Business Sociology

Following Overwhelmed, Brigid Schulte’s groundbreaking examination of time management and stress, the prizewinning journalist now turns her attention to the greatest culprit in America’s quality-of-life crisis: the way our economy and culture conceive of work. Americans across all demographics, industries, and socioeconomic levels report exhaustion, burnout, and the wish for more meaningful lives. This full-system failure in our structure of work affects everything from gender inequality to domestic stability, and it even shortens our lifespans.

American opportunity is not dead. Best-selling author and entrepreneur John Hope Bryant outlines the mindset and practices that will allow us to achieve the American dream, no matter what our current circumstances are. Using the inspiring story of his own rise from humble beginnings and that of his parents and grandparents, Bryant shows how individually we can change our mindset from survivor to thriver to winner and move beyond just getting by or being financially independent to becoming wildly successful. Collectively, we need to become a nation of winners once again.

Our planet is suffering from serious environmental problems: coastal flooding due to severe storms caused in part by atmospheric pollution, diminishing natural resources such as clean water, and so on. But while these problems plague planet Earth, two-thirds of our globe is ocean. The seas can be home to pioneers, seasteaders, who are willing to homestead the Blue Frontier. Oil platforms and cruise ships already inhabit the waters; now it's time to take the next step to full-fledged ocean civilizations.

During the Roaring Twenties, two of the most revered and influential men in American business proposed to transform one of the country’s poorest regions into a dream technological metropolis, a shining paradise of small farms, giant factories, and sparkling laboratories. Henry Ford and Thomas Edison’s “Detroit of the South” would be 10 times the size of Manhattan, powered by renewable energy, and free of air pollution. And it would reshape American society.

Are you above average? Is your child an A student? Is your employee an introvert or an extrovert? Every day we are measured against the yardstick of averages, judged according to how close we come to it or how far we deviate from it. The assumption that metrics comparing us to an average—like GPAs, personality test results, and performance review ratings—reveal something meaningful about our potential is so ingrained in our consciousness that we don't even question it. That assumption, says Harvard's Todd Rose, is spectacularly—and scientifically—wrong.

Tribalism is our most misunderstood buzzword. We’ve all heard pundits bemoan its rise, and it’s been blamed for everything from political polarization to workplace discrimination. But as acclaimed cultural psychologist and Columbia professor Michael Morris argues, our tribal instincts are humanity’s secret weapon. Ours is the only species that lives in tribes: groups glued together by their distinctive cultures that can grow to a scale far beyond clans and bands. Morris argues that our psychology is wired by evolution in three distinctive ways.

Why can salamanders grow new legs, and young children grow new fingertips, but adult humans can't regenerate? What is the electricity that flows through the human body? Is it the same thing that the Chinese call Qi? If so, what does Chinese medicine know that Western medicine ignores? Dan Keown's highly accessible, witty, and original book shows how Western medicine validates the theories of Chinese medicine and how Chinese medicine explains the mysteries of the body that Western medicine largely ignores.

According to the Leisure Studies Department at the University of Iowa, true leisure is “that place in which we realize our humanity.” If that’s true, argues Brigid Schulte, then we're doing dangerously little realizing of our humanity. In Overwhelmed, Schulte, a staff writer for The Washington Post, asks: Are our brains, our partners, our culture, and our bosses making it impossible for us to experience anything but “contaminated time”?

As a celebrated cultural critic and a writer for national publications like The Atlantic and Harper's, Alan Jacobs has spent his adult life belonging to communities that often clash in America's culture wars. And in his years of confronting the big issues that divide us - political, social, religious - Jacobs has learned that many of our fiercest disputes occur not because we're doomed to be divided, but because the people involved simply aren't thinking.

To a degree both engrossing and alarming, the story of fast food is the story of postwar America. Fast Food Nation is a groundbreaking work of investigation and cultural history that may change the way America thinks about the way it eats.

Organized around a simple metaphor of a dipper and a bucket - already familiar to thousands of people - How Full Is Your Bucket? shows how even the smallest interactions we have with others every day profoundly affect our relationships, productivity, health and longevity. Coauthor Donald O. Clifton studied the effects of positive and negative emotions for half a century, and he and his colleagues interviewed millions of people around the world.

If you're like most people, you think that your choices and behaviors are driven by your individual personal tastes and opinions. You wear a certain jacket because you like the way it looks. You picked a particular career because you found it interesting. The notion that our choices are driven by our own personal thoughts and opinions is patently obvious. Right? Wrong. Without our realizing it, other people's behavior has a huge influence on everything we do at every moment of our lives, from the mundane to the momentous occasion.

About 50km outside of Cape Town lies the beautiful town of Stellenbosch, nestled against vineyards and blue mountains that stretch to the sky. Here reside some of South Africa’s wealthiest individuals: all male, all Afrikaans - and all stinking rich. Johann Rupert, Jannie Mouton, Markus Jooste and Christo Weise, to name a few. Julius Malema refers to them scathingly as ‘The Stellenbosch Mafia’, the very worst example of white monopoly capital. But who really are these mega-wealthy individuals, and what influence do they exert?

Hailed by Time as one of the world's hundred most influential people, Jeffrey D. Sachs is renowned for his work around the globe advising economies in crisis. Now a classic of its genre, The End of Poverty distills more than 30 years of experience to offer a uniquely informed vision of the steps that can transform impoverished countries into prosperous ones. Sachs lays out a clear conceptual map of the world economy. In this 10th anniversary edition, Sachs presents an extensive new foreword assessing the progress of the past decade.

Why is the Mona Lisa the most famous painting in the world? Why did Facebook succeed when other social networking sites failed? Did the surge in Iraq really lead to less violence? How much can CEO’s impact the performance of their companies? And does higher pay incentivize people to work hard? If you think the answers to these questions are a matter of common sense, think again.

It may be taboo to say, but some groups in America do better than others. Mormons have recently risen to astonishing business success. Cubans in Miami climbed from poverty to prosperity in a generation. Nigerians earn doctorates at stunningly high rates. Indian and Chinese Americans have much higher incomes than other Americans; Jews may have the highest of all. Why do some groups rise? Drawing on groundbreaking original research and startling statistics, The Triple Package uncovers the secret to their success.

This reissue of Thomas Sowell’s classic study of decision making, which includes a preface by the author, updates his seminal work in the context of The Vision of the Anointed. Sowell, one of America’s most celebrated public intellectuals, describes in concrete detail how knowledge is shared and disseminated throughout modern society. He warns that society suffers from an ever-widening gap between firsthand knowledge and decision making—a gap that threatens not only our economic and political efficiency but our very freedom.

Once the poster girl for doing it all, after she had her first child, Tiffany Dufu struggled to accomplish everything she thought she needed to in order to succeed. Like so many driven and talented women who have been brought up to believe that to have it all, they must do it all, Dufu began to feel that achieving her career and personal goals was an impossibility. Eventually, she discovered the solution: letting go. In Drop the Ball, Dufu recounts how she learned to reevaluate expectations, shrink her to-do list, and meaningfully engage the assistance of others.

Every day, we make decisions on topics ranging from personal investments to schools for our children to the meals we eat to the causes we champion. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. The reason, the authors explain, is that, being human, we are all susceptible to various biases that can lead us to blunder. Our mistakes can make us poor and unhealthy. We often make bad decisions about education, personal finance, health care, family, and the environment.

In her refreshing and forthright voice, Anne-Marie Slaughter returns with her vision for what true equality between men and women really means and how we can get there. She uncovers the missing piece of the puzzle, presenting a new focus that can reunite the women's movement and provide a common banner under which both men and women can advance and thrive.