Business and Society Review 111:2 235–240
© 2006 Center for Business Ethics at Bentley College. Published by Blackwell Publishing,
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK.
Blackwell Publishing Ltd Oxford, UK BASR Business and Society Review 0045-3609 © 2006 Center for Business Ethics at Bentley College 111 2 Book Review BUSINESS and SOCIETY REVIEW BOOK REVIEW
Book Review:
Corporation, Be Good! The
Story of Corporate Social
Responsibility
(By William C. Frederick, Dog Ear Publishing, 2006)
ANTHONY F. BUONO
C
orporation, Be Good! is a journey through time, an eyewitness,
“I-was-there” story of how the business world discovered,
resisted, and according to its author, ultimately embraced
the ideal of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Defining CSR
in its broadest sense as the ongoing attempt to “find ways to live
peacefully and respectfully with one’s neighbors,” William Frederick
argues that we expect our corporate neighbors, much like we would
the family next door, to be friendly and to treat us with consider-
ation. The resulting “network of neighborly relations” has, over time,
propelled CSR into the limelight, turning it into a significant public
issue as the business world has increasingly found that “profit
making is no stranger to social constraints.”
The volume is a thought-provoking, though at times frustrating
account of the quest to find the “CSR grail.” Each chapter interweaves
an intriguing mix of scholarly insight and personal reflection through
an intimate, reflective subtext as Frederick traces his own search
for the meaning of corporate social responsibility—for the larger
business community and for business schools. Frederick, who is
noted as “one of the founders of the study of corporate social
Reviewer Anthony F. Buono is professor of management and sociology at Bentley College and
Coordinator of the Bentley Alliance for Ethics and Social Responsibility.