Between Enthusiasm and Overkill. Assessing Michael Porter’s Conceptual Management Frame of Creating Shared Value

Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer have been very successful, in terms of impact in the business community, in introducing a new management framework whose programmatic title points to the creation of shared value. However, their impact is due not to the scientific merit of their classic 2011 paper, which is indeed low, as many scholarly commentators have already pointed out. In my paper, I will explain the surprising discrepancy between impact and scientific quality and then draw a lesson from it that we as theoreticians of business ethics may find hard to swallow: modesty in the face of the real conditions of communicative propagation, uptake, and success of conceptual management frames. Alluding to Nelson Goodman, it seems that a good conceptual management frame should provide managers with a new way of symbolic worldmaking; it should help managers with their world disclosure; its bearing is primarily practical. I explain the successful propagation of the CVS notion by reference to a number of factors: (1) a cultural dynamics of fame very similar to the contemporary pop star system, (2) a strategy of reducing complexity by deflecting attention from precursors, (3) entrepreneurial self-promotion, (4) club building mechanisms, (5) tactical devaluation of alternative management frames, (6) the creation of a peer group around a buzzword, (7) the attractiveness of the hip and the en vogue, and finally and most importantly, (8) the strength of a rhetoric that permits us (if we buy this rhetoric) to do two incongruous things at once: understand ourselves as change-agents contributing to nothing less than the glorious reinvention of capitalism, and stay firmly within today’s capitalism’s comfort zone without essentially changing anything. I go on to point out three massive shortcomings of the CSV framework: Its poor axiology, its inability to quantify polyvalues, and its conventional rationality assumptions. In the final part of my paper, I suggest a discourse ethical alternative concerning the really important issue that Porter and Kramer 2011 take as their starting point, namely the problem of a legitimation crisis of present-day capitalism.