Sociology and Culture

How individuals lose judgement in a crowd and how leaders sway crowds.

Why mass movements of every kind draw the same frustrated people and use one method.

What makes city streets work, and how 1950s planning and slum clearance broke them.

An academic study of how new ideas spread.

An indictment of 1960s Australia as provincial, philistine and living on its luck.

Why complex, tightly coupled systems such as Three Mile Island will fail regardless.

Computer tournaments of the prisoner's dilemma show why tit-for-tat wins.

How television turned public discourse from argument into entertainment.

A study of Lima's informal economy and the legal costs that keep the poor outside it.

How the Chicago mob ran Las Vegas casinos, told through bookie Frank Rosenthal.

Why large state plans fail when they override local, practical knowledge.

How fast food reshaped farming, meatpacking, food science and low-wage work.

How slot machines are designed to keep gamblers playing longer.

How media from the penny press to social media capture attention and resell it.

America's opioid crisis from OxyContin's 1996 launch through Central Appalachia.

The one pattern of the hero's journey that runs through myths across cultures.

How American life changed between 1900 and 1950.

What the corporation did to the people inside it, written at its peak.

Classic fieldwork proving African farmers were rational capitalist investors.

Cities, not farms, drive economic growth by adding new work to old.

A portrait of Canada's business elite in 1975, from hundreds of interviews.

What Japan's institutions had solved that America had not, and what to learn.

How Americans chose separate suburban houses and how that shaped the country.

The culture of a society that got rich first and was uneasy about it.

The Basque Mondragon cooperative group, studied as a working business model.

A Pennsylvania steel town from Carnegie's purchase in 1883 to the 1986 closure.

Preference falsification: why people hide their views and how that hides change.

After the Cold War, conflict will follow cultural and religious fault lines.

Written from Romanian fieldwork; how the planned economy behaved in practice.

Who took charge of Central Europe's economies after 1989, without a capitalist class.

Arguments for consumers to question and take on the corporate superbrands.

The Finnish model: how a welfare state produced a technology cluster.

The first book to expose OxyContin marketing; reissued 2018.

US fiscal promises far exceed future revenue, which official debt figures hide.

Flags of convenience and the legal nowhere that ships are owned in.

Political economy of production without conventional property.

How Hollywood really makes money, mostly away from the box office.

One T-shirt traced from a Texas cotton farm to a Chinese factory and beyond.

Ten forces around 2000 that let anyone, anywhere compete in the global economy.

An investigation of a place living under the rule of a murderous crime organisation.

What Wal-Mart's scale does to its suppliers, its towns and prices everywhere.

How Southeast Asia's tycoons got rich from political favours, not productivity.

How family luxury houses became conglomerates selling to the mass affluent.

An introduction to modern India's rise and its many contradictions.

How the cigarette rose in 20th-century America, and how its harm was proved.

Ethnography of auctions, fairs and studios.

Why football clubs are poor businesses but resilient assets.

Why most media companies destroy shareholder value: few have barriers to entry.

A class analysis of the Gulf states that rejects the standard rentier-state view.

Six advantages, from competition to the work ethic, that let the West pull ahead.

Why Italy's economy underperformed, and the firms and places showing it can change.

Why US cities have split apart in wages and jobs, and why innovation hubs pull ahead.

How processed-food makers engineer salt, sugar and fat to make people eat more.

Broad employee ownership as an American tradition, and the case for reviving it.

A forecast of a hugely connected future world, with its challenges and benefits.

Japan after the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima, and how it might recover.

A global history of cotton used to trace how capitalism developed.

America's opiate epidemic, seen from the demand side of the OxyContin market.

The rise and fall of the American department store, with Sears throughout.

How the mp3, a CD-factory leaker and pirate websites broke the music business.

How the way organisations divide work blinds them, and how some break down silos.

Brazil's billionaires during the boom, and what their fortunes say about inequality.

The drug trade as a business: how cartels handle supply chains, staff and branding.

What longer lives do to savings, work and the products people buy.

The technology trends that will reshape daily life over the next thirty years.

How federal housing policy engineered segregation.

Why the platform mattered politically, and what that cost it.

How the offshore world lets officials who steal money hide it and spend it abroad.

Crony capitalism, promoter leverage and the bad-loan crisis.

How the Premier League turned clubs into globally traded media assets.

Three false beliefs taught to young Americans, and how they harm their minds.

How fixation on measured performance damages the work it is meant to improve.

How the global elite's efforts to change the world keep the status quo in place.

The costs and benefits of a shrinking world population.

The hidden on-demand workers who make automated online services work.

The economics of the music industry, where superstar markets show up in pure form.

Flags of convenience, crew abuse and jurisdictional voids at sea.

How McDonald's and fast-food franchising became bound up with Black America.

Disinflation came from a one-time surge in workers; ageing will reverse it.

One USB charger followed from a factory in Vietnam by ship and truck to a door.

How Amazon's growth concentrated wealth in a few places and hollowed out others.

What happened to Eastern Europe in the thirty years after 1989, measured.

Artisanal cobalt mining in Congo and its place in the battery supply chain.

Case studies of extraction from acquired companies.

The supply-chain breakdown of 2020 to 2022, traced through shipments and people.

Common knowledge, where everyone knows that everyone knows, and what it does.

How the internet can spread generosity and make giving a force for good.

Pre-industrial English society before wage labour and cities

Mahathir's case for Malay preferences that became the New Economic Policy.

Consumer-side account of how insurers make money.

A former distributor on the ideology that sustains recruitment.

How marketing-board pricing destroyed the country's main export industry.

Collected 1980s finance essays

The standardisation model that made the chain scalable.

Comparative coffee political economy; sets Colombia's growers' federation in context.

The Overseas Chinese business families and their fortunes around the Pacific.

Spain's institutions and business culture after Franco.

A critical look at the arithmetic behind multi-level marketing pay plans.

Edited fieldwork on how the format was localised across Asia.

Written straight after the 1997 crisis on opacity, related-party dealing and family control.

The economics of positional goods and status competition.

How fashion became a branded consumer-goods business.

How Kodak's advertising taught Americans what to photograph.

How Las Vegas grew from the Rat Pack era into a family holiday city.

Early and prescient case that access would displace ownership.

Scottish Enlightenment as the source of modern commercial and economic thinking

How experts, capital and land were arranged in modern Egypt.

How informal credit, trust networks and trade finance work when the banking system does not.

Broad-based stock options and what they did to company performance.

A writer who moved to Italy in 1999 on its courts, bureaucracy and darker side.

How returning land in Transylvania after communism created property rights.

Falling birth rates worldwide, and countries from Italy to Japan starting to shrink.

Why economic reform in the Middle East reshuffled privilege rather than ending it.

The NCEO's evidence on when shared ownership raises performance.

How the integrated investment bank extracts its economics from clients.

Cocoa supply chain and child labour behind confectionery majors.

Business-press account of supplier and wage pressure.

Edited volume on the supply chain and logistics model.

Elster on mechanisms rather than laws in the social sciences

The emirate's development model and its structural dependencies.

Sociologist embedded with a gang; an informal economy's incentive structure

The economic, political and personal costs of making and buying everything cheaply.

Polemical, but the case for bond-market financing over aid is argued in investor terms.

What Starbucks sells besides coffee, from visits to hundreds of its stores.

Saudi Arabia's oil wealth, religious establishment and attempts at reform.

Foreign investment, labour and the costs of the transition, told critically.

Labor historian on Walmart as a new template for capitalism.

How Wal-Mart's culture and labour model were built.

The developer-banker-politician network that inflated the property bubble.

The migrant districts on the edges of growing cities, where rural people move to.

How free tap water became bottled water, one of the most profitable products sold.

How Dubai became a centre for business and luxury, and the migrant labour beneath it.

The global co-operative sector and how member ownership works.

Ageing as a global economic and political force, country by country.

Vietnam's rapid change under Party control, state firms and the doi moi reforms.

Dubai governed openly as a company, and what that means for those who invest there.

Sceptical audit of what microfinance evidence actually supports.

How tobacco chemists engineered cigarettes, drawn from the industry's own documents.

The society and politics a foreign investor in Samsung is buying into.

Gladwell on underdogs and mistaken assumptions about advantage

The empire after the phone-hacking scandal.

Why incumbent power in states, firms and armies now erodes faster

Fertility decline argued as an economic rather than a moral problem.

African American co-operative economics, a history largely written out.

How Star Wars merchandise came to outgrow the films that created it.

Indonesia's contradictions, and what its decentralised state means for business.

Why Costco, Trader Joe's and QuikTrip pay more and still undercut rivals.

Commodity desks at banks and funds after the 2008 boom.

Dhaka's garment industry from Rana Plaza back through its supply chain.

How Chinese private champions including Alibaba actually built scale.

A critique of the Gates Foundation and the rise of philanthrocapitalism.

Greece's crisis seen in its villages and streets: tax evasion and informal work.

The critical case: platform power, housing supply and regulatory arbitrage.

A sociologist trains as a wealth manager to show how fortunes are shielded offshore.

How oil rebuilt Kuwait City and how land deals made its merchant fortunes.

Data economics of the shift from studios to streamers.

A worker's guide to the gig economy and how platforms price labour.

Economics of trust and matching that make marketplaces like Airbnb work.

Concentration of wealth, land and market power among a few families.

Southeast Asia's politics and conflicts, seen by a mediator at the negotiating table.

How Rudy Kurniawan faked rare Burgundy wines, and how he was caught.

What older consumers want and buy, against the stereotypes firms design for.

McKinsey survey of operating companies; Ghana appears among the consumer-market cases.

Reporting on the culture that produced Uber's 2017 crisis.

The revival of co-operatives and member ownership, online platforms included.

The insecure jobs and falling mobility behind Germany's export success.

The gig-work model Uber's unit economics depend on.

The gig economy's promises and realities, and the law on classifying its workers.

Network science on how success and reputation compound unequally

Field research on algorithmic management of drivers.

How deeply the two economies are now integrated.

The rise of the mega-galleries and the money in the contemporary art market.

How a dozen countries respond as people over 65 come to outnumber small children.

A framework for post-communist regimes, built on the Hungarian case.

How population change and migration made and unmade nations over two centuries.

By an early mentor and investor who turned against the company.

Wealth, land and conservation in the American West.

How a West Virginia town of 382 people got 12 million opioid pills in three years.

Foxconn from the inside; the labour cost of the contract model.

Concentration traced sector by sector through its effects on customers.

Why multi-level marketing's economics need constant recruitment to survive.

Argument that rich societies have stagnated into repetition and sterility

Insider memoir by the engineer whose blog post triggered the reckoning.

A political demographer on what the numbers do and do not determine.

How intermediaries capture creative-work rents; the bear case for creators.

An investigative case against the power of the Gates Foundation.

The social traits that the authors argue sustain Israel's success.

How ownership of American agriculture came to sit with a few families and firms.

A lawyer's memoir of fighting wrongful convictions, such as Walter McMillian's.

Essays on farm life in Maine, written after leaving New York City.

A guide to learning more than one language, focused on Europe's languages.

How cities developed, from Egypt and Mesopotamia through Greece and Rome to today.

Following Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters through the 1960s counterculture.

Four breaks with the postwar world, from a global economy to knowledge as capital.

Freud, Marx and Lévi-Strauss as cases of the Jewish struggle with Gentile civility.

How employee pension funds came to own a controlling share of American industry.

How the move from oral cultures to writing changed thought, personality and society.

How media in democracies serve state and corporate power while claiming independence.

How communities manage shared resources without either the state or the market.

The cultural rift between America and Japan, through people working across it.

How a culture hands its judgement to machines, statistics and technical experts.

Essays on 'social ecology': how societies and institutions change, Japan included.

Buildings as processes that change after they are built, and how to design for it.

Subtitled 'Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus'

American history as a repeating cycle of four generational turnings, each 20 years.

Survey research showing most American millionaires live modestly and save hard.

Comic essays on a life from a Raleigh childhood to drink- and drug-filled college.

An analysis of Nike's brand-marketing machine at its peak, built on the swoosh.

Reading the built landscape; observation trained as a research habit

Cognitive therapy applied to the thinking behind anger, hostility and violence.

Globalization as the new international system, seen from Amazon farms to Wall Street.

How ideas and behaviour spread like epidemics, and the three factors that tip them.

How the internet let amateurs topple old professions such as lawyers and stock gurus.

Common knowledge and coordination; why rituals and advertising work

Why foreign aid, investment and other remedies failed to make tropical nations rich.

Selections on community and society

The Dukes v. Wal-Mart sex discrimination litigation.

Where the worry about others' judgement of us comes from, and how people overcome it.

How companies can serve the world's poor profitably and reduce poverty in doing so.

When groups judge better than experts, and the four conditions that make it work.

Incentives and data applied to cheating teachers, sumo wrestlers and other puzzles.

Inside a community of men perfecting seduction techniques, and one man's doubts.

How free parking costs society, and why parking should be priced and deregulated.

A boy from a poor, broken home discovers football and rises to the NFL.

A history of the NBC broadcast network, which Comcast bought in 2011.

France's maps, migrations, languages and tribal disputes, from 1789 to 1914.

Academic study of the bottling and distribution system abroad.

How timing, culture and accumulated advantage explain exceptional success.

Nine people in India, among them a monk and a Jain nun, and how they live faith.

A novel: 17 super-rich Americans, Warren Buffett among them, unite to fix government.

Ten essays on China's economic and political change and what it means for America.

How mass immigration and Islam changed Europe without forming a melting pot.

Sequel applying incentive analysis to climate, crime and altruism

A memoir of moving from international banking to founding Acumen, an impact investor.

The long-run trends set to reshape economies and markets over the coming decades.

Longitudinal academic study of Boeing employees through restructuring.

West African cocoa economics for a buyer of the crop.

Debt came before money and barter, and its history is one of forgiveness and revolt.

How the problem-solving and teamwork of games could solve real-world problems.

How the internet changed politics and economies in Iran, Estonia, Korea and Senegal.

How dense cities make people more productive, inventive and green.

Wine economist on globalization, terroir and commodity pressure.

Why the twenties matter, against the hype that trivialises that decade of life.

Weak securities enforcement and what it costs minority shareholders.

The long-run dynamics of wealth and inequality, and why capital concentrates.

Why few women reach senior roles, and what women and firms can do about it.

How entrepreneurs and tech investors are building companies in the Middle East.

Essays on carnival hokum, magical thinking and Washington's cult of expertise.

How drug-war policing made a poor Philadelphia neighbourhood a surveillance state.

Journalistic, but the Denmark chapters on debt, tax and the flexicurity bargain are substantive.

How to make sense of the daily torrent of news, and what it does to our minds.

A letter to the author's teenage son about living in a black body in America.

How finding love, dating and relationships have changed from earlier generations.

How fleeing face-to-face talk harms relationships and work, and how to reclaim it.

Portraits of people living lives of extreme ethical commitment to helping strangers.