Competing Pressures occur often as businesses feel a need to change in order to have the ability to keep up with its competitors. This concept of competitive pressure is the basis of change that occurs across various industries and help improve the quality of products and services over time. There are however certain government regulations which ensure that certain products are recognized as being “authentic” and cannot be replicated in any shape or form. Take Parmigiano Reggiano for instance, a company which prides itself in making quality cheese. The company has a Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) regulation that basically prevents other companies to sell Parmesan cheese in Europe. One specific issue with competing pressures is that companies like Kraft feel the need to compete with all their effort with companies like Parmigiano Reggiano, taking away their own company identity and core principles/capabilities. Businesses are influenced by social concern and feel they need to sometimes change drastically, veering away from their missions often times.

A pro for government regulation is that companies like Parmigiano Reggiano who have such complex, historic methods of production for many years and have proven to make only the highest quality cheese in their market, have protected rights. One can argue that by having this government regulation consumers can make more clear distinctions between the highest quality goods on the market and the lower quality goods on the market. On the other hand, government regulations can also cause companies to change their mission and hinder its values in order to compete with the larger companies. Another con of government regulation like PDO, is it allows for the large businesses to maintain control of markets and smaller businesses like farming businesses for instance to have less of an opportunity. Also, the majority of the profits don’t trickle down to some of the less prominent members of production such as the people who worked on the fields or in the farms and are still a part of the company. One example of government regulation is U.S. Department of Labor which is the agency that issues regulations in terms of employee wages and hourly work. This agency issues the federal minimum wage and creates rules that relate to pay for overtime work. In addition the department is involved in the rule-making on child labor, medical leave, seasonal workers and more. There have been repeated debates about what the national minimum wage should be.