A Macromarketing Response to Crisis – Creating Shared Value for Market Recovery

Abstract

Crises are commonly treated as episodic disruptions that interrupt otherwise stable market processes. This framing casts crises as external shocks and resilience as a technical capacity to absorb and recover from them. In contrast, this paper advances a relational perspective in which crises are understood as intensified manifestations of structural fragility already embedded within market systems. Rather than anomalies, crises render visible the social, moral, and institutional arrangements through which value is routinely produced, maintained, and legitimized. We argue that crises function as relational–moral inflection points in which dominant value regimes are disrupted and renegotiated. This disruption foregrounds the socially constructed character of value and exposes the limitations of firm-centered and harmony-oriented approaches such as Creating Shared Value (CSV), which assume stable conditions, aligned interests, and commensurable values. We extend this critique by proposing a constructionist alternative—Creating–Shared Value (C–SV)—that situates value as plural, contested, and continuously co-constituted through networks of actors, practices, and institutions. To theorize how markets respond under such conditions, we develop a typology of exchange modalities—commodity, barter, gift, mutuality, and sharing—and map these onto different resilience orientations. We show how stabilization, adaptation, and transformation are not discrete outcomes but interrelated moments in the ongoing reconstitution of market order. By reframing crises as constitutive rather than exceptional, and value as relational rather than objective, the paper contributes a systemic account of resilience that foregrounds legitimacy, relational infrastructures, and the moral foundations of exchange in times of disruption.