“Nike boss Phil Knight’s 1994 salary was $1.5 million. On current wages, a young woman in China churning out his shoes would have to work nine hours a day six days a week for 15 centuries to match that.”

“Some 13 years ago, a leak from the Union Carbide plant at Bhopal was responsible for the deaths of 3,800 and injuries of up to half a million.” These examples illustrate the perception that many of us have of the way industrial giants ride roughshod over their employees and the public. As with many of the other case studies in this book, the companies involved believed, initially at least, that they were acting within the law, and were unable to foresee the outcome of their behaviour and the ensuing public relations disasters. So, why do good com-panies do bad things? The authors suggest a number of reasons, such as an excessive focus on financial measures of performance and the ways in which a company’s commitment to a particular project can prevail over all other considerations. Senior managers often consider moral and ethical issues to be someone else’s problems - for instance, those of the World Health Organisation or the United Nations. The authors stress that their focus is not on companies that deliberately evade legislative controls or violate employment laws, but on those that have enjoyed the respect of the public, lost it and are now seeking to re-establish themselves. In this age of globalis-ation, it is important that businesses study these examples and draw appropriate conclusions. The authors describe what can happen if companies fail to do so. This book will appeal to those who need to know what companies are, or ought to be, doing about social responsibility, and who might also wish to know how their own company performs. Ken Burnett Technical services officer CIPS