Book reviews used to be included at the end of most issues of most academic journals. Indeed, I used to spend a lot of time on seeking out willing and able authors to provide critical reviews of books in the journal that I used to edit. We had some great successe with a good crop of critical essays based on reviewing a book for what the book achieved and for what it did not achieve. This was at a time when the majority of book reviews were nothing more than a flattering summary. I had hoped that book reviewing in our field could become a shining example of worthy critiques. But that labour ceased some years ago. I thought it would be interesting to start to list newly published books in this blog. However, on searching the websites of several journals in the field, I could find almost no book reviews! I shall carry on looking. Has this form of public critique disappeared from construction management?
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Management and Economics in Construction 
Interesting Will. Could it be (a) development of CM has changed from books to Journals for academics, (b )that knowledge transfer is happening somewhere else (Blogs, social media, etc), or (c) we dont have time to read anything else than click baits (which would be awful).
Thanks, Jarkko, for the interesting suggestions. Food for thought, indeed. I am interested in working through this:
(a) For the CM research community to change from books to journals, we would need to be a community so homogenous that we all quietly did the same thing at the same time. Bear in mind that this change, the disappearance of book reviews, is something that has only happened in the last five years. In that time, the number of journals, conferences and books being produced each year has not changed significantly, I think. And when did any group of academics all quietly agree with each other? The whole point of being an academic, surely, is to challenge whatever appears to be conventional wisdom, wherever it appears? Another implication of this (perhaps mischievous) suggestion, is that our outputs are only worthwhile if they contribute to the numerical targets set by our bosses. Management by numbers and management by objectives, and an exclusive focus on outputs; these are ideas that seemed to fall into disrepute 40-50 years ago. But, I guess, higher education management has only just caught up with the 1970s. Modern thinking about management has moved on to more important things as we learned that management by numbers was acceptable for administrative management of some kinds. But academic output is not about numbers.
(b) Social media as predicated on popularity. Academic work is not. Indeed, we are supposed to question conventional wisdom and support the pursuit of new ideas and new knowledge. Sealing ourselves into social media bubbles where we crave ticks and likes is a horrifying thought for any free-thinking individual. Social media as not about knowledge transfer, but about selling advertising channels, where the users have become the commodity. I do not believe that the aspects of social media that enable discussion, debate and knowledge transfer have introduces anything new to our work. We have always been able to talk to people and exchange idea. Academic discourse is, surely, not about becoming popular. Rather the opposite, I would have thought. I am constantly amazed by how much the so-called world-wide web encourages a parochial and local focus in the users of social media! No, I do not believe that it offers us anything other than a minor marketing opportunity for the more serious and challenging stuff of academic life.
(c) Time. Yes, always this has been a problem. There is no more time available to us now than there was available to our ancestors. Time is not the problem; but how we choose to spend it is a problem. How do we prioritize and what do we choose to focus on? I don’t like to blame the passage of time on my inability to do what I know is right. It is too easy to make time the scapegoat. It is awful that we are so tempted by click-bait. I do it a lot, as well. But I cannot blame time itself for my inattentiveness. I like to be distracted; it helps me to see things differently if I follow ideas, one after another, through YouTube or Mendeley or similar. Thankfully, clicking on sensational or curious things is not the only thing I do. But I do think it is valuable.
I think my view academic life is strongly coloured by Edward Shils, in his book, the Calling of Education, which included an essay on “the Academic Ethic”. There is a lot written about the roles and purposes of universities but, I fear, very few in our academic community are even aware of this literature… Instead, they just do what the university bosses tell them. I am worried that we have all become wage slaves.
Anyway, considering all of this, my worry is that book reviews have come to be regarded as worthless because of two sad things. First, many book reviews are merely flattering summaries to be used by publishers for marketing the book. The author gets to flatter a colleague and keep a copy of the book. That is indeed a worthless activity. Second, good book reviews are joy to read when they are based on an honest critique from a clearly established point of view. A good review will include references to other literature to back up points and make connections. It will establish the context of the book and make clear what its contribution is. And to what do we contribute in academic work? I hope that our work is not only evaluated in terms of industrial productivity. I like the idea that all academic outputs are parts of conversations. Any output, whether a lecture, seminar, blog, journal paper, magazine paper, on-line video, even a tweet, may be seen as a contribution to a conversation. Refereeing, reviewing and critiquing are also elements of this conversation. A large part of what we do in academic life is about developing clarity on which conversation we are contributing to. Book reviews are an essential part of this, just as refereeing papers is.
My conclusion from this line of thought is that the market mechanism is tending to dominate the academic mechanism. The focus on making money from our ideas is deflecting us from the very academic discourse that enables the development of these ideas in the first place. We are working in institutions that behave like farmers who simply harvest crops or trees without planting new ones. You can make a lot of money like that in the short term. But in the long term, the project fails. Maybe the loss of book reviews is one of the symptoms of this nuclear winter. What a thought.