2. Aguinis & Glavas (2012) What We Know and Don’t Know About Corporate Social
Responsibility
3. Trevino & Brown (2004) Managing to be ethical: Debunking five business ethics myths
4. Donaldson & Dunfee (1999): When ethics travel
5. Boiral (2007): Corporate greening through ISO 14001
6. Friedman (1970): The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits
7. Ambec (2008) Does it pay to be green?
8. Ottman (2006) Avoiding green marketing myopia
9. McGovern (2007) Companies and the customers who hate them
10. Fassin (2009) The Ethics of NGO’s
11. Doane (2006) Beyond CSR
12. Wayne and Visser (2010) The Age of Responsibility
, 1.Creating shared value
Porter & Kramer
The capitalist system is under siege. In recent years business increasingly has been viewed as major
cause of social, environmental and economic problems.
Even worse, the more business has begun to embrace corporate responsibility, the more it has been
blamed for society’s failures.
Business is caught in a vicious circle.
A big part of the problem lies with companies themselves, which remain trapped in an outdated
approach to value creation that has emerged over the past few decades. They continue to view value
creation narrowly, optimizing short-term financial performance in a bubble while missing the most
important customer needs and ignoring the broader influences that determine their longer-term
success.
Companies must take the lead in bringing business and society back together.
Most companies remain stuck in a ‘’social responsibility’’ mind-set in which societal issues are at the
periphery (=omtrek), not the core.
The solution lies in the principle of shared value which involves creating economic value in a way that
also creates value for society by addressing its needs and challenges. Business must reconnect
company success with social progress.
Shared value is not social responsibility, philanthropy, or even sustainability, but a new way to achieve
economic success.
Google, IBM, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, Nestlé, Unilever and Wal-Mart create shared value by
reconceiving the intersection between society and corporate performance.
Businesses acting as businesses, not as charitable donors, are the most powerful force for
addressing the pressing issues we face. The moment for a new conception of capitalism is now;
society’s needs are large and growing, while customers, employees and a new generation of young
people are asking business to step up.
The purpose of the corporation must be redefined as creating shared value, not just profit per se. This
will drive the next wave of innovation and productivity growth in the global economy.
Economists have legitimized the idea that to provide societal benefits, companies must temper their
economic success.
Externalities arise when firms create social costs that they do not have to bear, such as pollution.
Solving social problems has been ceded to governments and to NGO’s. Corporate responsibility
programs – a reaction to external pressure – have emerged largely to improve firms’ reputations and
are treated as a necessary expense. Anything more is seen by many as an irresponsible use of
shareholders’ money. Governments for their part, have often regulated in a way that makes shared
value more difficult to achieve. Implicitly, each side has assumed that the other is an obstacle for
pursuing its goals and acted accordingly.
The concept of shared value, in contrast, recognizes that societal needs, not just conventional
economic needs, define markets. It also recognizes that social harms or weaknesses frequently
create internal costs for firms – such as wasted energy or raw materials, costly accidents, and the
need for remedial training to compensate for inadequacies in education.
Shared value is not about personal values, nor is it about ‘’sharing’’ the value already created by
firms. Instead, it is about expanding the total pool of economic and social value.
Fair trade is mostly about redistribution rather than expanding the overall amount of value created. A
shared value perspective, instead, focuses on improving growing techniques and strengthening the
local cluster of supporting suppliers and other institutions in order to for example increase farmers’
,efficiency, yields, product quality and sustainability.
While fair trade van increase farmers’ income by 10% to 20%, shared value investments can raise
their incomes by more than 300%.
The concept of shared value can be defined as policies and operating practices that enhance the
competitiveness of a company while simultaneously advancing the economic and social conditions in
the communities in which it operates. Shared value creation focuses on identifying and expanding the
connections between societal and economic progress.
Businesses have rarely approached societal issues from a value perspective but have treated them
as peripheral matters. This has obscured the connections between economic and social concerns.
Societal organizations and government entities often see success solely in terms of the benefits
achieved or the money expended. As governments and NGOs begin to think more in value terms,
their interest in collaborating with businesses will inevitably grow.
At a very basic level, the competitiveness of a company and the health of the communities around it
are closely intertwined. A business needs a successful community, not only to create demand for its
products but also to provide critical public assets and a supportive environment. A community needs
successful businesses to provide jobs and wealth creation opportunities for its citizens
→ Interdependence.
In the old, narrow view of capitalism, business contributes to society by making a profit, which
supports employment, wages, purchases, investments and taxes. Conducting business as usual is
sufficient social benefit. A firm is largely a self-contained entity and social or community issues fall
outside its proper scope.
Facing growing competition and shorter-term performance pressures from shareholders, managers
resorted to waves of restructuring, personnel reductions, and relocation to lower-cost regions, while
leveraging balance sheets to return capital to investors. The results were often commoditization, price
competition, little true innovation, slow organic growth, and no clear competitive advantage.
In this kind of competition, the communities in which companies operate perceive little benefit even as
profits rise.
As firms moved disparate activities to more and more locations, they often lost touch with any
location. Indeed, many companies no longer recognize a home – but see themselves as global
companies.
Strategy theory holds that to be successful, a company must create a distinctive value proposition that
meets the needs of a chosen set of customers. The firm gains competitive advantage from how it
configures the value chain, or the set of activities involved in creating, producing, selling, delivering
and supporting its products or services. For decades businesspeople have studies positioning and the
best way to design activities and integrate them. However, companies have overlooked opportunities
to meet fundamental societal needs and misunderstood how societal harms and weaknesses affect
value chains. Our field of vision has simply been too narrow.
What has been missed, is the profound effect that location can have on productivity and innovation.
The blurring of the boundary between successful for-profits and non-profits is one of the strong signs
that shared value is possible.
By better connecting companies’ success with societal improvement, it opens up many ways to serve
new needs, gain efficiency, create differentiation and expand markets.
The connection between competitive advantage and social issues: consider, for example, what
happens when a firm invests in a wellness program. Society benefits because employees and their
families become healthier, and the firm minimizes employee absences and lost productivity.
, Companies can create economic value by creating societal value. There are three distinct ways to
this. Each of these is part of the virtuous circle of shared value; improving value in one area gives rise
to opportunities in the others. By:
1)Reconceiving products and markets
Society’s needs are huge. In advanced economies, demand for products and services that meet
societal needs is rapidly growing.
Society’s gains are even greater, because businesses will often be far more effective than
governments and nonprofits are at marketing that motivates customers to embrace products and
services that create societal benefits, like healthier food or environmentally friendly products.
Equal or greater opportunities arise from serving disadvantaged communities and developing
countries. Poor urban areas are the most underserved market; their substantial concentrated
purchasing power has often been overlooked. The societal benefits of providing appropriate products
to lower-income and disadvantaged consumers can be profound, while the profits for companies can
be substantial.
Example: in India they developed a program for low income farmers, where they can access weather
and crop-pricing information and get agricultural advice for $5 a quarter.
As capitalism begins to work in poorer communities, new opportunities for economic development and
social progress increase exponentially.
For a company, the starting point for creating this kind of shared value is to identify all the societal
needs, benefits and harms that are or could be embodied in the firm’s products. The opportunities are
not static; they change constantly as technology evolves, economies develop, and societal priorities
shift. An ongoing exploration of societal needs will lead companies to discover new opportunities for
differentiation and repositioning in traditional markets, and to recognize the potential of new markets
they previously overlooked.
Meeting needs in underserved markets often requires redesigned products or different distribution
methods. These requirements can trigger fundamental innovations that also have application in
traditional markets.
2) Redefining productivity in the value chain
The synergy increases when firms approach societal issues from a shared value perspective and
invent new ways of operating to address them. So far, however, few companies have reaped the full
productivity benefits in areas such as health, safety, environmental performance and employee
retention and capability.
The following are some of the most important ways in which shared value thinking is transforming the
value chain:
• Energy use and logistics
The use of energy throughout the value chain is being reexamined, whether it be in processes,
transportation, buildings, supply chains, distribution channels, or supporting services.
The result has been striking improvements in energy utilization through better technology, recycling,
cogeneration and numerous other practices – all of which create shared value.
We are learning that shipping is expensive, not just because of energy costs and emissions but
because it adds time, complexity, inventory costs and management costs.
→ Reduce shipping distances, improve vehicle routing. By reducing its packaging and cutting 100
million miles from the delivery routes of its trucks, Wal-Mart lowered carbon emissions and saved
$200 million in costs.
• Resource use
Heightened environmental awareness and advances in technology are catalyzing new approaches in
areas such as utilization of water, raw material, and packaging, as well as expanding recycling and
reuse.
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