Business celebrities such as Bill Gates, Richard Branson and Rupert Murdoch are among the most widely recognised, admired and sometimes even vilified individuals in the world. Like their celebrity peers from the entertainment, sports, arts and political worlds, business celebrities exert an influence that is pervasive, but difficult to assess, evaluate and explain.Business celebrities have been around for as long as big business itself, but this is the first book to provide a syste...

A New York Times Notable Book of the YearIn the very near future, "smart" technologies and "big data" will allow us to make large-scale and sophisticated interventions in politics, culture, and everyday life. Technology will allow us to solve problems in highly original ways and create new incentives to get more people to do the right thing. But how will such "solutionism" affect our society, once deeply political, moral, and irresolvable dilemmas are reca...

This shocking, surprisingly entertaining romp into the intellectual nether regions of today's underthirty set reveals the disturbing and, ultimately, incontrovertible truth: cyberculture is turning us into a society of know-nothings.The Dumbest Generation is a dire report on the intellectual life of young adults and a timely warning of its impact on American democracy and culture.For decades, concern has been brewing about the dumbed-down p...

**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERCNN host and best-selling author Fareed Zakaria argues for a renewed commitment to the world’s most valuable educational tradition.**The liberal arts are under attack. The governors of Florida, Texas, and North Carolina have all pledged that they will not spend taxpayer money subsidizing the liberal arts, and they seem to have an unlikely ally in President Obama. While at a General Electric plant in early 2014, Obama remarked, "I promise ...

Spreadable Media maps fundamental changes taking place in our contemporary media environment, a space where corporations no longer tightly control media distribution and many of us are directly involved in the circulation of content. It contrasts “stickiness”—aggregating attention in centralized places—with “spreadability”—dispersing content widely through both formal and informal networks,some approved, many unauthorized. Stickiness has been the measure of success in the broadcas...

"Powerful and disturbing. No one who cares about the future of our public life can afford to ignore this book."—Jackson LearsA powerful sequel to Benjamin R. Barber's best-selling Jihad vs. McWorld, Consumed offers a vivid portrait of an overproducing global economy that targets children as consumers in a market where there are never enough shoppers and where the primary goal is no longer to manufacture goods but needs. To explain how and why this has come about, Barber br...

Modern culture’s worship of “how-to” pragmatism has turned us into instruments of efficiency and commerce—but we’re doing more and more about things that mean less and less. We constantly ask “how? and still struggle to find purpose and act on what matters. Instead of acting on what we know to be of importance, we wait for bosses to change, we seek the latest fad, we invest in one more degree. Asking how keeps us safe—instead of being led by our hearts into uncharted territory, we keep our...

From a cutting-edge cultural commentator and documentary filmmaker, a bold and brilliant challenge to cherished notions of the Internet as the great democratizing force of our age.The Internet has been hailed as a place where all can be heard and everyone can participate equally. But how true is this claim? In a seminal dismantling of techno-utopian visions, The People's Platform argues that for all that we "tweet" and "like" and "share," the Internet in fact reflects and ...

The distinguished sociologist Richard Sennett surveys major differences between earlier forms of industrial capitalism and the more global, more febrile, ever more mutable version of capitalism that is taking its place. He shows how these changes affect everyday life-how the work ethic is changing; how new beliefs about merit and talent displace old values of craftsmanship and achievement; how what Sennett calls the specter of uselessness” haunts professionals as well as manual workers;...

Trenchantly on point and bursting with insight, anthropologist Grant McCracken shows American corporations how keeping a finger on the pulse of contemporary cultural trends can change their business practices for the better -- and ahead of the curve.Levi-Strauss, the jeans and apparel maker, missed out on the hip-hop trend. They didn't realize that those kids in baggy jeans represented a whole new -- and lucrative -- market opportunity, one they could have seen com...

How are children-and their parents-affected by the world's most influential corporation? Henry A. Giroux explores the surprisingly diverse ways in which Disney, while hiding behind a cloak of innocence and entertainment, strives to dominate global media and shape the desires, needs, and futures of today's children.

In this landmark work on corporate power, especially as it relates to women, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, the distinguished Harvard management thinker and consultant, shows how the careers and self-images of the managers, professionals, and executives, and also those of the secretaries, wives of managers, and women looking for a way up, are determined by the distribution of power and powerlessness within the corporation. This new edition of her award-winning book has a major new afterward in whic...