英语论文网

皇家荷兰/壳牌集团的管理层宣布，在2004年1月，减少其“探明”石油和天然气储量的意图，并将这40亿桶石油增加到“可能”储量的类别。该公告涉及公司总“探明”储备的近20%，引起了媒体广泛的讨论，让投资者感到震惊，并提出了一些关于企业社会责任和巨大的跨国业务经理责任的相关问题。（Gupta，2003）。这篇简短的报告试图调查和讨论这项发展中的各种道德义务和企业社会责任的问题，而管理层则是从所有权中分离的，造成了这些问题不仅对对大型企业组织行为有一定的影响，同时也影响了成百上千的人的行动和生活。

案例描述
荷兰皇家壳牌集团（壳牌），其起源可追溯到第十九世纪初，是由英国皇家荷兰公司和壳牌在1907成立。这间公司由早期从事的业务范围慢慢发展成一家集团公司，主要领域涉及能源和石化产品，在20世纪50年代后出现了极大增长。（Gupta，2003年）。

Shell: The Case of the Missing Barrels

The management of The Royal Dutch/Shell Group announced, in January 2004, its intention of reducing its 'proven' reserves of oil and gas by 4 billion barrels and of adding such reduced figure to the category of 'probable' reserves. The announcement, which concerned practically 20% of the total 'proven' reserves of the company, created extensive media debate and discussion, shocked investors, and raised issues regarding Corporate Social Responsibility and the accountability of managers of huge multinational business undertakings (Gupta, 2003). This short report attempts to investigate and discuss the various ethical and CSR issues that emerged from this development, and the implications of such issues on the actions of large business organisations, whose actions impact the actions and lives of hundreds of thousands of people, and where management is separate from ownership.

Description of case

The Royal Dutch/Shell Group, (Shell), a conglomerate whose origins go back to the early 19th century, was created by the coming together of The Royal Dutch Company and Shell in 1907. The company, whilst engaged in a range of businesses in its early years, developed into a group of companies, engaged mainly in areas relating to energy and petrochemicals by the 1950s, and grew enormously thereafter (Gupta, 2003). In 2000, the company had operations in approximately 150 countries and employed approximately 115, 000 people (Gupta, 2003). Its Anglo-Dutch management was known to be essentially conservative in nature and the company enjoyed substantial investor confidence (Gupta, 2003).

Shell's announcement regarding reserve reclassification was followed by intense and elaborate examination of its oil reserves across the globe by company executives, with the assistance of an external consultancy organisation with acknowledged experience in the area (Shell..., 2004). The examination, which covered practically nine-tenths of the company's global reserves and all oil wells with capacities of more than 10 million barrels, led to revision in the estimated life of the company's reserves, (as stated in the 2002 annual report) from 13 years to 10.2 years (Shell..., 2004). The company announced that the financial impact of the reclassification would lead to a write-down of approximately 100 million USD per annum, for the period 2000 to 2003 (Shell..., 2004).

The revision of the established oil reserves of the organisation in 2003 was followed by the release of an internal report to the media in April 2004 (Gupta, 2003). The report disclosed stated that members of the senior management of the company had been fully aware of the possibility of such significant overstatement of the company's oil reserves and had been debating at length on the provisioning of true information to the publi