My first real contact with construction was 1962 when I ventured onto site for my first summer vacation employment. It was a very different industry then than now. For example there was very little documentation supporting health and safety. This responsibility was left to the companies. Of course all companies and their management knew that it was good to protect the employees and to provide a safe working environment, but it was less formalised and left to the discretion of each company. Sustainability was not an issue, that came much later and the phrase Corporate Social Responsibility had not been invented. Company managers were driven by productivity and cost and this placed a focus on method statements, planning, estimating and cost control. These are still the main drivers of construction managers today but the context in which they deliver their projects on-time and within budget is very different. Today there are many more issues to deal with that are explicitly on their table, issues that previously might only have been implicitly acknowledged.

This book is timed to be in advance of formal legislation relating to Corporate Social Responsibility which will surely strengthen as we evolve. It is similar to Health and Safety which started voluntarily and developed into the legislation we have today. The purpose of this book is largely educational, developing the right attitudes and outlooks to support our modern and more responsible industry. It has taken in an amazing 29 authors to produce this text so the creation of the book itself is a testimony to the management skills of the editors Mike Murray and Andrew Dainty.

In examining the impact of construction on society the contributions in this book include government interventions, human rights, employee rights, community involvement, corruption and environmental damage. The text is in five parts providing the structure for the book these are:

• Evolution of corporate and social responsibility in the construction industry
  This contains three chapters largely tracing development. The author Green argues that even if in the end corporate social responsibility cannot be proven to add to the short term profit then enlightened self interest for the long term should be the guide. This reflects the stage of evolution of the regulatory framework and the accepted practices of today. Randles and Price extend this by calling for a 'social conscience' and for the development of corporate governance incorporating social responsibility as the guide.
• Impact of construction on communities
  Zawdie and Murray comment on the role of construction in the mitigation of poverty and present case studies on post-disaster recovery. They build an argument for sustainable construction within the context in which the development is taking place. Interestingly this is a subject on which I was drafting advice reports on government aid in the 1980s.
  Moodley and Preece argue for 'considerate construction' respecting the local neighbourhood.
• Prevalence and nature of corrupt practices
  Tookey and Chalmers deal with corruption in UK construction, Murray and Meghgi deal with corruption within international engineering - construction projects and Male deals with cartels and the supply chain.
  This is a daunting subject and is closely linked to culture. That is the culture of the industry, the culture of the countries and the culture of the funding and aid agencies. It is noteworthy that the inclusion of 'ethics' in engineering degrees is currently a topic being discussed at influential levels and that ethics seminars are being run as training and development within companies. A seminar I recently attended had the delegates fill out a questionnaire on their company practices and this was used to identify 'unethical behaviour'. The defence of this unethical behaviour was 'but that is normal' and that was a company in a developed economy (NB not the UK)
• Sustainable development
  Sexton, Burnett and Lu map the evolution of sustainable development. Woolley explores how eco-building may impact mainstream construction and Adams, Payne and Watkins describe the social responsibility of UK house building. Woolley is campaigning against the use of the descriptor 'green' without any real sustainable substance. Adams, Payne and Watkins see hope in the development of UK house building where developers are taking a broader view but sometimes tempered by local issues and attitudes.
• International perspectives on corporate and social responsibility in construction.
  This section presents an international overview. Smallwood and Lingard deal with occupational health and safety. Santos and Amiadigi describe corporate social responsibility in the American Continent. Bowen, Edwards and Root deal with corporate social responsibility and public sector procurement in South Africa.
  Rowlinson deals with Hong Kong and Lingard, Blismas and Stewart provide a commentary on Australia.
  Each of these global regions address issues reflecting their own context.

As the editors say this is not a 'how to' book nor does the book offer a set of solutions. The book sets out to explore the issues and the dilemmas faced by construction and the demands of corporate social responsibility. Given that 29 academics have contributed this can be regarded as a major statement of what is important. In this sense it is a campaigning text and the campaign is to promote corporate social responsibility. However it is a text written by academics for academics. The cumulative style of the text is academic i.e. well referenced and presenting the pros and the cons. The wider industry will find it difficult to develop their company policies from this text alone, but It may start them thinking. I provided a copy of the book to the chairman of a major company and asked for his views, sadly he had not been drawn to it through his own activities. He read the title and scanned the introduction, crucially he was interested enough to command one of his staff to draft a summary mapped onto the company's policies and to highlight where their challenges lay. I regard that as a good outcome. The authors should consider a summarised version to send to every company chairman and CEO written in a style to seize their imagination and stir their conscience.

Ronald McCaffer
Loughborough University