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ive in an environment in which it felt that many of its competitors would be artificially boosted by government cash. The company cut back many ancillary programs, including a number of factories, a chain of dealerships, and the costly Formula One racing team, and re-focused on core products. Just as recovery seemed to be around the corner, a major safety recall was necessitated in late 2009 and early 2010 as the company discovered problems with braking software on a number of models. The estimated cost of this recall program is between $1.8bn and $2bn (Fisk, 2010), which represents a sizeable chunk of the company's profits for the next few years.

Social Responsibility

In 2001, Toyota began to promote 'the Toyota way', a socially responsible philosophy that emphasised two key areas: respect for people, and continuous development. Aligning technological advances with the need to improve lives, Toyota sought to counter the idea that technology is essentially de-humanising. The Toyota Way has four main components:

Group problem-solving, recognising the ability of individuals to express themselves.

Long-term thinking, including an awareness of the company's environmental impact.

Developing employees, improving their skill sets so that they contribute more to the company.

Solving root problems, rather than covering up the symptoms of those problems (Liker, 2004).

The Toyota Way quickly came to be seen by many analysts as the benchmark for early twenty-first century social responsibility. Many observers began to position the Toyota Way as 'less about Toyota, and more about how the world's major corporations can retain their cutting-edge competitiveness while acting in a more socially responsible manner' (Liker, 2004, p. 205). As a result, many other companies around the world began to expressly or implicitly define their own corporate social responsibility programs within the parameters of the Toyota Way. The result, for Toyota, was substantial positive publicity about the company's leading role in fundamentally changing the way in which corporations approach their relationship with their customers. By 2004, the Toyota Way had been championed by over 100 leading companies around the world (Liker, 2004, p. 206) and was widely seen to have made a substantial and genuine contribution to corporate social responsibility, including establishing the idea of such responsibility in the first place. Despite some criticisms of the plan, including 'an emphasis on words over actions' (Crane et al., 2007, p. 56), the Toyota Plan positioned Toyota as one of the most socially responsible corporations in the world today.

In 2006, Toyota established the Toyota Corporate Citizenship Division (CCD) in a bid to further formalise its commitment to social responsibility and sustainable development. CCD was based on Toyota's claim that it was determined to 'reinforce social contribution activities and integrate corporate social contribution functions that had (previously) been performed by multiple divisions' (Toyota, 2006). The CCD program was not specifically a new initiative, but rather an umbrella venture designed to bring the company's various environmental, educatio本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。