External influences affecting the firm and its activities
External influences affecting the firm and its activities
Introduction
Your task is to identify and use 4 stories from the national press that enables you to discuss examples of external influences that affect a specified firm and its activities.

The aim of this assignment is to assess your knowledge and understanding of the topic together with your ability to produce a written report and communicate relevant information and concepts.

What you have to do
• Produce a report 1250 words long.
The word count does not include footnotes, references, bibliography or appendices.
You will be penalised if you stray outside of +/- 10% of this word count.

• The report should consist of an explanation or discussion of 4 news stories or articles. Each news story should contain a mention of an environmental influence and a specific firm or organisation. You should ensure that each news item illustrates a different firm and a different environmental factor.

• These stories should come from daily newspapers (eg The Times, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph etc). They can be hard copy or the electronic version. The newspapers should be dated anytime between Monday 24th September 2012 to Monday 3rd December 2012. You can choose your stories from any combination of newspapers, ie. They can be from the same issue or completely different ones. To emphasise – an appropriate source is a newspaper that is published daily.

• The purpose of your report is to ‘Outline how changing external influences affect organisations’. The stories should be selected on the basis that they identify a change in the environment and they mention or discuss an organisation with respect to this change. You need to clearly explain the environmental change referred to and justify the actual or anticipated effect of this change upon the organisation.

• Produce your report in a clear structured way. Follow this format:
– A front cover to your report, with your name, id number and the title ‘Examples of how changes in the environment affect organisations’
– The second page should list the contents of the report. It should identify each story by reference to its title, newspaper used (with date), reporter (if given) and page number.
– Each news story covered in the report should be identified with a clear heading.
– On the last page of the report you should list your references. This should include all four stories and any other sources that you have used. References must be written using the Harvard Referencing style.
– At the back of your report you should include the cuttings of the 4 stories. ie the copy that you have based your report upon.

What should you include in your report?
a. Clearly summarise the information given in the story, from the perspective of
our interest (ie how an external change has, or will, affect an organisation).
b. Introduce any extra information that you think adds to the summary and analysis. Any information that is added, that has been taken from another source, must be clearly referenced. Please use the Harvard referencing system.