The Market for Virtue: The Potential and Limits of Corporate Social Responsibility.

The Market for Virtue: The Potential and Limits of Corporate Social Responsibility. By David Vogel. Brookings Institute Press, 222 pages. $28.95.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has made a lot of noise this year, with corporate giants like Ford Motor Co. and General Electric Co. making major announcements about their commitment to the environment. But CSR clearly has a cost that some companies are loath to embrace.

That argument serves as a strong backbone for The Market for Virtue. David Vogel, a professor of business ethics at the University of California, maintains that despite the CSR movement's progress in prodding companies in areas such as labor, human rights and the environment, "CSR's potential to bring about a significant change in corporate behavior is exaggerated."

Why? Simply because business is motivated principally by profit, not by idealism, and the bottom line tends to win out. The result, he writes, is that the business case for CSR is relatively weak, voluntary and market-driven--meaning that companies will get involved in it only to the extent that it makes business sense to do so.

Vogel reminds us that while ecological disasters like the Exxon Valdez spill and the Union Carbide explosion in India in the 1980s had major short-term negative effects on the companies, the public's memory is short. Merck & Co.'s social contributions have been all but ignored amid the current Vioxx controversy, he notes, and "who now remembers which firms stayed in or left South Africa?"--a reference to the agitation over divestiture by companies doing business with the apartheid regime there, agitation that peaked in the 1980s.

This is a smartly written, very thoughtful book that takes a balanced view of a major corporate development and puts its various facets in sharp perspective.