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STRATEGY AND SOCIETY: THE LINK BETWEEN COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE AND CORPORATE STRATEGY. Michael E. Porter & Mark R. Kramer. The Emergence of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Increasing attention to CSR from governments, activists, media, and others Companies held accountable
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STRATEGY AND SOCIETY: THE LINK BETWEEN COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE AND CORPORATE STRATEGY Michael E. Porter & Mark R. Kramer
The Emergence of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) • Increasing attention to CSR from governments, activists, media, and others • Companies held accountable • 4 prevailing justifications for CSR: • Moral obligation • Sustainability • License to operate • Reputation
Presumption of Conflict • Traditional approaches assume that companies and society are in conflict • Pits business against society • A zero-sum game • This is counterproductive, since the two are interdependent • Companies fail to recognize the importance of CSR in their strategies
Proactive Framework • In the past, CSR was treated more as an unavoidable cost • Better if viewed as a potential competitive advantage • Presents a framework • to identify possible social consequences of action • To discover opportunities to benefit society and themselves • To discover CSR initiatives to address • To find the most effective way to do so
Framework for Strategy and Society • Looking inside out: identify positive and negative social impacts of activities engaged in while doing business • Looking outside in: societal impacts on a corporation’s competitive context and success in what it does • There will be points of intersection where there could be problems and/or where there could be opportunities
Benefits of the Integrative Framework • Identifying the points of intersection • Choosing which social issues to address • Creating a corporate social agenda • “Responsive CSR” • “Strategic CSR” (when CSR is incorporated into strategy) • Creating a social dimension to the value proposition >>such that the value it offers to its customers also has a positive social impact.