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Book Reviews

2008-01-07	Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products The United States is no longer setting the agenda for manufacturers� standards and American consumers are paying the price with their health.
2007-11-05	The Clean Tech Revolution A new book on investing in green technology looks at new and expected developments that hold out promise for big returns over the coming decades.
2007-08-21	World Inc: How the Growing Power of Business is Revolutionizing Profits, People and the Future of Both Author Bruce Piasecki argues that better products will help make a better world as companies face the "S" frontier.
2007-08-03	A Billion Bootstraps: Microcredit, Barefoot Banking and the Business Solution for Ending Poverty Phil Smith and Eric Thurman offer a primer on microcredit for businesspeople who want the best bang for their charitable bucks.
2007-07-13	Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy Author Hazel Henderson's exhaustive survey of the sustainable business landscape serves as a perfect primer on green economics and tracks lesser-known trends and developments.
2007-05-07	Deep Economy: The Wealth Of Communities And The Durable Future Author Bill McKibben's latest book helps lay the groundwork to create a more livable and viable world in which less is actually better.
2007-01-09	Make Poverty Business: Increase Profits and Reduce Risks by Engaging with the Poor The co-authors provide a blueprint for on-the-ground managers of multinational corporations to create sustainable profits and reduce country risk by helping alleviate poverty.
2006-11-20	Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage The plethora of real-life examples of corporate environmental initiatives is where readers will find value in this book from two authors associated with Yale.
2006-09-29	The Business Case for Diversity DiversityInc presents compelling anecdotal evidence supporting the business case for diversity as well as copious empirical evidence, some of which is marred by editorial oversights.
2006-08-04	International Documents on Corporate Responsibility A comprehensive compendium of important codes on corporate social responsibility.
2006-07-13	The Triple Bottom Line: How Today's Best-Run Companies Are Achieving Economic, Social, and Environmental Success--And How You Can Too The book lays out a framework for companies to follow on the path toward integrating the triple bottom line of economic, social, and environmental sustainability.
2006-06-27	Shareholder Participation and the Corporation: A Fresh Inter-disciplinary Approach in Happiness Australian Law Professor James McConvill applies empirical research on happiness to corporations, specifically focusing on the case it makes for shareowner empowerment.
2006-06-07	Managing the Business Case for Sustainability: The Integration of Social, Environmental, and Economic Performance The book presents a wide breadth of academic and practitioner perspectives on corporate social and environmental sustainability.
2006-04-25	Values-Driven Business: How to Change the World, Make Money, and Have Fun The first in the Social Venture Network book series provides loads of anecdotal advice on how to establish a values-driven business, but little on how to retain social responsibility in a buy-out.
2006-03-23	Responsible Investment An impressive and wide-ranging list of contributing writers advance a balance between elucidating the strengths of socially responsible investing while also exposing its weaknesses.
2006-03-01	Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility: Stakeholders in a Global Environment The book maps the landscape of CSR, advocates a strategic approach taking global stakeholders into account, and presents a wealth of case studies to illustrate its points.
2006-02-16	Economic Apartheid in America: A Primer on Economic Inequality & Insecurity The revised and updated edition of this text (originally published in 2000) examines how excessive executive compensation contributes to the widening gulf between rich and poor.
2005-12-22	Megatrends 2010: The Rise of Conscious Capitalism The newest in the Megatrends series advances a framework for conscious capitalism that highlights socially responsible investing.
2005-11-07	The Challenge to Power: Money, Investing, and Democracy John Harrington compiles voluminous evidence to diagnose what ails modern corporatocracy, and prescribes a comprehensive cure with socially responsible investing playing a key role.
2005-10-18	The False Promise of Pay for Performance: Embracing a Positive Model of the Company Executive According to James McConvill, the problem with perverse executive compensation is not managerial power, as an earlier book suggests, but rather the very pay for performance system.
2005-09-27	An Unreasonable Woman: The True Story of Shrimpers, Politicos, Polluters, and the Fight for Seadrift, Texas Shrimper-turned-grassroots environmental activist Diane Wilson transforms her experience fighting corporate toxic emissions into a literary work of art imbued with the rugged beauty of the Texas coast.
2005-08-31	The Market for Virtue: The Potential and Limits of Corporate Social Responsibility David Vogel scrutinizes the business case for CSR and finds no causal link between corporate virtue and profitability, but rather finds a robust niche market for it.
2005-08-04	Profitable Socially Responsible Investing?: An Institutional Investor's Guide An invaluable tool for fiduciaries considering SRI, the book advances original research finding competitive financial performance for positive screening.
2005-06-10	The Next Sustainability Wave: Building Boardroom Buy-In Longtime IBM Canada executive authors a sequel book, adding new sustainability drivers and providing a comprehensive tool for convincing management to consider sustainability.
2005-05-12	The Bhopal Reader: Remembering Twenty Years of the World's Worst Industrial Disaster A collection of primary and secondary sources spanning the twenty-year quest for corporate accountability from Union Carbide and now Dow for the 1984 chemical leak that killed thousands upon thousands.
2005-02-22	Corporations and the Public Interest: Guiding the Invisible Hand Steve Lydenberg eloquently describes corporate social responsibility and socially responsible investment, fields in which he is an expert, and recommends mechanisms to fuel their trajectories.
2005-02-09	Cause for Success: 10 Companies that Put Profits Second and Came in First The profiles present a wealth of information supporting the claim that corporate social responsibility can enhance profitability, but little information critiquing this claim.
2005-01-25	Faith and Fortune: The Quiet Revolution to Reform American Business Fortune magazine writer Marc Gunther documents the growing link between spiritual values, which he defines broadly to include sustainability, and business conduct.
2004-12-21	Capitalism at the Crossroads: The Unlimited Business Opportunities in Solving the World's Most Difficult Problems
2004-11-18	The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits C. K. Prahalad seeks to solve global poverty by turning the bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid from victims of globalization into its beneficiaries through consumerism.
2004-10-14	Book Inspires Symposium on How Governance Codifies Excessive Executive Pay The book is written by Harvard Law Professor Lucian Bebchuk and Berkeley Law Professor Jesse Fried, and the Symposium is hosted by Columbia Law School.
2004-09-08	Corporate Social Opportunity: Seven Steps to Make Corporate Social Responsibility Work for Your Business Book provides extensive real-world examples and hypothetical scenarios to help business people transform corporate responsibility from risks to opportunities.
2004-07-27	Raising the Bar: Creating Value with the United Nations Global Compact Primarily a guidebook for companies to navigate Global Compact participation, the book also reports on a study suggesting a Global Compact market premium.
2004-06-17	Profits With Principles: Seven Strategies for Delivering Value with Values Pertinent case studies that illustrate corporate social responsibility best practice abound in this well-structured and well-written book.
2004-04-09	The Best Business Stories of the Year: 2004 Edition Ethics, disclosure, labor relations, executive compensation, and insider trading are among the topics related to socially responsible investment in this collection of business articles.
2004-02-13	What Matters Most: How a Small Group of Pioneers is Teaching Social Responsibility to Big Business, and Why Big Business is Listening Seventh Generation CEO Jeffrey Hollender relates the historical development of socially responsible business, revealing its interconnections and assessing its pros and cons.
2004-01-22	The Corporate Responsibility Code Book This book is no thriller, but it is indispensable for anyone seeking to grasp the complex landscape of the multitudinous tools that measure corporate social responsibility.
2004-01-14	True to Our Roots: Fermenting a Business Revolution Paul Dolan, president of Fetzer Vineyards, promotes sustainable business practices by relating his personal transformation committing to organic growing practices.
2003-12-31	The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea This new book betrays the promises of its title except in its brevity, according to Peter Kinder, president of KLD Research and Analytics.
2003-12-12	How Does it Pay to Be Green? An empirical study finds a positive relationship between environmental and economic performance when environmental strategies are factored into business decisions.
2003-12-02	The Sustainable Company: How to Create Lasting Value Through Social And Environmental Performance A new book makes the business case as well as the moral case for sustainability through socially and environmentally responsible business practices.
2003-11-04	The Soul of Capitalism: Opening a Path to a Moral Economy William Greider�s new book seeks to explain the contradictions between capitalism and social responsibility, and then seeks to reconcile these differences.
2003-08-10	The Naked Corporation: How the Age of Transparency Will Revolutionize Business In making the business case for corporate transparency, a new book cites studies on the competitive performance of socially responsible investment.
2003-09-23	24 Days: How Two Wall Street Journal Reporters Uncovered the Lies that Destroyed Faith in Corporate America A new book tells the behind-the-scenes story of Enron's demise and the detective work that revealed the chicanery in Enron's corporate practices and culture.
2003-08-29	The Planetary Bargain: Corporate Social Responsibility Matters Author Michael Hopkins' ideas about the global spread of corporate social responsibility are obscured by a lack of precision in revising and updating this book that was originally published five years ago.
2003-07-29	The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century A Yale economist proposes innovative ways to use risk management as a tool to counteract economic inequality and livelihood uncertainties, among other things.
2003-07-02	Summer Reading List, SRI-Style Prominent figures in the socially responsible investing community recommend SRI- and CSR-related books, and as well as some great titles from outside the field.
2003-06-06	Eco-Service Development: Reinventing Supply and Demand in the European Union A new book presents the business case for promoting sustainable development through "eco-services," or the switch from a product-oriented to a service-oriented culture.
2003-05-29	Saving the Corporate Soul & (Who Knows?) Maybe Your Own A new book recommends a series of corporate reforms that mirror those advocated by the corporate social responsibility and socially responsible investment communities.
2003-04-08	Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists A new book identifies what ails capitalism and proposes a panacea.
2003-03-11	Socially Responsible Investment: A Global Revolution A new book is generous in its history of socially responsible investing, but it shortchanges readers with its definition of SRI and its coverage of SRI's globalization.
2003-02-21	Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights A new book by Thom Hartmann states that the nineteenth century Supreme Court case that established corporate personhood did not in fact rule on this issue.
2003-01-09	The Sustainability Advantage In a new book written for corporate senior executives, a former IBM manager systematically quantifies the business case for sustainability.
2002-12-18	Cause Marketing A new look at an increasingly used marketing angle may provide lessons for social investors.
2002-11-13	National Policy Association Book Advocates Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting A new book published by the National Policy Association makes a series of recommendations to promote global corporate social responsibility, among them triple bottom line reporting.
2002-10-11	The SRI Advantage In this important new book, author Peter Camejo makes a case for why socially responsible investing strategies lead to higher returns than non-SRI strategies.
2002-08-07	The Ecology of the New Economy A collection of essays identifies how the new digital economy both upgrades and downgrades the environment without predicting which trend will prevail.
2002-06-28	Rio + 10 Series: Building Partnerships A new book outlines the benefits and challenges of cooperation between the private sector and the United Nations.
2002-05-20	Corporate Irresponsibility George Washington University law professor and corporate governance expert blames immoral corporate behavior on imperative to maximize stockholder profit.
2002-04-11	Investing in Separate Accounts A new book extols the merits of separate accounts, which may represent an attractive alternative to mutual funds for institutional investors and high net-worth individuals.
2002-02-15	Eco-Economy Pioneering environmentalist Lester R. Brown fuses ecological consciousness into economics to create "eco-economy," an economic system that would preserve natural resources while continuing to generate wealth.
2002-01-22	The Divine Right of Capital Marjorie Kelly argues persuasively for the creation of a new corporate structure, one that puts a priority on those that create wealth, not on those that own the company.
2002-01-09	Sustainable Finance and Banking New book methodically argues that finance and banking have a significant role to play in achieving sustainability.
2001-09-28	The Civil Corporation The New Economy brings increased competition, faster dissemination of information and the rise of corporate citizenship.
2001-07-31	The Future of Success The new economy may be offering unprecedented opportunities and choices, but is making it nearly impossible to live a balanced life.
2001-07-25	The New Global Investors Robert Monks calls on institutional investors to exercise their rights as shareowners and hold senior managers accountable for company performance and practices.
2002-06-11	Cradle to Cradle William McDonough and Michael Braungart propose a paradigm shift for how the world views product lifespans, moving from a "cradle-to-grave" mentality where products die in a landfill to a "cradle-to-cradle" mentality where they continue to feed production.
2001-05-30	The Rise of Fiduciary Capitalism The fiduciaries of large institutional investors are finding it is in their interest, as shareowners, to urge corporate social responsibility.
2001-05-14	Sustainable Banking Scholarly collection of perspectives and case studies explores the international financial sector�s role in sustainable development.
2001-03-19	The 50 Best Ethical Stocks for Canadians Investment advisor and corporate social research expert pen book on building a socially responsible investment portfolio of individual stocks.
2001-02-06	Comeback Cities Community development corporations spotlighted in recent book on revitalizing cities.
2001-01-22	Investing With Your Values Thorough handbook on socially responsible investing is revised for the 21st century.
2001-01-04	Socially Responsible Investing Social investment industry pioneer Amy Domini pens a new, comprehensive book on the whys and hows of socially responsible investing.