Sociology and Culture
Societies and the way people live in them: class, race, gender, cities, media, inequality, anthropology and social criticism. Read by anyone trying to understand a group larger than a family and smaller than a nation.
672 books
Books 672
Gustave Le Bon · 1895 · The founding study of crowd psychology behind every mania
Eric Hoffer · 1951 · Mass movements and the psychology of the true believer
Jane Jacobs · 1961 · Still the founding text on how urban value is actually created.
Everett M. Rogers · 1962 · The adoption curve everyone else borrows from.
Donald Horne · 1964 · The complacency critique that named the national economic problem.
Neil Postman · 1985 · Television as a medium that reshapes public discourse into entertainment
Hernando de Soto · 1989 · Field measurement of Lima's informal economy and the cost of legality; the founding text.
Nicholas Pileggi · 1995 · The skim era and the Teamsters pension-fund financing of Las Vegas.
James C. Scott · 1998
Eric Schlosser · 2001 · The industry critique that made McDonald's its central case.
Natasha Dow Schüll · 2012 · Slot machine design as engineered time-on-device.
Tim Wu · 2016 · Two centuries of harvesting and reselling human attention.
Beth Macy · 2018 · The epidemic from Appalachia upward; basis for the series.
Joseph Campbell · 1949 · The monomyth; why the same story shape persuades across cultures
Frederick Lewis Allen · 1952 · How American life and incomes changed between 1900 and 1950
William H. Whyte · 1956 · What the corporation did to the people inside it, written at its peak.
Polly Hill · 1963 · Classic fieldwork proving African farmers were rational capitalist investors.
Jane Jacobs · 1969 · Cities rather than nations as the unit of economic growth.
Peter C. Newman · 1975 · The founding map of who owns Canadian business.
Ezra F. Vogel · 1979 · The high-water mark of Western awe, useful now as a study in extrapolation.
Kenneth T. Jackson · 1985 · Suburbanization of the United States; the standard history.
Simon Schama · 1987 · The culture of a society that got rich first and was uneasy about it.
William Foote Whyte, Kathleen King Whyte · 1988 · The Basque cooperative group studied as an actual operating model.
William Serrin · 1992 · A century of the town Carnegie built and broke.
Timur Kuran · 1995 · Preference falsification: why opinion cascades and regimes collapse suddenly
Samuel P. Huntington · 1996 · Cultural blocs as the organising frame of post-Cold War conflict
Katherine Verdery · 1996 · Written from Romanian fieldwork; how the planned economy behaved in practice.
Gil Eyal, Iván Szelényi, Eleanor Townsley · 1998 · Who ended up owning Central European assets when there were no owners.
T2 No Logo
Naomi Klein · 1999 · The anti-sweatshop campaign that reshaped Nike's supply chain.
Manuel Castells, Pekka Himanen · 2002 · The Finnish model: how a welfare state produced a technology cluster.
Barry Meier · 2003 · The first book to expose OxyContin marketing; reissued 2018.
Laurence J. Kotlikoff, Scott Burns · 2004 · The fiscal arithmetic of unfunded old-age promises.
William Langewiesche · 2004 · Flags of convenience and the legal nowhere that ships are owned in.
Steven Weber · 2004 · Political economy of production without conventional property.
Edward Jay Epstein · 2005 · Where studio money actually comes from, line by line.
Pietra Rivoli · 2005 · One garment traced through every outsourced link in its chain.
Thomas L. Friedman · 2005 · The popular account of offshoring and supply-chaining as business models.
T2 Gomorrah
Roberto Saviano · 2006 · Organised crime as an actual industrial and logistics business.
Charles Fishman · 2006 · How the buying power reshapes suppliers, prices and wages.
Joe Studwell · 2007 · Places Li inside the Hong Kong and Southeast Asian tycoon system.
Dana Thomas · 2007 · The best-known account of LVMH-led mass luxury and outsourcing.
Edward Luce · 2007 · The political economy behind the growth story, by an FT Delhi bureau chief.
Allan M. Brandt · 2007 · The regulatory and litigation environment that set what the tobacco assets were worth.
Sarah Thornton · 2008 · Ethnography of auctions, fairs and studios.
T2 Soccernomics
Simon Kuper, Stefan Szymanski · 2009 · Why football clubs are poor businesses but resilient assets.
Adam Hanieh · 2011 · How Gulf merchant families became regional capital, and where they invest.
Bill Emmott · 2012 · The two Italies framing: competitive exporters against captured incumbents.
Enrico Moretti · 2012 · Why a few metropolitan areas capture most of the gains.
Michael Moss · 2013 · Industry-wide, with Nestlé among the main companies examined.
Joseph R. Blasi, Richard B. Freeman, Douglas L. Kruse · 2013 · The long American history of profit-sharing and broad-based ownership.
Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen · 2013
David Pilling · 2014 · Japan as the working example of a shrinking, ageing economy.
Sven Beckert · 2014 · One commodity chain as the whole story of industrial capitalism.
Sam Quinones · 2015 · The demand side of the OxyContin market.
Vicki Howard · 2015 · The rise and fall of the American department store, Sears throughout.
Stephen Witt · 2015 · How the MP3 destroyed recorded-music revenue and set up the streaming rebuild.
Gillian Tett · 2015 · How organisational silos hide risk; an anthropologist inside banks
Alex Cuadros · 2016 · Eike Batista and the plutocracy: how Brazilian fortunes are made and unmade.
T2 Narconomics
Tom Wainwright · 2016 · The cartels analysed as firms: supply chains, franchising, HR.
Lynda Gratton, Andrew Scott · 2016 · What longer lives do to savings, work and the products people buy.
Richard Rothstein · 2017 · How federal housing policy engineered segregation.
Zeynep Tufekci · 2017 · Why the platform mattered politically, and what that cost it.
T2 Factfulness
Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Ronnlund · 2018 · Global development data set against intuition; the outside view applied
T2 Moneyland
Oliver Bullough · 2018 · How the pieces assemble: Nevis trusts, BVI companies, London property, Caribbean passports.
Shoshana Zuboff · 2018 · Behavioural data as the raw material of the ad model.
James Crabtree · 2018 · Crony capitalism, promoter leverage and the bad-loan crisis.
T2 The Club
Joshua Robinson, Jonathan Clegg · 2018 · How the Premier League turned clubs into globally traded media assets.
Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt · 2018 · Applies antifragility to universities; safety culture as manufactured fragility
Anand Giridharadas · 2018 · The strongest popular case that market-led do-gooding entrenches the status quo.
T2 Empty Planet
Darrell Bricker, John Ibbitson · 2019 · The argument that global population peaks sooner than the UN projects.
T2 Ghost Work
Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri · 2019 · The hidden on-demand labour that makes automated services work.
T2 Rockonomics
Alan B. Krueger · 2019 · An economist on superstar effects and the economics of the music industry.
Ian Urbina · 2019 · Flags of convenience, crew abuse and jurisdictional voids at sea.
Marcia Chatelain · 2020 · Pulitzer-winning history of McDonald's franchising in Black America.
Charles Goodhart, Manoj Pradhan · 2020 · Argues ageing turns from disinflationary to inflationary; the key macro claim.
Christopher Mims · 2021 · One item followed through the modern JIT supply chain end to end.
T2 Fulfillment
Alec MacGillis · 2021 · What Amazon did to American places; the cost side of the model.
Kristen R. Ghodsee, Mitchell Orenstein · 2021 · The evidence on who actually gained and lost from the transition.
T2 Cobalt Red
Siddharth Kara · 2022 · Artisanal cobalt mining in the DRC and the battery supply chain.
Gretchen Morgenson, Joshua Rosner · 2023 · Case studies of extraction from acquired companies.
Peter S. Goodman · 2024 · The pandemic freight squeeze traced through the whole chain.
Steven Pinker · 2025 · Common knowledge as the hidden coordination mechanism in social life
Peter Laslett · 1965 · Pre-industrial English society before wage labour and cities
Mahathir bin Mohamad · 1970 · Insider primary source: the argument that became the New Economic Policy and Bumiputera quotas.
Andrew Tobias · 1982 · Consumer-side account of how insurers make money.
Stephen Butterfield · 1985 · A former distributor on the ideology that sustains recruitment.
Gwendolyn Mikell · 1989 · How marketing-board pricing destroyed the country's main export industry.
George Ritzer · 1993 · The standardisation model that made the chain scalable.
William Roseberry, Lowell Gudmundson, Mario Samper Kutschbach · 1995 · Comparative coffee political economy; sets Colombia's growers' federation in context.
Sterling Seagrave · 1995 · Overseas-Chinese business networks; the milieu in which Li's empire grew.
John Hooper · 1995 · The standard survey of post-Franco institutions and business culture.
Robert L. FitzPatrick, Joyce K. Reynolds · 1996 · The first sustained critical analysis of MLM compensation arithmetic.
James L. Watson · 1997 · Edited fieldwork on how the format was localised across Asia.
Michael Backman · 1999 · Written straight after the 1997 crisis on opacity, related-party dealing and family control.
T3 Luxury Fever
Robert H. Frank · 1999 · The economics of positional goods and status competition.
Teri Agins · 1999 · How fashion became a branded consumer-goods business.
Nancy Martha West · 2000 · How Kodak's advertising taught Americans what to photograph.
Jeremy Rifkin · 2000 · Early and prescient case that access would displace ownership.
Arthur Herman · 2001 · Scottish Enlightenment as the source of modern commercial and economic thinking
Timothy Mitchell · 2002 · Heavy going, but the sharpest account of how land, capital and expertise were arranged.
Arang Keshavarzian · 2003 · How informal credit, trust networks and trade finance work when the banking system does not.
Joseph R. Blasi, Douglas L. Kruse, Aaron Bernstein · 2003 · Broad-based stock options and what they did to company performance.
Tobias Jones · 2003 · Courts, bureaucracy and why contracts are slow to enforce.
Katherine Verdery · 2003 · Land restitution in Transylvania; a case study in manufacturing property rights.
T3 Fewer
Ben J. Wattenberg · 2004 · Early statement that the population problem had reversed direction.
Steven Heydemann · 2004 · Why economic liberalisation reorganised privilege rather than removing it.
Corey Rosen, John Case, Martin Staubus · 2005 · The NCEO's evidence on when shared ownership raises performance.
Philip Augar · 2005 · How the integrated investment bank extracts its economics from clients.
Carol Off · 2006 · Cocoa supply chain and child labour behind confectionery majors.
Anthony Bianco · 2006 · Business-press account of supplier and wage pressure.
Nelson Lichtenstein · 2006 · Edited volume on the supply chain and logistics model.
Jon Elster · 2007 · Elster on mechanisms rather than laws in the social sciences
Christopher M. Davidson · 2008 · The emirate's development model and its structural dependencies.
Sudhir Venkatesh · 2008 · Sociologist embedded with a gang; an informal economy's incentive structure
Ellen Ruppel Shell · 2009 · The externalities of the discount model.
T3 Dead Aid
Dambisa Moyo · 2009 · Polemical, but the case for bond-market financing over aid is argued in investor terms.
Bryant Simon · 2009 · Cultural historian on what the brand actually sells.
Robert Lacey · 2009 · The sequel covering the religious backlash and reform attempts.
Jane Hardy · 2009 · Foreign investment, labour and the costs of the transition, told critically.
Nelson Lichtenstein · 2009 · Labor historian on Walmart as a new template for capitalism.
Bethany Moreton · 2009 · How the company's culture and labour model were actually built.
Matt Cooper · 2009 · The developer-banker-politician network that inflated the property bubble.
T3 Arrival City
Doug Saunders · 2010 · Migration into the world's fastest-growing urban peripheries.
Peter H. Gleick · 2010 · The water business that became a core Nestle division.
Syed Ali · 2010 · Migrant labour, property speculation and the social structure underneath the boom.
John Restakis · 2010 · The global co-operative sector and how member ownership works.
Ted C. Fishman · 2010 · Ageing as a global economic and political force, country by country.
Bill Hayton · 2010 · The standard account of Party control, state firms and the doi moi business environment.
Ahmed Kanna · 2011 · The emirate governed explicitly as a firm, and what that means for investors.
David Roodman · 2011 · Sceptical audit of what microfinance evidence actually supports.
Robert N. Proctor · 2011 · Built from the industry's own litigation document archive.
Daniel Tudor · 2012 · The society and politics a foreign investor in Samsung is buying into.
Malcolm Gladwell · 2013 · Gladwell on underdogs and mistaken assumptions about advantage
Moises Naim · 2013 · Why incumbent power in states, firms and armies now erodes faster
Jonathan V. Last · 2013 · Fertility decline argued as an economic rather than a moral problem.
Jessica Gordon Nembhard · 2014 · African American co-operative economics, a history largely written out.
Chris Taylor · 2014 · Merchandising rights outgrowing the films that created them.
Elizabeth Pisani · 2014 · The archipelago's decentralisation and what it means for doing business.
Zeynep Ton · 2014 · Why Costco, Trader Joe's and QuikTrip pay more and still undercut rivals.
Kate Kelly · 2014 · Commodity desks at banks and funds after the 2008 boom.
Jeremy Seabrook · 2014 · Dhaka's garment industry from Rana Plaza back through its supply chain.
Edward Tse · 2015 · How Chinese private champions including Alibaba actually built scale.
Linsey McGoey · 2015 · Academic critique of Gates Foundation philanthrocapitalism.
James Angelos · 2015 · Reportage on tax evasion, disability fraud and the informal economy behind the headline numbers.
Tom Slee · 2015 · The critical case: platform power, housing supply and regulatory arbitrage.
Brooke Harrington · 2016 · The author trained as a wealth manager; the best account of the professionals who build the structures.
Farah Al-Nakib · 2016 · Oil urbanism and how land distribution created the domestic merchant fortune.
Michael D. Smith, Rahul Telang · 2016 · Data economics of the shift from studios to streamers.
Diane Mulcahy · 2016 · The worker's-side manual; useful on how the platforms price labour.
Arun Sundararajan · 2016 · Economics of trust and matching that make marketplaces like Airbnb work.
Pasuk Phongpaichit, Chris Baker · 2016 · Concentration of wealth, land and market power among a few families.
Michael Vatikiotis · 2017 · Regional political economy from a mediator who has worked across it.
Joseph F. Coughlin · 2017 · MIT AgeLab on what older consumers actually buy, against the stereotype.
Acha Leke, Mutsa Chironga, Georges Desvaux · 2018 · McKinsey survey of operating companies; Ghana appears among the consumer-market cases.
T3 Brotopia
Emily Chang · 2018 · Reporting on the culture that produced Uber's 2017 crisis.
Nathan Schneider · 2018 · Platform co-operativism and the revival of member ownership.
Oliver Nachtwey · 2018 · Labour-market dualism and downward mobility behind the export success.
Jeremias Prassl · 2018 · Legal analysis of classification, the model's load-bearing assumption.
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi · 2018 · Network science on how success and reputation compound unequally
Andrew Selee · 2018 · How deeply the two economies are now integrated.
T3 Boom
Michael Shnayerson · 2019 · The rise of the mega-galleries and the contemporary market.
T3 Extra Time
Camilla Cavendish · 2019 · Policy and market responses to ageing across a dozen countries.
Bálint Magyar · 2019 · Comparative framework for post-communist regimes built on the Hungarian case.
Paul Morland · 2019 · Demography as the hidden driver of the last two centuries of power.
T3 Zucked
Roger McNamee · 2019 · By an early mentor and investor who turned against the company.
Justin Farrell · 2020 · Wealth, land and conservation in the American West.
Eric Eyre · 2020 · Pulitzer-winning local reporting on opioid distribution volumes.
Jenny Chan, Mark Selden, Pun Ngai · 2020 · Foxconn from the inside; the labour cost of the contract model.
T3 Monopolized
David Dayen · 2020 · Concentration traced sector by sector through its effects on customers.
T3 Ponzinomics
Robert L. FitzPatrick · 2020 · The fuller argument that MLM's economics require continual recruitment.
Ross Douthat · 2020 · Argument that rich societies have stagnated into repetition and sterility
Susan Fowler · 2020 · Insider memoir by the engineer whose blog post triggered the reckoning.
Jennifer D. Sciubba · 2022 · A political demographer on what the numbers do and do not determine.
Rebecca Giblin, Cory Doctorow · 2022 · How intermediaries capture creative-work rents; the bear case for creators.
Tim Schwab · 2023 · Investigative case against the foundation's power.
Dan Senor, Saul Singer · 2023 · The sequel, on the social factors the authors think sustain it.
T3 Barons
Austin Frerick · 2024 · Concentration of ownership across American agriculture.
Peter F. Drucker · 1969 · OL records first publish year as 1966
John Murray Cuddihy · 1974
Peter F. Drucker · 1976 · Published 1976 as The Unseen Revolution; retitled 1996
John Murray Cuddihy · 1978
Janet Malcolm · 1990
Peter F. Drucker · 1993 · Essay collection; not returned by the Open Library author query
Peter Thiel, David O. Sacks · with David O. Sacks · 1995 · Subtitled 'Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus'
Faith Popcorn, Lys Marigold · 1996
William Strauss, Neil Howe · 1996
Thomas J. Stanley, William D. Danko · 1996 · Thomas Stanley and William Danko's 1996 research-based portrait of actual American millionaires found them living in ordinary neighborhoods, driving used cars, and running unglamorous businesses. The book's lasting value is empirical: it provides data against the cultural image of wealth as consumption, and it directly informs how the FIRE movement thinks about lifestyle design.
Stevenson Swanson, Chicago Tribune · 1997
Robert Goldman, Stephen Papson · 1998 · Analysis of the brand-marketing machine at its peak.
John R. Stilgoe · 1998 · Reading the built landscape; observation trained as a research habit
Barbara Ehrenreich · 2001
Michael Suk-Young Chwe · 2001 · Common knowledge and coordination; why rituals and advertising work
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi · 2002
Peter F. Drucker · 2003 · Selections on community and society; not returned by the Open Library author query
Gregg Eaterbrook · 2003
Liza Featherstone · 2004 · The Dukes v. Wal-Mart sex discrimination litigation.
Steven D. Levitt, Stephen D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner · 2005
Benjamin M. Friedman · 2005
Michele Hilmes · 2007 · History of the network Comcast bought in 2011.
Robert J. Foster · 2008 · Academic study of the bottling and distribution system abroad.
Richard Lynn · 2008
William Dalrymple · 2009
Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner · 2009 · Sequel applying incentive analysis to climate, crime and altruism
Jacqueline Novogratz · 2009
Bruce Greenwald, Jonathan A. Knee, Ava Seave · with Jonathan A. Knee, Ava Seave · 2009
T4 Supertrends
Lars Tvede · 2010 · Long-horizon view of the trends reshaping economies and markets.
Edward S. Greenberg, Leon Grunberg, Sarah Moore, Patricia B. Sikora · 2010 · Longitudinal academic study of Boeing employees through restructuring.
Katherine Boo · 2011
Orla Ryan · 2011 · West African cocoa economics for a buyer of the crop.
David Graeber · 2011 · The long anthropological view of debt forgiveness and its politics.
Edward L. Glaeser · 2011 · The economist's case for density as the engine of productivity.
T4 Wine Wars
Mike Veseth · 2011 · Wine economist on globalization, terroir and commodity pressure.
Chrystia Freeland · 2012
Judith Flanders · 2012
Bruce Livesey · 2012 · Weak securities enforcement and what it costs minority shareholders.
Tom Wilber Books on Science · 2012
Mahzarin R. Banaji, Anthony G. Greenwald · 2013
Thomas Piketty · 2013
Nicholas Wade · 2014
Christian Rudder · 2014
Danielle Teller, Astro Teller · 2014
Michael Booth · 2014 · Journalistic, but the Denmark chapters on debt, tax and the flexicurity bargain are substantive.
Ta-Nehisi Coates · 2015
Richard Moore · 2015
Nima Sanandaji · 2016 · Longer version of the same argument, aimed at American admirers of the model.
T4 Evicted
Matthew Desmond · 2016
Robert H Frank · 2016
George Lakey · 2016 · Popular and partisan, but the clearest short account of the Nordic bargain.
Douglas Murray · 2017
Alain Bertaud · 2018 · An urban planner using land markets rather than master plans.
Thomas J. Bollyky · 2018
Kevin Simler, Robin Hanson · 2018
Robin DiAngelo · 2018
Alexandrea J. Ravenelle · 2019 · Sociology of platform work across Uber and peers.
Ramon Lobato · 2019 · The geography and licensing constraints of global streaming.
Malcolm Gladwell · 2019
Rory Sutherland, Pete Dyson · with Pete Dyson · 2021 · Open Library unreachable this run; title not machine-verified.
Jamie Fiore Higgins · 2022 · Insider memoir of the trading floor culture.
Peter Zeihan · 2022 · The strongest form of the argument that the trading order is ending.
T4 The Big Fail
Bethany McLean, Joe Nocera · with Joe Nocera · 2023 · OL lists title as 'Big Fail'
Brian Reisinger · 2024 · Why family farms lose ground to consolidated ownership.
Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, Richard Lannon
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Elinor Ostrom
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Clay Shirky
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Sue Johnson
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Goldian Vanden Broeck
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Lars Mytting
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Don Thompson
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Fred Pearce
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Lewis Hyde
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Jonathan Gottschall
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Joshua Cooper Ramo
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Verna Myers
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