"All large businesses today practice corporate social responsibility (CSR),so Douglas Eichar’s claim that CSR is in retreat appears to contradict our everyday experience. But the kind of CSR that exists today is significantly different from previous versions. U.S. corporations now spend more than ever on education, health, and infrastructure programs in developing countries, and they take their environmental responsibilities more seriously. But large corporations do not deploy their resources to raise the living standards and security of American workers. Instead, large businesses treat labor as a commodity, just one of the costs that businesses feel they must control. Today, raising wages and offering job security provoke strong resistance from shareholders and disapproval from the business press. [...] Eichar argues that CSR, or what he terms “voluntary responsibility,” has always been the weakest pillar in a tripartite structure that also includes “mandated responsibility” (government regulations) and “negotiated responsibility” (labor unions). Together, these three pillars constrain what corporations can do. Eichar makes no secret of the fact that he distrusts CSR. [...] To understand fully the dialectic between capitalists/managers and reformers requires knowing the history of how the corporation has evolved since the late nineteenth century—and so, Eichar devotes much of this volume to some well-trodden historical material. This is frustrating for historians who already know the broad outlines of the history of big business, but it is helpful for the vast majority of the book’s potential readership.

"I believe Douglas Eichar’s The Rise and Fall of Corporate Social Responsibility fills two important gaps in the current literature. First, CSR research is dominated by studies from the business and management field that focus on the relationship between firms’ CSR practices and their financial performance. In this firm-centric framework, CSR is seen as a property of the firm with little analysis of the broader political and economic environment that could ostensibly shape the practice of CSR. Second, while sociologists and other social scientists have increasingly turned their attention to the CSR phenomenon with analyses at the meso (field) level, they have nonetheless paid less attention to casting CSR in its macro context. In light of these observations, Eichar’s excellent treatment of the rise and decline of corporate social responsibility puts the study of CSR squarely in the context of its political economy, conventionally understood as how private actors act in relation to the state, with its mandates on corporate behavior, and non-state actors, who negotiate with corporations on specific business practices. [...] The main arc of Eichar’s argument, in lightof these developments, is threefold. First, the consolidation of the large corporation and the continued concentration of corporate power in America allowed big business to largely resist government efforts to mandate more socially responsible corporate behavior, although corporations reluctantly negotiated with collective bargaining efforts to prevent entrenched opposition from labor unions. Second, CSR had reached a peak in the 1970s, when the regulatory structure of the United States strongly facilitated mandated and negotiated forms of CSR through strong labor unions and pressure from other non-state actors. Third, in the following decades, mandated and negotiated CSR weakened considerably as corporations maintained their dominance vis-a`-vis the government, while unions diminished in their bargaining power. This left voluntary CSR as the primary channel through which corporations engaged with the wider society, although this voluntary channel was and remains largely discretionary. [...] Although Eichar’s macro approach has much to recommend it, however, the exclusive focus on the United States downplays the fact that the CSR movement is a truly global phenomenon."

"This book brings to mind the following question: What would happen if, rather than engage in “corporate social responsibility”, companies merely paid their fair share of taxes? [...] The book concentrates on the United States, but many of its lessons could equally apply across the developed world. Of interest to industrial relations aficionados is the fact that Eichar expands the definition of corporate social responsibility to include, not only traditional corporate largesse to charities and communities, but also treatment of their own employees. Thus, we have a useful review of employee relations in the pre-Fordist, Fordist and post-Fordist periods. We get a very useful aidememoire of welfare capitalism, both inside and outside the corporate workplaces. The book’s central thesis is that corporate social responsibility, especially in the United States, has always been a tradeoff against the threat of state regulation. Rather than accept laws specifying controls on pollution, labour relations, consumer protection and other externalities, American corporations and their public relations touts, lawyers and lobbyists have promised voluntarism and self-regulation. [...] The author traces the ebbs and flow of this voluntary regulation regime. [...] The book’s exclusive concentration on the United States and its implicit assumption that the rest of the world is a mere replica is an irritant. Without engaging in an entirely new study, the author could have paid a little attention to the situation elsewhere. Even a tip of the hat to the 'varieties of capitalism' literature would have been appreciated."