Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate Social Responsibility Paper

Corporate social responsibility, CSR, has three major trends. Shared Value, conscious capitalism, and social business, make up these trends. Throughout this paper, I will be discussing these major trends and demonstrating how different businesses embody them. These major trends don’t always work together. However, many businesses demonstrate one or two of these trends.

In today’s world, corporate social responsibility is something that every business should make a great effort to incorporate into their business model. This is important because corporate social responsibility is how businesses are affecting society. CSR is a way for businesses to have some accountability in making sure their products or services do not impact the environment or community in a negative way. Throughout the next few pages, I will give examples of companies in our current society and prove how these companies are applying these trends to their business model.

Shared value is the first trend of CSR. Shared value was introduced in a Harvard Business Review article. Strategy & Society: The link between Competitive Advantage and Corporate Social Responsibility was published in late 2006 by Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer. Both Kramer and Porter helped spread the word about shared value and revealed how it works and why shared value was a necessary component to society. Porter is considered to be the front-runner on competitive strategy and is the chair at the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at Harvard Business School.

Shared value creates value for the economy while creating value for society at the same time. In the Harvard Business review article, Porter states, “leaders in both business and civil society have focused too much on the friction between them and not enough on the points of intersection. The mutual dependence of corporations and society implies that both business decisions and social policies must follow the...