Creating Shared Value: The One-Trick Pony Approach

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. IN THEIR ARTICLE “Creating Shared Value. How to reinvent capitalism—and unleash a wave of innovation and growth,” Michael Porter and Mark Kramer (2011) suggest what they see as a paradigmatic change in management thinking, one that they believe should contribute to nothing less than the reinvention of capitalism. The authors (2011: 64) criticize a too narrow understanding of management that aims at short-term business profits, and they stress the