The End of the Village: Planning the Urbanization of Rural China

useful in developing stakeholder theory. Stakeholder theory has been criticized for describing every individual and organization as relevant to organizations. However, Smith’s findings indicate that even the stakeholders that have been placed in the periphery remain pertinent. Their identities and agencies are tied to their organizations, and they assume a central role in meeting with clients and interacting with the public. In this sense, stakeholder theory should indeed also consider the stakeholders that are considered to reside at the outskirts of organizational development. Understanding a corporation’s motivation for corporate social responsibility (and whether corporations are capable of being responsible) has been a pursuit of many social scientists. Smith states that corporate responsibility and accountability might be altered with altered agencies of engineers who are constituting these accountabilities (Chapter 7). This understanding enriches the discourse of corporate social responsibility in the social sciences because engineers’ agencies can be construed as one of the motivators for corporations to be more environmentally and socially responsible. In other words, in addition to the motivators for responsible corporations that are discussed in the literature, such as brand image, marketing, and corporate governance, Smith also adds agencies of the stakeholders that constitute accountability to the list. This revised understanding of corporate social responsibility stimulates the audience to appreciate the intricate nature of environmental and social transitions. The book contributes to a number of disciplinary fields, namely environmental studies, science and technology studies, and organization studies, and it also has methodological merit that distinguishes it from other qualitative studies. This interdisciplinary book that promotes complementary and holistic perspectives in understanding societal transitions should be praised for its expansive and valuable data as well as for its perceptive and discerning analysis. The End of the Village: Planning the Urbanization of Rural China, by Nick R. Smith. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. 336 pp. $27.00 paper. ISBN: 9781517910921.