New Books in Business, Management, and Marketing

Critical Management Studies and Librarianship: Critical Perspectives on Library Management Education and Practice (Library Juice Press, November 2024) introduces key concepts in the field of critical management studies (CMS) and critiques dominant theories and concepts in the management field. The aim of CMS is to denaturalize dominant theories in the management field by introducing works and research from other fields (e.g., queer feminist theories, postcolonial studies, critical race theory). In this edited volume, Silvia Vong brings together contributions that offer critical perspectives on dominant CMS issues contextualized in LIS management education and practice such as strategic planning, consumer and assessment culture, and management institutes to name a few. In addition, the book includes discussions around approaches to leading using research and literature outside of the business and management literature to redress epistemic injustice in management education and provide inclusive and diverse perspectives on leadership.Silvia Vong is an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream at University of Toronto’s iSchool. She was a professional librarian for 15 years in various roles at different Canadian universities ranging from liaison librarian to head of public services to associate dean of scholarly, research, and creative activities. Her experience in teaching, collections, scholarly communications, and management contributed to her research as a professional in critical management studies in librarianship as well as addressing anti-racism in the profession.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom (2022) and The Social Movement Archive (2021), and co-editor of Armed By Design: Posters and Publications of Cuba’s Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (2025). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this podcast, Matthew talks about his late entry into entrepreneurship, taking advantage of opportunities that emerged as Kindle offered a new way to distribute books. In his career as a journalist with well known business publications he enjoyed talking to entrepreneurs, even having his editor turn down his pitch to interview Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Starting a business was something he had always been open to, but journalism came first until quite late in life. He shares how his initial idea of publishing short-form books from well-known authors pivoted into the bigger opportunity of publishing back catalogues. Matthew describes how and why larger publishers missed the boat due to conservative pricing and a feeling that ebooks might just "go away." He discusses the importance of a "problem-solving mindset," persistence, and being ready to hustle. We learn what being a fiction author has in common with being an entrepreneur, and how crucial it is to handle and manage rejection. Matthew also delves into his path to an exit, the loyalty he felt to his authors and staff, and the challenges of management and leadership. He particularly highlights the learning process of dealing with the fact that the founder is often more motivated than the people they hire.Links relevant to the interview.Matthew’s books Death Force seriesLume Books Joffe Books - acquired by Lume BooksMatthew’s Bio Daily Telegraph - columnist - 2013-2024 Money Week - columnist - 2008-2024 Bloomberg - columnist - 1999-2012 The Sunday Times - Reporter and columnist - 1992-2000 Business magazine - reported - 1988-1991 Asiaweek, Hong Kong - 1986-1988 Financial Adviser magazine - 1985-1986 Founder - Lume Books - 2013- 2023 Author Death Force - Hodder Headline - 2010 Fireforce - Hodder Headline - 2011 Shadow Force - Hodder Headline - 2012 Ice Force - Hodder Headline - 2013 Insecurity - Random House - 1997 The Watchmen - Random House - 1999 Education:Balliol College, Oxford. Politics, Philosophy & Economics.Richard Lucas’s TEDx talk on Opportunity Readiness and on Why everyone should embrace rejection Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As Twitter enters its own adolescence, both the users and the creators of this famous social media platform find themselves engaging with a tool that certainly could not have been imagined at its inception. In their engaging book Twitter: A Biography (NYU Press, 2020), Jean Burgess and Nancy K. Baym (@nancybaym) tell the fascinating and surprising story of how this platform developed from a quirky SMS tool for publicly sharing intimate details of personal life to a major source of late-breaking news, political activism, and even governmental communication. This story explores how many of Twitter's most ubiquitous and iconic conventions were not systematically rolled out from a centralized corporate strategy, but so often driven by users who continued to innovate within the limitations of the platform they had to democratically create the platform they desired. Yet this story highlights the tensions along the way as Twitter has adapted to new and unforeseen challenges, business models, and social consequences as the experiments of social media have become increasingly powerful, influential, and contested. This book is a must read for anyone interested in the wild and changing landscape of internet communication and communities. Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, NBN founder & CEO Marshall Poe talks about his early plans to become Michael Jordan, his journey from a professorship in Russian history to his fascination with communications, and his present role as a podcasting entrepreneur. We chat about the surprising alignments between the craft of history and entrepreneurship, the power of observation, the courage to try new things and fail and fail again, and the great fun of finding a solution to someone's problem. Marshall reminds us how humans are built to watch and listen rather than read and suggests how understanding speech as performance rather than content messaging can help us understand Donald Trump's popularity. We also wonder who will listen to AI-generated podcasts and whether universities do enough to prepare students for situations of ambiguity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The key to a life well-lived is prioritization, but people rarely explain how to do it effectively.  In Managing Priorities: How to Create Better Plans and Make Smarter Decisions (Rosenfeld Media, 2024), Harry Max provides a useful guide. He explains how learning to prioritize is helpful in life as well as at work. He explains how he - and his clients - feel a sense of freedom, as though a weight is lifted, when it's clear what is most important and they are able to focus on those things. In this relatable approach, Max acknowledges that avoidance behavior is natural, and clarifies the need to understand the costs of not prioritizing intentionally.Drawing on methods used at Apple, DreamWorks, NASA, Adobe, Google, Microsoft, and beyond, Harry Max presents a practical method that you can apply either for single large decisions or for ongoing efforts. In the book he introduces the "daily boot", a way to start the day by clearing out the fog of competing efforts, and his DEGAP® method: Decide, Engage, Gather, Arrange, Prioritize. Max demystifies common prioritization frameworks by providing guidance on how and when to use them, either together or separately. These include the Eisenhower Matrix, the Analytic Hierarchy Process, Paired Comparison, and Stack Ranking among others. Mentioned resources: The New How by Nilofer Merchant The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists by Richard P. Rumelt The Kano model by Noriaki Kano. It's not a prioritization framework per se, but a valuable resource for understanding what is important as it relates to customer satisfaction.  Author recommended reading: Wiring the Winning Organization by Gene Kim and Steven J. Spear Creativity, Inc by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace Hosted by Meghan Cochran Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As part of our informal series on artificial intelligence, Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Matt Beane, Assistant Professor of Technology Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara, about his book The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in the Age of Intelligent Machines (HarperCollins, 2024). Beane outlines the fascinating forms of research he did - both his own ethnographic work and reanalyzing the data of other ethnographers - to better understand how automating technologies are being adopted in organizational settings and how such adoption may threaten traditional mentor-mentee relationships through which junior workers learn crucial skills. Beane also discusses ways in which the worst negative skill-learning outcomes may be avoided and his own work trying to create new training systems to improve our current situation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks to Benjamin Shestakofsky about his book, Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality (U California Press, 2024). Shestakofsky is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is affiliated with AI at Wharton and the Center on Digital Culture and Society. His research centers on how digital technologies are affecting work and employment, organizations, and economic exchange. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Imagining After Capitalism (Triarchy Press, 2025) is the culmination of a decade-long exploration of what comes next after capitalism. It leverages previous work in developing foresight methodologies, which are featured in two previous books: Teaching about the Future and Thinking about the Future (2nd edition), both with Peter Bishop. It also leverages my work in identifying long-term values shifts—which are pivotal to After Capitalism—that are highlighted in ConsumerShift: How Changing Values Are Reshaping the Consumer Landscape.Arguing that the absence of compelling positive alternatives keeps us stuck in a combination of fear, denial, and false hope, he offers three “guiding images” for the long-term future: an environmentally driven Circular Commons, a socially and politically driven Non-Workers’ Paradise, and a technology-driven Tech-Led Abundance.Imagining After Capitalism argues “first things first.” Let us first decide where we want to go before building detailed plans for getting there. The three “guiding images” are not the answers, but are intended to provoke discussion about the possibilities.The book offers an alternative to the prevailing doom and gloom and suggests there are indeed positive alternatives out there and it’s time to get started on crafting a different path to the future!Andy Hines brings more than three decades of experience as a futurist to the Imagining After Capitalism work. He has explored the future from multiple vantage points. He is currently an Associate Professor and Program Coordinator at the University of Houston Foresight program. He also spent a decade as an organizational futurist, first with Kellogg’s and then Dow Chemical. His consulting futurists roles included Coates & Jarratt, Inc., Social Technologies/Innovaro and currently his own firm Hinesight. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Streaming Music, Streaming Capital (Duke University Press, 2024)  provides a much-needed study of the political economy of music streaming, drawing from Western Marxism, social reproduction theory, eco-socialist thought and more to approach the complex and highly contested relationship between music and capital. By attending to the perverse ways in which recorded music has been ultimately decommodified under the current regime of music production, circulation and consumption, Eric Drott explores issues that far exceed music - consumer surveillance, Silicon Valley monopolism, the crisis of care, capitalist extractivism and the climate emergency - while showing us how the streaming economy is thoroughly imbricated, and implicated, in these processes. Drott's rigorous and wide-ranging analysis thus offers novel ways of understanding music, culture, digitalisation and capitalism in present and future tenses .Eric Drott is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Texas at Austin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, I sat down with Alex Keller, then a Digital Content Producer at CBS News Texas, to talk about his unconventional career path. From studying biology and neuroscience to earning an MA in history, Alex’s journey is a testament to the unexpected ways history skills can shape careers. We dove into how his history background prepared him for his role at CBS, where he uses storytelling to help audiences make sense of important community issues. Alex explained how skills like analyzing sources, breaking down complex ideas, providing context, and writing have been invaluable. He also shared his thoughts on journalism’s deeper purpose—not just reporting the facts but helping people understand why they matter. If you’re a history grad—or just curious about how to turn history skills into real-world impact—this episode is for you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices