faulker031

After our article on shared value came out in the California Management Review, and we published our last blog piece summarizing our critique, we've had a lot of response from various academics and practitioners in the corporate responsibility field. In fact, we've probably had more emails, comments and calls on this one article than we've had on anything else we've ever published. It has clearly struck a nerve. In the main, these responses have been very positive, suggesting that a lot of people have just been waiting for an article like this to come out. Here's just a smattering of some of the responses we've received (you can also read the comments to our blog post  for more): "This is a long over due excellent and comprehensive critique on the overly optimistic and shallow CSV framework that doesn't really address the real trade offs required to get to sustainable development." "Good on you for re-framing this topic in a manner that more ...

The idea of "Creating Shared Value" (CSV) popularized by Michael Porter and Mark Kramer in the Harvard Business Review has probably done more to get corporate responsibility issues into the boardroom than anything else written in the last few years. In many respects, that is a good thing. Or at least it is until you start to realize all the big problems that are hidden behind the big ideas of CSV. We've just published (together with Guido Palazzo and Laura Spence) a comprehensive critique of CSV in the California Management Review . The published version features a response from Porter and Kramer and a counter response from us which we think makes for quite enlightening reading (you can also download a free, but slightly different, version of our article but without this dialogue over at SSRN ). Our article sets out four main problems with CSV: 1. It is unoriginal.  Porter and Kramer simply don't acknowledge that there is little new about CSV. People have been writin...