Bridging Morale and Business Through Shared Value?

“Shared value” is the name of a concept that suggests solving the antagonism between social demands for morale in business and private profit maximization – thereby relieving governments to some degree from their social obligations. The basic idea is to produce goods or services under market conditions that offer an extra positive social externality, ideally one that also provides the respective enterprise with a competitive advantage over others. Indeed in practice, one may observe some promising examples that seem to prove the usefulness of the concept. But the general problem remains whether there is really something about it beyond a clever marketing strategy.