers, and the users must all put time into learning about the product’s capabilities and quirks. This wasn’t a big problem when technological innovation was mostly trial and error. Change came so slowly that learning easily kept up. But today, because engineers can conceive of and design devices unlike anything that has ever been built, people end up using things they don’t really understand. That’s where the learning comes in. In manufacturing a new device the maker must figure out which techniques do the best job at the least cost. The manufacturing process may uncover features of the product’s design that looked fine on paper but just don’t work in practice (Pool, 1997).
Question 3
One potential problem for Total group is the reduced resource for the creation of their products. In the next few years there would be lesser resources for the company’s products. This would force them to hike prices and it would cause them to lose some markets. This entails the use of ecosystem management that will make sure that a balanced use of resources would be done. Ecosystem management accepts that human values must play a leading role in policy decision-making. The key players in ecosystem management are scientists, policy-makers, managers and the public. The human dimension of ecosystem management is encompassed by the notion of sustainable development. Integrating human and biophysical factors is a daunting task. Humans can generate wants and capabilities of meeting these wants that lie outside the natural ecological order. The very idea of sustainability itself is a curious human construct. Laudable though the idea of sustainability might be, there are problems with it, not the least of which is the lack of a definition. The treatment of natural ecosystems is complemented with a discussion of the human-created environments that exist as cities and rural areas (Hussen 2000).
Cities generate complex energy and material flows with pollution of the air and water, land contamination and the creation of waste being the principal by-products. The traditional means of managing the environmental problems that arise in cities has been through planning regulations but it is now becoming clear that these are inadequate for the task and new approaches involving the concepts of healthy cities and sustainable communities must be seriously considered. Rural environments, by contrast, are different in being the partial creations of human activity and the question is one of finding a more harmonious, less exploitative accommodation with nature. Perhaps the most important management principle, however, is the realistic pricing of environmental resources. Decision-making in free market economies relies on relative cost as the best indication of efficient investment. But markets find it very difficult accurately to reflect the long-term costs and benefits of environmental resources. One approach to this problem is to assess the total economic value of a contemporary environmental resource as the sum of present value plus benefits forgone if the environmental resource is destroyed (Heilman & Walsh, 1994). To counter the problem of reduced resource the company needs to determine alternative resources. Quality assurance is evaluation with an emphasis on optimizing program delivery and performance on a continuous basis. Essentially, this is a process evaluation that develops measurements that link program process and performance. This approach recognizes that successful delivery of demand-side resources is a multistep process. Thus, it monitors and tracks program performance at critical steps. It develops quality-assurance mechanisms and services to control risk. The goal is to ensure resource availability (Homer-Dixon, 1999).
By improving resource availability, it may be possible to reduce reliance on measurement and minimize payment and measurement risks. An emphasis is placed on providing program services to increase the long-term reliability of the demand-side resource. The role of evaluation is to help ensure that these services are delivered effectively. Quality assurance is an ongoing process. It provides feedback for program optimization and has mechanisms to ensure the long-term performance of energy-efficiency projects. Better institutions, policies, and technologies can directly boost the physical availability of resources and reduce total resource demand. Price changes in efficient markets encourage people to tap new sources of scarce resources (Hussen 2000). One issue that Total group might face in the future would be the changing human resources. The personnel are important for Total group since they are the ones who directly deal with clients and they are the ones that respond to their needs. The human resources are not only internationalized but have changing needs and characteristics. The internationalization of human resources may be a good thing but it results to change in the outlook of people and their idea of what they need (Briscoe & Schuler, 2004). The change in human resources implies changes in the processes that involve hiring and training the personnel. Companies like total group need to adjust their processes to accommodate the changing human resources. Total use of technologies than people to create products may prevent the problem of changing human resources but it would cause issues with society. (Mazin & Smith, 2004). In the typical domestic HR department in a large firm, a number of activities are performed that generally support the core HR responsibilities. These include the HR information system, human resource planning, job analysis and the writing of job descriptions, job evaluations and wage surveys and the development of job classifications and wage rates, labor market analyses to determine the availability and abilities of potential employees, the development of appraisal systems, relocation services, and personnel/HR research. In order to achieve the above agenda and responsibilities, IHR as a management function will need to continue professionalizing (Kulik, 2004).
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