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We've been meaning to write something on Annie Leonard's "Story of Stuff" online phenomenon for some time. But then we thought: why not give some real "digital natives" the opportunity to express what they think about it? So we set a challenge for a class of undergraduates at Copenhagen Business School who we knew were using our book and were about to watch some of the Story of Stuff content as part of their CSR course. Write us a review, we said, and we'll feature the best one on the Crane and Matten blog. And so here it is - a terrific guest blog from the winner of our challenge, Camilla Marie Thiele , a bachelor’s student at CBS . -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “ The Story of Bottled Water ” presents a narrative of how the bottled water industry came into being by “manufacturing demand” for an unnecessary product through misleading advertisements, and how this product is effectively trashing the plan...

"All I ask for is an unfair advantage.” Reputedly a favourite line of Hank Greenberg, the former Chair and CEO of AIG, it makes for an apposite tagline for a leader forced to resign by his own board as a result of investigations into financial impropiety. The Greenberg investigations were instigated by then New York Attorney General, Eliot Spitzer, who made a habit of making enemies amongst the city's most powerful  corporate leaders during his uncompromising campaign to prosecute corporate misconduct. And as writer and director Alex Gibney argues in Client 9: the Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer it was the foes he created in his day job as much as the night time friends he sought among the high class escort world that ultimately brought him down. Gibney, the oscar winning documentary maker of Taxi to the Dark Side , Casino Jack , and Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room , is no stranger to the twilight morality of big business, and the powerplays of American politics. In C...

We are big fans of the power of film to illuminate business ethics issues, but we don't often discuss the role of fiction.  But that doesn't mean we're not interested in it. And to prove the point, we thought we'd point out that a short story written by Andy has been short-listed for a writing prize, the AnyBook Award , organized by the American Book Centre in Amsterdam. The theme of the competition is Redesign Your World, and Andy's entry " Baby Shopping " is all about the marketization of human reproduction. It doesn't offer any ethical answers or certainties, but uses fiction to explore what happens when the emancipatory forces of choice get the better of ethical considerations ... and the very human problems that ensue. It's all focused around personal relationships rather than abstract ethics, which is where fiction has some obvious obvious advantages over our more usual academic writing. It's not to be taken too seriously, but if you'...

Money. Cash, moolah, dough, readies, greenbacks, dosh. Whatever you call it, you can't get away from it. Most of us like to have it, of course, but we also know that it's a dangerous drug. "Money," as the saying goes, "is the root of all evil." With the financial crisis and executive greed currently giving money a particularly bad name, we were interested to hear of a recent experiment in Amsterdam in the Netherlands which is seeking to provide a new and more positive way of thinking about the value of money. It's called the Bijlmer Euro , named after a much maligned quarter of the city called de Bijlmer which is home to many of Amsterdam's many immigrant communities and a good proportion of its less successful examles of high rise urban planning. The Bijlmer Euro is a local currency, which for those of you that have not come across them before, are specially designed notes or other form of exchange certificate that are used within a specific localit...

This post comes from one of our occasional guest bloggers, Dr Laura Spence,from Royal Holloway, University of London. She's also the unofficial Crane and Matten photographer having been responsible for our latest profile pic to the right, (as well the one it replaced). Thanks Laura! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ While Crane & Matten have been enjoying a well earned break, I had an intriguing and thought-provoking week here in the UK . On Monday I was invited to a talk by Bill and Melinda Gates, the entrepreneur behind Microsoft and his wife. The purpose of their talk was to spread the word on an initiative called the ‘Living Proof project’. They asked the audience to tell the story further, which I am happy to do here. Akthough focusing only on US investments, Living Proof reminds us of the progress that investment in sustainable development has resulted in over recent decades. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have pla...

We don't usually post personal blogs here but given our lack of activity over the past couple of months we figured we had some explaining to do. The fact is we've been neglecting the Crane and Matten blog because, well .... we've been concentrating rather more than usual on Crane and Matten's personal lives. The last two months have seen not just one of us, but both of us getting married.... and not, we should clarify, to each other, nor, in case you were wondering, to the same woman. Hey, we're friends but we're not that friendly. So first Andy got hitched in September (to Daniela) and then Dirk in October (to Deniz). Of course we also had to go to each other's weddings ... and of course neither of us could get married here in Canada because, well, that would have just been too easy. So it has been a hectic time of travelling, planning, celebrating, honeymooning, with a bit of best man speech-writing thrown in for both us. Naturally we mused from time to ti...

Our friend, colleague, and fellow blogger over at the University of Western Ontario, Mike Valente, has just posted a very informed and thought-provoking response to last week's rather incendiary article in the Wall Street Journal about why CSR is misguided . As you'll see from the 200 or so comments on the WSJ comments page , the original piece did not pose a particularly convincing argument, and as far as we're concerned, nor was it a very insightful one either. Over on his Business and Sustainability blog, Mike helpfully provides some good clear analysis of why the author is wrong, some of which we've re-posted  below. Mike also says where he agrees with the article too, but you'll have to go to Mike's original post to read that. We just like the argumentative bits. It's great that Mike took the time to write this reply. When we first read the WSJ piece, Andy's deeply thought through response was, "this is suspiciously crtpyo-Friedmanite - he ...