Morality, competition, and the firm : the market failures approach to business ethics /

This volume collects a series of papers and essays on the subject of corporate social responsibility written by Heath (public policy, Univ. of Toronto) over a period of years. The author's approach is a sensible focus on market failure, which comes closer to the mark in explaining violations of explicit and implicit contracts in civil society than any other diagnostic so far. Individual chapters focus on stakeholders, contracts, agency theory, and variants on ethics. Heath provides a lengthy and excellent introduction that, together with the first chapter on market failure, arguably contains the core of the book. Undergraduate and graduate students in business and society courses might be well served by focusing on these two sections of the book; later chapters balance the text by delving further into details for those desiring much greater depth or conducting research on the subject. There is also an outstanding bibliography. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and graduate students. --Ingo Walter, New York University