Creating Shared Value: The One-Trick Pony Approach - A COMMENT ON Michael Porter and Mark Kramer

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.