David Maurrasse with Cynthia Jones (Eds.), A Future for Everyone: Innovative Social Responsibility and Community Partnerships.

David Maurrasse with Cynthia Jones (Eds.), A Future for Everyone: Innovative Social Responsibility and Community Partnerships. New York: Routledge, 2004. $21.95 paperback.

Corporate social responsibility has become a popular concept in business circles. Based on the idea that business corporations should not be guided primarily by the profit motive but by a wider commitment to contribute positively to the well-being of the communities and societies in which they operate. This idea reflects a growing concern about business ethics and the need for corporations to pursue their activities in ways that are respected by consumers and citizens alike. Faced with growing public hostility as a result of recent well-publicized scandals, the business community is increasingly concerned about ethical issues and the need improve its image.

Although the concept of corporate social responsibility is still poorly defined, it is often used to refer to the provision of financial support by commercial firms to charitable organizations and their efforts to link up with the nonprofit sector. This collection of papers provides further insights into how the concepts of corporate social responsibility is currently used. Based on a conference organized by the Center for Innovation in Social Responsibility (CISR) at Columbia University in October 2001, the book contains ten chapters dealing with different aspects of the topic. These are fairly wide-ranging covering issues such as the involvement of corporations in community development, efforts to improve media reporting of social issues, the contribution of corporations to environmental protection, ethical responsibility in the legal profession, the work of Latino non-profits in the United States, and the spending policies of foundations. The book's opening chapter by Jonathan Cohen provides an overview of the field and discusses the different ways in which corporations can promote socially responsible activities and, at the same time, be influenced by governments, nonprofit organizations and international development agencies. In this regard, he pays particular attention to the United Nations Global Compact which was introduced in 1999.

There is much in this book that will be helpful to readers wishing to know how the concept of corporate social responsibility has been interpreted and implemented around the world. However, the book's diverse chapters are not linked together in a coherent way and some seem to be misplaced. For example, chapters dealing with the digital divide, the professional values of lawyers and the future of community-higher education partnerships do not shed much light on the way business firms can, as the editors point out, "give something back to their communities." Nevertheless, the book contributes to the growing literature on corporate social responsibility and should be of interest to both scholars and practitioners in the field of social welfare which has not traditionally shown much interested in the potential contribution of business corporations to community well-being.