Porter and Kramer CSR Framework

I'm a big fan of Michael Porter's, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that an article (.pdf) about the framework devised by him and Mark Kramer to re-examine Corporate Social Responsibility was granted the 2006 McKinsey Award by Harvard Business Review.

The fundamentally new part of this article is the explicit comment that the need is to change the adversarial relationship between business and society into a collaborative one; the authors review current approaches and offer commentary about their framework.

I actually feel this framework doesn't go quite far enough -- though I haven't talked to either of the authors so this may be simply because of the article scope -- but it *seems* that they're saying that there needs to be collaboration across the boundary or in the interface between firm and non-firm.  In contrast, I'm saying that the concept of externalities is outmoded now that we can model complex systems, and a new model needs to be developed that treats firms, community groups, etc. -- down to the individual level -- as actors in a larger topology.

Comments

[John T. Maloney]

Hi -- Right on. What you a speaking about is a complexity principle ca value networks. See: http://www.vncluster.com/VNVAC.htm (BTW, Clusters are from MP original work.) -j