New Books in Business, Management, and Marketing

The modern market-based economy generates wealth, but it lags on well-being; it has mastered efficiency, but struggles with equity; it boasts size, but falls short on sustainability. In other words, our economy delivers performance but neglects progress (i.e., well-being, equity, and sustainability). Many rightly call for tighter regulation, higher (“true”) prices, and longer-term incentives. Others appeal to corporate purpose, shared value, and stakeholder-centricity.

Beyond regulation and the practice of business, we must attend as well to education and the theory of business. In particular, we must look at business theory's core assumptions, whose weaknesses are long know...

Ed Freeman’s influential ideas on stakeholder theory, business ethics, humanities, and capitalism became foundational in the management field and turned around the mainstream thinking about business. Stakeholder theory developed by Freeman and others posits that business is not as much about profits, but rather about creating value for its stakeholders, including employees, customers, communities, financiers, and suppliers. The relationship between a company and its stakeholders is the essence of business and should be of utmost attention to its managers. Managers should avoid resorting to trade-offs by prioritizing one stakeholder group (e.g., shareholders) over the others and strive to...

How Henry Ford institutionalized a social gospel Henry Ford did not just mass produce cars. 

As a member of the Episcopal Church, reader of New Thought texts, believer in the “gospel of reincarnation,” mass marketer of antisemitic material, and employer who institutionalized a social gospel, Henry Ford’s contributions to American models of business were informed by and produced for an America he understood to be broadly Christian. Though Ford’s efforts at the head of the Ford Motor Company have commonly been understood as secular, Ford himself was explicit that his work in engineering and auto productio...

Dov Baron is also the author of Fiercely Loyal and One Red Thread. He’s one of the world’s foremost authorities on authentic leadership and cultural transformation. He’s been ranked among the top 30 Global Leadership Gurus and honored by Inc. magazine as one of the top 100 leadership speakers.

What do our formative years deliver each of us? The answer is an emotive “source code” that takes “hidden wounds” that magnifies them when we’re under stress on the job or elsewhere. What adds to workers’ stress? A pervasive feeling of loneliness created by circumstances in which people don’t...

Today I’m speaking with Stephanie Williams, Director of Wayne State University Press, and president of the Association of University Presses. Every year, NBN speaks with the president of AUPresses in anticipation of University Press Week. This year, press week will take place from November 9 through the 13th, with the theme: #PowerUP. To celebrate, I’m thrilled to speak with Stephanie Williams about all things UPs.

University Press Week Info

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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Cybersecurity is often presented as a technological challenge: protecting computer networks, preventing attacks and investing in increasingly sophisticated security systems. Yet even the most advanced technology may prove inadequate if organisations cannot interpret threats, communicate their consequences or respond effectively. What role does communication play in building cyber resilience, and why should it matter to business leaders as much as to cybersecurity specialists?

In this episode, Bernardo Bátiz-Lazo speaks with Nina Paine and Ashley Sweetman about Communicating Cyber Risk: Build Cyber Resilience Through Compelling Communication (Kogan Page, 2026). They discuss the book's origins and the distinction between c...

In this episode, I had the privilege of speaking with Maude Barlow, who has spent decades at the center of the global water justice movement. She is the honorary chairperson of the Council of Canadians, a co-founder of the Blue Planet Project, and served as senior advisor on water to the president of the United Nations General Assembly, where she helped win the 2010 resolution recognizing water as a human right. She has written or co-written nearly twenty books, including Blue Gold, Blue Covenant, and Still Hopeful. Her latest book, Earth for Sale: The Fight to Stop the Last Plunder...

Veronica Villarreal earned her joint MHA/MBA at the University of Houston–Clear Lake, took her first job out of the program at DHR Health in the Rio Grande Valley, and worked her way up through revenue cycle and operations into the C-suite. She served as Chief Ambulatory Officer over a network of roughly 75 clinic locations and more than 30 specialty service lines. She then moved to UT Health Rio Grande Valley, where she is now Chief Operating Officer.

Along the way, she wrote the book she wishes someone had handed her. C-Suite Bound: How Self-Discovery Leads to Ul...

Eating Grasshoppers: Chapulines and the Women Who Sell Them (U Texas Press, 2025) is an approachable ethnography of how grasshoppers are harvested, sold, and consumed in Oaxaca.

Chapulines (toasted grasshoppers) are not a delicacy in Oaxaca. They are just food—good food—and a protein-rich seasonal snack that is the product of a long-standing industry based overwhelmingly on the labor of women. Jeffrey Cohen has interviewed dozens of these chapulineras, who harvest insects from corn and alfalfa fields, prepare them, and sell them in urban and rural marketplaces. An accessible ethnography, Eating Grasshoppers tells their story alongside the broa...

Karmic Winds: Reflections from “The Smartest Guy in Hollywood” (Rare Bird Books, 2026) is a memoir of power, collapse, and reckoning by Peter M. Hoffman, a Yale-trained lawyer and Hollywood insider who once stood at the center of the independent film boom and later found himself stripped of status, freedom, and certainty. As president of Carolco Pictures, Hoffman helped steer an era-defining slate that included Terminator 2, Basic Instinct, and Rambo, navigating a world of massive egos, creative brilliance, and financial brinkmanship. But ambition has its cost. After the industry turns, legal battles mount, and a federal conviction leads to imprisonment, Hoff...

What should authors be doing to market their books, and when? Book marketing expert Jeffrey Yamaguchi, a writer and poet with 25+ years in publishing, joins Sarah Russo on “The Publishing Playbook” to explain why book marketing and book publicity aren’t the same thing, and why a successful campaign needs both.

In this episode:
• Book marketing vs. publicity: what you earn and what you pay for
• Why your book campaign timeline should start a year or more before pub day
• Why every author needs a newsletter, and when to start a Substack
• Red flags for pay...

Our second episode on “The Literary Ecosystem” features scholars of contemporary literary culture Dan Sinykin and Sarah Brouillette in conversation with host Aarthi Vadde. Like the good close readers we all are, we begin by thinking about how the metaphor of the “literary ecosystem” works. Sarah values the way it brings relationships between cultural institutions to the foreground but prefers the base-superstructure model of Marxian critique. Dan, too, moves away from “naturalizing” metaphors although he sees the ecosystem’s potential for pithily naming the interplay of literary production, circulation, and reception.
From here the conversation ranges widely as we consider th...

B. Joseph Pine II is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and management advisor to Fortune 500 companies and entrepreneurial startups, and cofounder of Strategic Horizons. Previous books include The Experience Economy, which is credited with introducing the concept of “experience” to the business world, Authenticity, and Mass Customization.

Now, in The Transformation Economy: Guiding Customers to Achieve Their Aspirations (Harvard Business Press, 2026), Pine brings his clarifying lens to the Rosetta stone of transformation, the customer service experience. What’s the percentage of CEOs who have made a real commitment to the front-line customer service workers who so often serve...

In this episode, host Richard Lucas sits down with Polish entrepreneur, author, and publisher Marcin Osman for an insightful conversation tracing his remarkable journey through entrepreneurship, publishing, and personal transformation.

Marcin shares how his entrepreneurial path began two decades ago as a broke student attending Toastmasters in Kraków. Through humble curiosity, networking, and cold outreach, he built his first marketing agency—landing major clients before facing the hard lessons of business failure. Undeterred, Marcin pivoted into self-publishing, pioneering a pre-sale model that grew OSMPower into a 5M PLN/year publishing powerhouse. Over the years, OSMPower published Pol...

Beneath the Wage: Tips, Tasks, and Gigs in the Age of Service Work (Princeton UP, 2026) retheorizes capitalism from the perspective of the service economy, challenging conventional assumptions about how work is waged, regulated, managed, and automated Today, 80 percent of U.S. workers do service work, from delivering takeout to mopping floors to teaching. Each time we are handed a bag of groceries or a cup of coffee, call for a cab or have our homework graded, we confront both the enormity and the intimacy of the contemporary service sector. Do these jobs have anything in common? Who is doing...

Making Sense of China's Economy (Routledge, 2023) untangles China’s complex economic structure, evolving issues and curious contradictions, and explains some key features of this most puzzling of global economic powerhouses. This book reveals how factors such as demographics, the initial stage of development in 1978, the transition away from full state ownership and central planning, the dual urban-rural society, and a decentralised governance structure have combined to shape the economy, its development and its reforms. It shows how the pragmatic and adaptive nature of China’s policymaking upends familiar perspectives and hinders simple cross-country comparisons. The book also explores crucial topi...


Meg Reid and Will Evans join Mesha Maren to consider what makes up a literary ecosystem. As leaders of two nonprofit independent presses,Hub City Writers Project and Deep Vellum Press, Meg and Will describe their roles as publishers, booksellers, community builders, and advocates working with the many interconnected players in publishing: writers, readers, translators, critics, librarians, distributors, and funders. They discuss how independent presses create literary infrastructure by staying rooted in their communities, building relationships with readers, and making space for voices and stories that might otherwise be overlooked.

The conversation turns to the impact of conso...

The Integrity Compass: Leading with Ethics in a Changing World is a practical, readable guide to ethical decision-making for engineers, technologists, managers, policymakers, and students navigating complexity and pressure. Blending lived experience with clear frameworks, it shows how integrity becomes action—especially when deadlines, incentives, and power dynamics push the other way.

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It is fair to say Aarthi Vadde's wonderful new book, We The Platform, demostrates "how literature changes our perspective on the internet." But you also need to add that it "respond[s] to decline narratives about literature and literary study and to offer an alternative to prevailing sense of defeat and nostalgia that guides them.”

Her conversation with John, like the book itself, aims to narrate the history of Web 2.0 from about 2004 to the present and to explore how writers themselves have responded since 2008. (That means compression" so please Google Aarthi to learn more about her Duke pr...

How Do AI & Innovation Cohabitate?
 

Bryan Cassady is an author, professor, and all-around innovator, whether in book form or in classrooms, real and virtual, stretching from Europe to India.  He is a professor, consultant, and a serial entrepreneur now with a mission: to teach 1 million innovators by 2027.

He has built companies in 6 countries and trained 40,000+ leaders. He’s also a former professional racquetball player turned mathematician, a United Nations professional who speaks four languages. A researcher who has published on innovation, alignment, and social-media addiction. He’s co-created books with 50+ experts worldwide, including the international...

Host Licia Cianetti talks to Lorenzo Feltrin about his recent book Workers and the World: Fighting Ecological Crisis from Within (Verso, 2026). They discuss how the climate and ecological crisis often confronts workers with the impossible choice between the end of the month and the end of the world, but how this choice between jobs and environment is not as zero-sum as it is usually represented. Lorenzo explains how people living near toxic industries often lose both jobs and the environment, how this takes different forms in different parts of the world, and how new solidarities can emerge that could...

Research Triangle Park in North Carolina (RTP) emerged under the unique circumstances of a poor Southern state that needed to find a way to offset the declining industries of tobacco, furniture, and textiles in the 1950s. Through the sustained commitment of nearby universities, business leaders, and local and state officials, state leaders established the largest science and research park in the United States in an area that was nothing but “possums and pines.” Miracle Road: The Story of Research Triangle Park (Duke University Press, 2026) tells this story through the eyes of those at the center of it, like the local bl...

For more than two decades, Andrew Brandt has lived at the intersection of money, law, and sports—first as a player agent, then as vice president of the Green Bay Packers during the franchise’s most iconic quarterback transition, and now as a widely respected educator and analyst for ESPN and Sports Illustrated.

In Smarter about Sports: My Life Navigating Athletes, Agents, Media, and the Business of the NFL (Triumph Books, 2026) Brandt pulls back the curtain on the modern sports industry, revealing what really happens behind the deals, decisions, and drama. With sharp insight and rare access, he ex...

Stop waiting for permission to lead!

Most of us have suffered under badly behaved managers, enduring micromanagement, navigating toxic "mindfields," and watching great ideas die at the bottlenecks of the traditional chain of command.

We’ve been sold a lie: that leadership is a title, a rank, or a corner office. Clinging to this outdated assumption limits your potential and leaves your team trapped in a cycle of cynicism and burnout.

What if leadership isn’t a position you attain but a set of practices you choose?

In the fully revised seco...

Whether you’re hoping to publish your first book or you’re a seasoned author with an unfinished proposal languishing on your hard drive, The Book Proposal Book provides honest and invaluable advice on how to overcome common sticking points and get your book published. It also shows why a well-conceived proposal can help lead to an outstanding book. The Book Proposal Book cuts through the mystery and guides you through the process of crafting a compelling proposal and pitching it to university presses and other academic publishers.

This episode explores: what a book proposal is and isn’...

In this episode of International Horizons, host John Torpey sits with Pepper Culpepper, Blavatnik Professor of Government and Public Policy at the University of Oxford, to explore the core thesis of his recent book, Billionaire Backlash: The Age of Corporate Scandal and How It Could Save Democracy (co-authored with Taeku Lee).

Drawing historical parallels to the American Progressive Era and the trust-busting of the early 20th century, Culpepper explains how corporate missteps act as catalysts for public action. The discussion delves into the concept of "latent opinion"—the submerged, widespread unease regarding corporate power, tech monopolies, and un...

Jen Ford Reedy has served as President of the Minnesota-based Bush Foundation since 2012. In her perennially popular Philanthropy 101 classes, Reedy tells her students: Everyone is a beginner when they join a foundation. Foundation board and staff members come from a variety of professional backgrounds and bring their talents and skills into the field. But even if you’ve been successful in other sectors, you must adapt your skills to be effective in the world of philanthropy.

Please Be Good at Philanthropy: An Introduction to Grantmaking Strategy and Practice (Disruption Books, 2026) explains how to do just that. Reedy la...

In Hollywood today, thousands of data specialists work for streaming video platforms, playing a role not just in distribution and marketing but also in decisions about content and production. In Data-Driven Hollywood: The New Data Professionals in the Age of Streaming (Princeton UP, 2026), Violaine Roussel examines the emergence of this new category of professionals at the heart of the Hollywood dream factory. Roussel shows how the rise of data and algorithm specialists has transformed organizations and rearranged power relationships within them. Drawing on extensive interviews and in situ observations, she describes the ways that technical “data work” carried out by profe...

Alfie Marcus is ordinarily the host of On the Cusp Between Strategy and Ethics, where he interviews authors about the intersection of organizational strategy, corporate responsibility, and the changing role of business in society. Today, however, I’m in the host seat and Alfie is joining as the guest to discuss his own new book, Comeback: Can Great Companies Rise Again? from the University of Toronto Press. Alfie is a Professor at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management where he holds the Edson Spencer Endowed Chair In Strategy And Technological Leadership. Comeback encapsulates more than 4 decades of r...

Baruch Fischhoff's Bounded Disciplines and Unbounded Problems: A Vision for Management Science (Oxford University Press, 2025), part of the Clarendon Lectures in Management series) tackles a central tension in academia that disciplines are organized around narrow, bounded methods and theories, while the real-world problems society faces such as climate change, public health, financial crises, technology risk are messy, unbounded, and refuse to respect departmental boundaries. Fischhoff argues that business schools are uniquely positioned to bridge this gap because they already house faculty with both rigorous analytical training and applied, real-world orientation. The book proposes concrete ways management schools can restructure...

The Grant Writing Guide: A Road Map for Scholars (Princeton UP, 2023) is an essential handbook for writing fundable grants. This easy-to-use guide features writing samples, a glossary of important terms, answers common questions, and explains pitfalls to avoid. Dr. Betty Lai focuses on skills that are universal to all grant writers, not just specific skills for one type of grant or funder. She explains how to craft phenomenal pitches and align them with your values, structure timelines and drafts, communicate clearly in prose and images, solicit feedback to strengthen your proposals, and much more. This incisive book walks you...

We often blame social media for the rampant problem of disinformation, but the truth is that mainstream news media is often equally at fault. Not only do news outlets disguise paid content to look like online news articles, a practice called “native advertising,” but new research suggests that this form of advertising even influences the real journalism that appears next to it—both perceptions of the journalism as well as its actual substance. In Content Confusion: News Media, Native Advertising, and Policy in an Era of Disinformation (MIT Press, 2025), Michelle Amazeen explores the origins and evolution of this mainstream media...

Why have Finland’s biggest multinationals teamed up to create a globally unique analysis hub just to decode the future of China? Meet the analysts who are nurturing the next generation of Finnish expertise to bridge the gap between Nordic business and Chinese policy.

In this episode, Julie Yu-Wen Chen at the University of Helsinki talks to Kevin Broady, Marleena Makkonen and Anton Karppanen, three analysts from the China Office of Finnish Industries to understand their mission. The China Office of Finnish Industries acts as a unique nonprofit designed to assist Finnish multinational corporations in navigating the co...

In our recent conversation about Protecting Workers? Crisis, COVID-19 and South Asia, the editors Kanchana N. Ruwanpura and Wilfried Swenden reflect on the need to move beyond treating the pandemic as a singular, isolated shock. Our discussion reflected on the deeper mechanics of knowledge production, how we reflect on crisis beyond its immediate occurrence, how we conceptualize South Asia today, and the process of bringing such a dynamic volume together.

A central theme was the necessity of examining crisis as a revealing, prolonged condition rather than a temporary disruption. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed pre-existing structural vulnerabilities across...

A surprising look at the big business of owning small businesses and what America's franchise economy means for its workers.

Walk into a McDonald's anywhere in the United States, and it will be identical to every other McDonald's in the country. Yet, that particular store is almost certainly owned and operated by an "independent" franchisee. While McDonald's presents an image of centralized uniformity to the consumer, it shows a different face to the small business owners operating its stores under its control and the workers preparing its product to its standards. How then does McDonald's--and its big...

Chains of Command: The Rise and Cruel Reign of the Franchise Economy (University of Chicago Press, 2026) is a surprising look at the big business of owning small businesses and what America's franchise economy means for its workers.

Walk into a McDonald's anywhere in the United States, and it will be identical to every other McDonald's in the country. Yet, that particular store is almost certainly owned and operated by an "independent" franchisee. While McDonald's presents an image of centralized uniformity to the consumer, it shows a different face to the small business owners operating its stores under...

In Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Sandeep Vaheesan recounts the rather overlooked story of how electricity spread across the U.S. economy during the 20th century. This book sheds careful light on the varied institutions and interests mediating the process, including investor-owned utilities and the rural electric cooperative. Vaheesan does not hesitate to critique the successes and failures cropping up along the way; rather, he lays them all bare in service of paving an actionable path toward the decarbonization and democratization of power.

Sandeep Vaheesan is the le...

The strategic landscape of the Cold War generated political support for a permanent US military force of unprecedented scale. Faced with the problem of managing this behemoth, leaders of the defense bureaucracy looked to private industry for inspiration: since the military now resembled a huge industrial conglomerate, they reasoned, it should be run like a business. In Pentagon Capitalism: How the Cold War US Military Modeled Itself on Private Business (Harvard UP, 2026), Dr. A. J. Murphy explores the profound consequences of translating military structures of command, logistics, and warfare into capitalist terms.
In the realm of budgeting and...

Does it seem like the business world is in its own version of an arms race to figure out AI?

It’s a moment when even a little wisdom, grounded in experience and expertise, provides relief.

But how do you get that wisdom?

If you’re KPMG, you turn to your own secret weapon, Stephanie Kim, who leads Signals & Strategy, to combine the firm’s intelligence AND the steady stream of data from the outside INTO a cogent worldview. Tracking, distilling, and interpreting signals has been Kim’s focus for years. If this were a s...

Pedagogies of Value: Marketing Foreign Goods in China (Berghahn, 2026) by Dr. Máximo Badaró explores how China is reshaping global hierarchies of worth. Through ethnographic research among marketers, consultants, and brokers who promote foreign goods in Shanghai, Beijing, and beyond, this book investigates how value is taught, contested, and transformed in everyday encounters. From luxury brands and consumer ethnography to real estate, wine, and organic food, the book reveals how foreign intermediaries attempt to ‘educate’ Chinese consumers, only to confront shifting power dynamics that challenge Western authority. Blending vivid narratives with sharp analysis, this study argues that China has become...