“Corporate Social Responsibility” is pretty much dead

Not that it ever showed much life. In any case it will only be resurrected if it’s forced on them. I don’t doubt that plenty of business school grads start with some measure of idealism. But current corporate culture gets them ditching that in a hurry.

It’s 15 years since Michael Porter and Mark Kramer galvanised the stodgy world of Corporate Social Responsibility with their report in the Harvard Business Review, ‘Creating Shared Value’, with the not unambitious sub-title of: ‘How to Reinvent Capitalism and Unleash a Wave of Innovation and Growth’...

Nobody talks about Shared Value these days. Back then, the idea that the surplus value created by companies could be shared more equitably between shareholders, employees, suppliers, communities and other stakeholders did indeed present itself as an imaginative way of rescuing capitalism from its own worst tendencies, moving beyond ‘self-defeating trade-offs between business and society’.

Well, yes – depending on how much faith you have in the idea of companies acting voluntarily for the ‘common good’– in the absence of legislation. In retrospect, Porter and Kramer were staggeringly naive in their expectations of the so-called ‘voluntary principle’. - Beyond Nuclear