New Books in Business, Management, and Marketing

Soda Science: Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola (U Chicago Press, 2024) takes readers deep inside the secret world of corporate science, where powerful companies and allied academic scientists mould research to meet industry needs. The 1990s were tough times for the soda industry. In the United States, obesity rates were exploding. Public health critics pointed to sugary soda as a main culprit a...

Business and Human Rights Law is a rapidly growing area of law, which has dramatically transformed many parts of international law. In this new volume in the Elements series, Robert McCorquodale explores how the responsibility for human rights abuses has transitioned from a purely state obligation to also being the responsibility of businesses. Business responsibility for human rights impacts have...

Non-profit organizations play an indispensable role in the world today, and are consistently rated higher than governments, the media or businesses in term of public trust. Yet many non-profit organizations suffer from dysfunction. New non-profit leaders find themselves unprepared for the challenges ahead, and even seasoned leaders often struggle to ensure their organizations achieve the impact th...

In recent years, companies have felt the pressure to be transparent about their environmental impact. Large documents containing summaries of yearly emissions rates, carbon output, and utilized resources are shared on companies’ social media pages, websites, and employee briefings in a bid for public confidence in corporate responsibility. And yet, Matthew Archer argues, these metrics are often ju...

Across the world, algorithms are changing the nature of work. Nowhere is this clearer than in the logistics and distribution sectors, where workers are instructed, tracked and monitored by increasingly dystopian management technologies. In Cyberboss: The Rise of Algorithmic Management and the New Struggle for Control at Work (Verso, 2024), Craig Gent takes us into workplaces where algorithms rule...

In an era where the financial stability of many arts organizations is increasingly precarious, arts philanthropy stands at a critical juncture. The recent COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-21 laid bare the vulnerabilities in existing funding structures, highlighting just how fragile these lifelines can be. Coupled with a surge in social initiatives that demand attention and resources, the way the arts are...

Ella Houston's book Advertising Disability (Routledge, 2024) invites Cultural Disability Studies to consider how advertising, as one of the most ubiquitous forms of popular culture, shapes attitudes towards disability. The research presented in the book provides a much-needed examination of the ways in which disability and mental health issues are depicted in different types of advertising, includ...

The struggle against neoliberal order has gained momentum over the last five decades – to the point that economic elites have not only adapted to the Left's critiques but incorporated them for capitalist expansion. Venture funds expose their ties to slavery and pledge to invest in racial equity. Banks pitch microloans as a path to indigenous self-determination. Fair-trade brands narrate consumptio...

After she earned her BA and MA in history, Allison Tourville decided to pursue a career in social media strategy. For nearly a decade, she worked for Vale Group (formerly Vulcan LLC, founded by the co-founder of Microsoft Paul G. Allen). She is now the Digital Media Director at the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. On Ep. 11, we talked about her choices, experiences, passion for history, and the sk...

Why do we want what we want? Philosopher, theologian, and literary critic René Girard posits that we draw our desires largely from the people around us, a fact which has implications for everything from how we should plan our careers to the direction of foreign policy. Following a career spanning business, religious discernment, and academia, Luke Burgis joins Madison's Notes to explore Girard's p...

From the 1960s through the 1990s, the most common job for women in the United States was clerical work. Even as college-educated women obtained greater opportunities for career advancement, occupational segregation by gender remained entrenched. How did feminism in corporate America come to represent the individual success of the executive woman and not the collective success of the secretary? All...

Today’s book is: More Than A Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech (MIT Press, 2024), by Meredith Broussard. When technology reinforces inequality, it's not just a glitch—it's a signal that we need to redesign our systems to create a more equitable world. The word “glitch” implies an incidental error, as easy to patch up as it is to identify. But what if racism, sexism, and ab...

Esoteric and frequently disinterested in the public good, financial institutions can be hard to navigate for those seeking to advance social welfare. My Episode 10 guest Paul Katz of the Jain Family Institute is trying to change that by building innovative tools to help visionary leaders in Brazil grow social wealth. During our lively exchange, Paul helped me understand how much history fits into...

Richard interviews BBC Journalist Dougal Shaw about his book CEO Secrets based on the BBC Series CEO secrets in which he interviewed 100s of CEOs. When Dougal first began as a business journalist at BBC, he wasn’t particularly interested in the topic. Prior to his new career, he was training for doctorate in history. He began creating content for social media, interviewing CEOs who found themselve...

Dialysis is a medical miracle, a treatment that allows people with kidney failure to live when otherwise they would die. It also provides a captive customer for the dialysis industry, which values the steady revenues that come from critically required long-term care that is guaranteed by the government.  Tom Mueller's six year deep dive into the dialysis industry has yielded his latest book, How t...

How can we restore America's frontier spirit, foster innovation, and stave off decay? Chris Buskirk sits down to discuss his new book America and the Art of the Possible: Restoring National Vitality in an Age of Decay. Along the way, he delves into the history of innovation from Augustan Rome to the Scottish Enlightenment to Silicon Valley, whether America is an oligarchy or an aristocracy, how ou...

For centuries, the vastness of the Chinese market tempted foreign companies in search of customers. But in the 1970s, when the United States and China ended two decades of Cold War isolation, China’s trade relations veered in a very different direction. In Made in China: When US-China Interests Converged to Transform Global Trade (Harvard University Press, 2024) Dr. Elizabeth Ingleson shows how th...

America's elite law firms, investment banks, and management consulting firms are known for grueling hours, low odds of promotion, and personnel practices that push out any employees who don't advance. While most people who begin their careers in these institutions leave within several years, work there is especially difficult for Black professionals, who exit more quickly and receive far fewer pro...

I had the pleasure of talking to Francisco Ramos about how his study of history shaped his approach to data science, and public policy, and his efforts to scale institutionally driven social change. For Francisco, immersion in history began as a personal project of self-discovery. It evolved into a set of tools that he uses and perfects to understand the impact of policies and institutions on soci...

In the early nineteenth century, the American commercial marketplace was a chaotic, unregulated environment in which knock-offs and outright frauds thrived. Appearances could be deceiving, and entrepreneurs often relied on their personal reputations to close deals and make sales. Rapid industrialization and expanding trade routes opened new markets with enormous potential, but how could distant me...

Labor and race have shared a complex, interconnected history in America. For decades, key aspects of work—from getting a job to workplace norms to advancement and mobility—ignored and failed Black people. While explicit discrimination no longer occurs, and organizations make internal and public pledges to honor and achieve “diversity,” inequities persist through what Dr. Adia Harvey Wingfield call...

Based on extensive research into weekly rural publishers and rural readers, Reviving Rural News: Transforming the Business Model of Community Journalism in the US and Beyond (Routledge, 2024) outlines a mode of practice by which small publications can stay financially sound and combat the rise of "news deserts." This book argues that publishers must actively reach out to their communities to foste...

The COVID-19 pandemic forced an unprecedented experiment that reshaped white-collar work and turned remote work into a kind of new normal. Now comes the hard part. Many employees want to continue that normal and keep working remotely, and most at least want the ability to work occasionally from home. But for employers, the benefits of employees working from home or hybrid approaches are not so obv...

On this episode of "Practical History," I talk with Charles Halvorson, a history PhD, author, and business strategist. With experience that spans work at the boutique cultural consultancy Gemic and the global strategy firm Accenture (where he is currently helping accelerate the energy transition with utilities and other energy ecosystem partners), Charles has much to say about the value of an adva...

In their bestselling book Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway revealed the origins of climate change denial. Now, in The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market (Bloomsbury. 2023), they unfold the truth about another disastrous dogma: the “magic of the marketplace.” In the early 20th century, business elites, trade associations, weal...