v1n17: Beschorner on Porter & Kramer on Creating Shared Value
Posted: September 8, 2013 Filed under: Uncategorized 2 Comments“Creating Shared Value: The One-Trick Pony Approach” by Thomas Beschorner
A COMMENT ON Michael Porter and Mark Kramer (2011), “Creating Shared Value,” Harv Bus Rev 89(1/2): 62–77.
Abstract: Although Michael Porter’s and Marc Kramer’s article “Creating Shared Value” is a welcome attempt to mainstream business ethics among management practitioners, it is neither so radical nor such a departure from standard management thinking as the authors make it seem. Porter’s and Kramer’s criticism and rejection of corporate social responsibility depends upon a straw man conception of CSR and their ultimate reliance on economic arguments is too normatively thin to do the important work of reconnecting businesses with society. For these reasons, prospects for a genuine reinvention of capitalism lie elsewhere.
To download the full PDF, click here: Beschorner on Porter and Kramer.
Business Ethics Journal Review 
“Instead of dealing with a contemporary understanding of CSR, corporate social responsibility seems to be used instead as a straw man to rhetorically justify the authors’ contribution and its proclaimed originality.”
Indeed. And when you look at the client list of FSG and the way in how they integrate Nestlé (remember LIFE water?) into the article, you see that it is not only vanity what motivates them to ride this one-trick pony. I was waiting for this article, thanks Thomas.
I think we shoudl recognize Porter’s ability to disseminate social and sustainability concepts and conceptualize them. At the http://www.center4sharedvalue.org we try to reseach and measure the value impact on the local regional communities.