In Managing Corporate Impacts: Co-Creating Value, a recent addition to Cambridge University Press’s Business, Value Creation, and Society series, Jennifer Griffin seeks to push stakeholder theory in a new direction. Starting from the premise that “businesses are in the business of creating mutual benefits that positively impact stakeholders and the firm” (3), Griffin seeks to advance stakeholder theory in two ways: first, by calling for a focus on firms’ impacts on stakeholders; and second, by arguing that firms are most likely to have positive impacts if they work with their stakeholders as partners in value co-creation.

The key insight and challenge to conventional thinking found in Griffin’s book is that corporate social responsibility, as it is commonly practiced, tends to miss what is really important, namely creating real benefits for stakeholders. Means and ends have been confused, Griffin suggests, and she asks firms in Managing Corporate Impacts to not just consider all of their stakeholders but also think through and implement their actions jointly with stakeholders so as to produce positive consequences. This is the focal point for her case to “co-create” value for multiple stakeholders.

Griffin insists that firms take an expansive approach to assessing the impacts of corporate policy and actions on stakeholders. She conceptualizes impacts to include financial impacts (chapter 2), impacts on employees, the impacts of new products (chapter 3), and the impacts of information-sharing activities (chapter 4). In addition, in chapters 5 and 6 Griffin details the many indirect positive and negative impacts of firm activities. Chapter 5 examines financial spillovers, employee and workplace spillovers (e.g., how employee volunteerism benefits communities and other stakeholders), product and service spillovers (e.g., how attention to a customer can lead to new corporate policies that benefit many other customers), and information spillovers (e.g., how beneficial corporate practices undertaken in one community can transfer to other communities). Chapter 6 details firms’ multiplier effects along its value chain as well as across its locations of operation.

In chapters 10 and 11, Griffin describes the initiatives and mechanisms of value co-creation, paying particular attention to how multinationals can create value by simultaneously managing global pressures for efficiency and cost reductions while responding to particular local conditions. She views value co-creation as increasingly important in a world in which societal expectations of business are changing continuously and dramatically (chapter 8).

Griffin recommends her assessment of impacts over two well-known approaches to understanding stakeholder theory. She refers to these as the “issue-by-issue” approach and the “stakeholder-by-stakeholder” approach (chapter 9). She points out that a deficiency of the issues approach is that resolving an issue is no guarantee that value actually has been created for stakeholders; further, she notes, the issues approach can prevent pre-emptive or early action because it requires that a phenomenon first be socially constructed as an “issue” before it can be managed. Griffin also finds the stakeholder approach wanting. She insightfully notes that organizations may miss opportunities for value co-creation when they box actors into particular stakeholder categories and miss the complexity and interrelatedness of their interests.

Managing Corporate Impacts redirects the stakeholder conversation. Griffin persuasively argues that the common practice of stakeholder theory as philanthropy and bilateral transactions with stakeholders is limiting because it misses important value-creation opportunities; her approach is more likely to capture such opportunities because it asks firms to holistically and simultaneously account for all stakeholder’s interests. Griffin stresses that developing a broad understanding of the firm’s impact is not merely an accounting exercise but also pushes managers into a new mindset of co-creation. While considering how the firms’ multiple stakeholders will be influenced by particular actions is itself useful, it is through the bundling of stakeholders’ interests that new value creation opportunities are identified. Thus the impacts approach requires managers to look at their stakeholder networks, not just their stakeholder relationships.

While Managing Corporate Impacts works well as an agenda setting book, it leaves some conceptual and theoretical work for the future. For example, future research will need to articulate the normative foundation of Griffin’s “impacts” approach. Managing Corporate Impacts appears to be based on the assumption that co-creating positive impacts is the right thing for firms to do, but this assumption is never made explicit. The emphasis on co-creating net positive impacts of course suggests a utilitarian approach, but questions remain as to how managers should implement this approach, and whether and how other ethical frameworks come into play. Just how much harm can be inflicted on a particular stakeholder in the name of the common good? Are there particular moral minimums that must be respected even if doing so leads to net loss of value? Griffin addresses these questions when she writes:

Yet while this statement describes an appealing approach to stakeholder management, it does not provide much guidance for making the difficult judgments that the impacts approach, because of its thorough and inclusive consideration of stakeholders’ demands.

While the book’s focus on co-creation is one of its great strengths, this concept too will require researchers’ attention in the future. Griffin supports a core message of her book—that it is “in the meshing of common interests among stakeholders [that] innovation is often sparked” (54-55)—by identifying particular initiatives (functional and cross-functional) and mechanisms (solo and collaborative) of value co-creation; however, the chapter on these is relatively brief. For some time, value co-creation has held a prominent position in management and organization studies. Prahalad and Ramaswamy (Reference Prahalad and Ramaswamy2004) argue that firms should focus on customer experience and co-creating value with customers through dialogue. Van de Ven and colleagues show that firms innovate more successfully when they “run in packs” rather than going it alone (Van de Ven, Polley, Garud, & Venkataraman, 1998); similarly, the open innovation paradigm (Chesbrough, Reference Chesbrough2003) asserts that because of the distributed nature of knowledge, technology firms that collaborate with their customers, developers, and other stakeholders will be more successful in developing new innovations. In general, the quest for competitive advantage has come to be seen as a team sport. Likewise, there is now a voluminous literature on non-market approaches to value co-creation (e.g., public-private partnerships and multi-sector partnerships) in management, public policy and planning, science and technology, and other fields (Brunner, Steelman, Coe-Juell, Cromley, Edwards, & Tucker, Reference Brunner, Steelman, Coe-Juell, Cromley, Edwards and Tucker2005; Innes & Booher, Reference Innes and Booher2010; Koontz, Steelman, Carmin, Korfmacher, Moseley, & Thomas, Reference Koontz, Steelman, Carmin, Korfmacher, Moseley and Thomas2004; Ostrom, Reference Ostrom1990). While Griffin does touch on the collaborative non-market approaches just mentioned, much of the relevant literature on inter-organizational value co-creation is not referred to in the book.

Future research is also needed to solidify other elements of the impacts approach’s theoretical foundation. For example, Griffin’s framework for categorizing impacts (financial, employee- and product-related, and information-related) and spillovers requires justification. The reader may, for example, have difficulty understanding the information-sharing category (which, it would seem, could include all of the other impact categories since they too involve sharing information with stakeholders), and is left wondering why the framework focuses on material impacts but excludes institutional and symbolic ones, such as the corporate influence on public discourse and politics. A clear definition of “impact” near the beginning of the book would address this problem.

These issues aside, Managing Corporate Impacts successfully pushes stakeholder theory forward. In the world of distributed knowledge, radical transparency, and a growing role for business in addressing complex social and environmental problems, Managing Corporate Impacts is a very timely addition. The book instructs that rather than managing issue-by-issue or stakeholder-by-stakeholder, today’s firms must instead consider their impacts on stakeholders broadly and collectively, and treat these stakeholders as partners in value creation. Griffin thereby begins to show us how the “win-wins” that stakeholder theorists have long posited actually are created.