Creating shared value

About: Creating shared value is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2404 publications have been published within this topic receiving 63148 citations.

Strategy and society: the link between competitive advantage and corporate social responsibility.

Abstract: Governments, activists, and the media have become adept at holding companies to account for the social consequences of their actions. In response, corporate social responsibility has emerged as an inescapable priority for business leaders in every country. Frequently, though, CSR efforts are counterproductive, for two reasons. First, they pit business against society, when in reality the two are interdependent. Second, they pressure companies to think of corporate social responsibility in generic ways instead of in the way most appropriate to their individual strategies. The fact is, the prevailing approaches to CSR are so disconnected from strategy as to obscure many great opportunities for companies to benefit society. What a terrible waste. If corporations were to analyze their opportunities for social responsibility using the same frameworks that guide their core business choices, they would discover, as Whole Foods Market, Toyota, and Volvo have done, that CSR can be much more than a cost, a constraint, or a charitable deed--it can be a potent source of innovation and competitive advantage. In this article, Michael Porter and Mark Kramer propose a fundamentally new way to look at the relationship between business and society that does not treat corporate growth and social welfare as a zero-sum game. They introduce a framework that individual companies can use to identify the social consequences of their actions; to discover opportunities to benefit society and themselves by strengthening the competitive context in which they operate; to determine which CSR initiatives they should address; and to find the most effective ways of doing so. Perceiving social responsibility as an opportunity rather than as damage control or a PR campaign requires dramatically different thinking--a mind-set, the authors warn, that will become increasingly important to competitive success.

Creating Shared Value

Abstract: THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM is under siege. In recent years business increasingly has been viewed as a major cause of social, environmental, and economic problems. Companies are widely perceived to be prospering at the expense of the broader community.

Toward a Political Conception of Corporate Responsibility - Business and Society Seen from a Habermasian Perspective

Abstract: We review two important schools within business and society research, which we label positivist and post-positivist corporate social responsibility (CSR). The former is criticized because of its instrumentalism and normative vacuity, and the latter because of its relativism, foundationalism, and utopianism. We propose a new approach, based on J?rgen Habermas's theory of democracy, and define the new role of the business firm as a political actor in a globalizing society.

Corporate social responsibility in europe and the u.s.: insights from businesses self-presentations

Abstract: The paper compares the extent and content of businesses’ communications about corporate social responsibility (CSR) in France, the Netherlands, the U.K., and the U.S. In particular, the study investigates the nature of CSR principles, processes, and stakeholder issues discussed in web pages. The results show that businesses in the four countries do not display the same eagerness to appear as socially responsible and employ diverse means to convey social responsibility images.