We live in a world of competing and sometimes, it seems, increasingly antagonistic values. These values are shaped by a bewildering multitude of experiences, as well as diverse political, religious, ethical and cultural assumptions of how to behave, how to treat others and how we understand what is ârightâ and âwrongâ at the most fundamental level. So, what if anything could we hold on to as common values that might underpin corporate social responsibility (CSR) in an international context? The United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 reflect a worldwide common agenda for sustainable development, built around the painstakingly negotiated shared values of the UN Charter and subsequent efforts to build a peaceful world of mutually respectful coexistence and justice. Each of the UNâs ambitious 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) includes a range of governmental, corporate and personal responsibilities as citizens and specifies a framework for collective action through a Global Partnership. The role of business and the private sector in this partnership is essential, but cannot be untangled or divorced from the actions of political leaders and bodies, the UN system and other international institutions, civil society, indigenous peoples, the scientific and academic communityââand all peopleâ (UN 2015). It is in this spirit that we explore the importance of values in CSR.
In this book, we capture and explore different aspects of value in corporate social responsibility (CSR). This includes the historical development of value in CSR, how value is linked to a positive vision of the future and how it is communicated by a range of private and public organizations to various audiences. The book also contrasts corporate strategic value with cooperative value, and community value. Finally, it explains how leadersâ values can drive responsible business practice and enhance social cohesion, solidarity and resilience in fractured and unequal communities. The book therefore asks the reader to consider what value means in CSR (for business and society, both by drawing from the past and by looking into the future), where it comes from and how it is enacted (organizational legacies or managersâ values) and its purpose (communicative value, co-operation, community). The book also presents CSR as a global project by noting how values are cultural. Understanding value creation or co-creation, value delivery and value measurement in corporate responsibility, and connecting these with corporate and societal values, offers a chance to re-legitimize businesses in their attempts to meet sustainability goals, including those ambitious targets mapped out by the UN.
1.1 Defining Value: An Economic Perspective
Defining value in a way that prioritizes sustainability is both a business opportunity and a challenge. Markets aim to create all sorts of value: economic value, social value, brand value, lifetime value and so on. Some values sit uneasily alongside others.
From the economic reductionism perspective, value might be reduced to cost-benefit calculations (from the era of Fordism) where this means âvalue for moneyâ and the emphasis is on âmore of something for less moneyâ (or less labour). In business studies, especially in marketing, the concept of value is most commonly understood as a subjective measure of the perceived utility of a product or service (Grönroos and Ravald 2011). The economic value offered by firms to society is just one kind of value. Most obviously, value has a more everyday meaning relating to our beliefs about right and wrong, or as it relates to ethics. One of the Oxford Dictionariesâ definitions presents value as âprinciples or standards of behaviour; oneâs judgement of what is important in lifeâ. We see a return to this definition in the consumer as citizen and in CSR. The legitimacy of economic value is that this was what âthe free marketâ promises to consumers and ironically economic value may be easier to justify morally than the marketâs expansion into, or claims around, other value domains.
In terms of who creates (economic) value, the cost-benefit approach invites the view that value is created by an organization, at first through production, and later through marketing and/or branding, that is, brand value or the recognition that value is not (just) in production, but in the symbolic meanings of brands. This is an âinternalâ perspective of value that suggests it is created inside the organization by the actors who assemble it. However, this view has been challenged by the idea of a âvalue systemâ and more recently by the idea of âvalue in useâ and âshared valueâ.
For example, Porterâs (1985) value system theorization recognizes that value is incrementally created through material and immaterial changes. This may be âinternalâ, capturing the different functions of an organization, but it also recognizes external actors or stakeholders. For example, as aluminium is extracted from the ground, then transformed into a statement of design and lifestyle âcoolâ in the form of an iPhone. In other words, the Porterâs approach adopts a macro (i.e., business system) level of analysis of value, as it shows all the activities or operations necessary to transform raw materials into goods/services that are consumed by people. The âvalue systemâ allows an examination of where value is added, where more can be added (or costs reduced) and what sorts of value may be added, and some see it as an important planning tool to meet âsustainable competitive advantageâ (Priem et al. 1997).
Such macro arrangements also have ramifications for marketing practices where consumers are seen as a primary source of value. The turn to the consumer is best captured in ârelationship marketingâ where marketers nurture, expand and exploit what they know about consumers and aim to extract value from âlong-term mutually beneficial relationshipsâ. Alternatively, it can be found in the idea of âcustomer lifetime valueââa prediction of the net profit attributed to entire future relationships with customersâthat recognizes consumers as more valuable than transactions. In recent years, especially in marketing, another target for value has been consumer data. Data is seen as value in itself and is inherently valued by business (e.g., consumer databases or insight, value exchange, integrated campaigns), but raises significant privacy issues about how and whether businesses respect consumers/individualsâ boundaries (see, e.g., Shoshana Zuboffâs 2019, Surveillance Capitalism, a chilling presentation of business models and algorithms underpinning the digital economies). In parallel to âescalating market value and valuesâ, consumers and other stakeholders âlearnâ to be savvy. They seek new values from their engagement with markets and these might be financial, but also result in other demands, that is, ethical business practice.
1.2 Ethical Business Practice, CSR and Value(s)
As ideas about value expand in business contexts, we are naturally drawn back to broader definitions of values. For example, several authors note that Western economies keep perpetuating several values such as individualism, with implications for care and responsibility (Bauman 2013), materialism, with a contested debate about implications for human relationships (Fromm 1976; Illouz 2007; Miller 2008; Molesworth and Grigore 2019) or competitiveness, with implications for identity (Marcuse 1964). The task of businesses might seem to be to persistently create new value, which risks a sort of imperialism where markets seek to capture more and more âvaluesâ in their quest for new value with the implication that all aspects of life become marketized. Similar ideas are captured in Kleinâs (2009) âNo Logoâ, Barberâs (2008) âConsumed: How markets corrupt children, infantilize adults, and swallow citizens wholeâ, Kuttnerâs (1999) âEverything for Sale: The virtues and limits of marketsâ or Sandelâs (2012) âWhat money canât buy: the moral limits of marketsâ where the authors draw attention to the fact that markets erode moral values. Indeed, in an experiment about how people behave when they received financial incentives in a simulated marketplace conducted by researchers at the Universities of Bonn and Bamberg the main result was that: âpeople decide very differently depending on whether they act in markets or outside of markets [âŠ] individually, outside of markets, people have difficulties in killing these mice, they donât want the money. In markets most people actually find it easier to kill the mice even for very small amounts of moneyâ (DW 2013).
Although business might be about the generation of value, ethical issues in business are therefore also tied to the moral values held by individuals and the contexts in which they are situated (Forsyth 1992). This brings us to an alternative way of seeing value: âshared valueâ. Porter and Kramer (2019) suggest that the purpose of organizations needs to be redefined so that there is a focus not just on profit and value for money, but on creating shared value, such that economic value can also create value for society. This view brings together a companyâs success and social progress, opening the possibility of new discourses around new sources of value that can be obtained by connecting business and society. In other words, organizations need to create economic value in a way that also creates value for society. The shared value perspective places CSR at the hearth of business, and Porter and Kramer (2019) see this as âour best chance to legitimize business againâ.
The origins of CSR can be tracked to at least the nineteenth century (religiously motivated) and in a more secular form from the 1920s when Clark mentions that businesses have obligations to society. A decade later, Berle (1932: 1365) suggests that mana...