Authored by an academic psychologist, this matter-of-fact colorless volume can help educators assess recent research in this incredibly broad topic, advise workers how to deal with its implications and weigh direct involvement themselves in ways of increasing honesty and decreasing dishonesty by changing people, situations, or both.

To this reviewer's astonishment and outrage, however, labor unions receive no mention whatsoever, a peculiar form of intellectual dishonesty that robs the volume of considerable merit.

Labor's part is ignored, for example, in helping to get the 1988 Employee Polygraph Protection act. No mention is made of labor's major role in shaping drug testing policies and practices. Unions are conspicuous by their absence from the volume's closing discussion of "Individuals and Groups Responsible for Encouraging Honesty," and, are entirely absent from the volume's index.

Honestly now, what Jack Barbash called "shop floor democracy" and Richard B. Freeman and James L. Medoff call the "voice" role of local unions would seem fairly relevant to a thorough discussion of the book's topic: Guess not.

This puzzling blindspot of the author to one side, the book otherwise offers a competent overview of such topics as types of dishonesty, corporate corruption and white-collar crime, whistle-blowing, methods of detection, methods of control, business ethics and structural approaches to increasing honesty.

Especially meritorious is the author's utilization of nearly 500 research reports, his openness to unorthodox thinking (such as the contention that a little dishonesty is good for an organization), and his cautiously upbeat conclusion: "It may be that in organizations of the future, honesty will be easier to achieve and sustain."

Perhaps, especially if we get alot more honest about the significance here of nearly 50,000 worksite locals for over 16 million working men and women in the nation's labor movement.

Honesty in the Workplace. Kevin R. Murphy. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole, 1993, 241.pp. paper.