New Books in Economic and Business History

New Books Network
  • 4.9 (13)
  • Books
  • Updated Weekly

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork

  1. 4h ago

    Billionaire Backlash

    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 unchecked wealth that may be missed by conventional polling endeavors — and how high-profile scandals mobilize this sentiment into concrete regulatory reform. From the fiasco of Cambridge Analytica and controversies over AI data centers to the rising political tension surrounding billionaires, this conversation offers a nuanced, "possibilist" framework for how public outrage can revitalize democratic institutions and establish essential guardrails for modern capitalism. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  2. Sep 7

    Kevin Van Meter and Robert Ovetz eds. "Points of Departure: Refusal of Work and the Crisis of Capitalism: the Collected Writings of Harry Cleaver" (Common Notions, 2026)

    “The general thrust of capitalist policy in this period aims at the intensified imposition of work in response to ongoing struggle against it.” —Harry Cleaver, “Work Is Still the Central Issue: New Words for New Worlds,” in Points of Departure, ed. Robert Ovetz and Kevin Van Meter, p. 35. What changes if we begin the history of capitalism not with what capital does to workers, but with what workers force capital to do? This reversal helps set Harry Cleaver’s approach to Marxism apart from more traditional accounts of capitalism and labor. In Points of Departure: Refusal of Work and the Crisis of Capitalism, editors Robert Ovetz and Kevin Van Meter bring together Cleaver’s writings from several decades, including hard-to-find and previously untranslated work. The first volume in Common Notions’ new Class Compositions series presents Cleaver’s work not simply as theory, but as a practical way of making sense of everyday struggles from the worker’s standpoint. The refusal of work, unwaged labor, class composition, capitalist crisis, and self-valorization take on renewed significance amid contemporary struggles over work and organization. Greek and Turkish translations are also in the works. Listeners may know Cleaver from his landmark 1979 book Reading Capital Politically. For more than five decades, he has helped develop what became known as autonomist Marxism, an approach that places working-class self-activity at the center of its analysis. In this interview Ovetz and Van Meter discuss the traditions from which his work emerged, and what they hope a new generation of readers might do with it in their search for alternatives. Although more conventional accounts of political economy often begin with companies restructuring workplaces, introducing new technologies, moving investment, or tightening workplace discipline. Cleaver instead, turns the perspective around by asking what forms of worker resistance may have compelled capital to make those changes in the first place. That reversal in turn raises questions the editors grapple with, such as: How do everyday acts of resistance become collective power? How can we demonstrate that corporate restructuring is actually a response to worker resistance, and what might other approaches add to or supplement Cleaver’s inversion of class perspective? And when workers create organizations of their own, how can those institutions preserve autonomy without hardening into less responsive bureaucracies? Drawing on concepts like workers’ inquiry, workplace cooperation, self-valorization, cooperatives, as well as the significance of Zapatistas, we consider what it means to move beyond refusing existing forms of work toward creating new forms of collective life. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  3. Sep 5

    Autumn Lorimer Linford, "Extra! Extra! A History of America's Girl Newsies" (U Nebraska Press, 2026)

    American pop culture loves newsies. The children who bawled out headlines and sold newspapers on city streets in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been depicted countless times in movies, Broadway shows, books, music, and more, but somehow it’s only ever the stories of newsboys that are told. Scholarly literature too has focused mostly on boy newsies. Yet for nearly as long as there were newspapers in the United States, there were also newsgirls. Girl newsies were photographed, interviewed, studied, argued over, and eventually absorbed into the collective “newsboys” and forgotten. Extra! Extra! A History of America's Girl Newsies (U Nebraska Press, 2026) by Dr. Autumn Lorimer Linford offers a corrective, demonstrating the importance of newsgirls as early news workers and as symbols of child labor and gender reform efforts. Sometimes younger than ten years old and from impoverished families, girl newsies were already vulnerable to exploitation from the newspaper publishing industry, which relied heavily on child labor during the “golden age” of journalism. However, the newsgirls of this period contributed much to news labor, and they were important to the discussions concerning childhood, child labor reform, and women’s changing societal roles. Properly integrating newsgirls into the history of newsies dismantles archetypes and enables a deeper understanding of child news labor. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  4. Sep 4

    Alfie Marcus on How Great Companies Can Rise Again

    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 research and teaching, seeking to understand why great companies struggle and how they can best chart a path back to success. Many people are familiar with the remarkable story of Apple, including its initial success, implosion, and the triumphant return of co-founder Steve Jobs. Most companies, even great ones, are not like Apple. They rise to prominence, plateau, lose relevance, and must navigate complex market conditions. Each chapter in Comeback presents a case study, walking readers through the companies major challenges, prompting them to think about how they might handle the issues faced by companies like Amazon, Intel, Pepsi, and Disney. For every major company that manages to reinvent itself, there are dozens that failed: think of Bed, Bath, and Beyond, Circuit City, Blockbuster, Toys R Us, Yahoo and many, many more. There are no simple solutions, magic bullets, or easy paths, even for well-positioned incumbents. To help listeners understand what makes for a great comeback story, I’m pleased today to speak with Alfie Marcus. Alfred A. Marcus is a professor and Edson Spencer endowed chair in strategy and technological leadership at Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  5. Sep 4

    Baruch Fischhoff, "Bounded Disciplines and Unbounded Problems: A Vision for Management Science" (Oxford UP, 2025)

    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 incentives, training, and collaboration so scholars can excel in their discipline while still meaningfully engaging with intractable societal problems. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  6. Sep 2

    Xiaochang Li, "Divination Engines: Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Making of Algorithmic Culture" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

    Since the advent of computers, society has fantasized about conversing with machines. In Divination Engines: Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Making of Algorithmic Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2026), Dr. Xiaochang Li shows readers how that dream both fueled the demand for data and set the stage for today’s generative AI.  With original research and clear explanations, Dr. Li elucidates the origins of what’s known as natural language processing (NLP) and the heated twentieth-century debates between computer scientists, linguists, and communication engineers that shaped today’s technology. Starting with early devices that recorded, analyzed, and attempted to interpret human speech, she demonstrates how computer speech recognition, particularly efforts led by Bell Labs and IBM, advanced technology by deemphasizing linguistic meaning in favor of statistical prediction. In other words, researchers gradually abandoned systems that sought to understand human language, opting instead for work-arounds that simply predicted patterns in speech and text data. That solution became incredibly and surprisingly adaptable. As Dr. Li reveals, transforming linguistic questions into engineering ones ushered in the routine operation of search engines, spam filters, and the varied content sorting and recommendation mechanisms that regulate the access, circulation, and legitimacy of information across every platform. But this has all come at the cost of forever requiring copious and ever-growing amounts of new data. At its core, Divination Engines illuminates how the artifacts of human communication—speech, text, and images—have become both the fodder for and products of computers. This connection between communication and computation, Li shows, has given rise to data-driven analytics, machine learning, and today’s algorithmic culture. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  7. Aug 30

    Tom Trier, "Blue Sea, Black Gold, Red Banner: The South Caucasus and Scandinavia, 1880s–1920s" (Northern Illinois UP, 2026)

    Blue Sea, Black Gold, Red Banner: The South Caucasus and Scandinavia, 1880s–1920s (Northern Illinois University Press, 2026) tells the story of the historical connections between two geographically distant and culturally distinct regions on the edges of Europe: Scandinavia and the South Caucasus. From the late nineteenth century, maritime trade fostered new commercial links and consular relations. Scandinavian merchants, particularly in Batumi and Baku, played key roles. The discovery of oil along the Caspian Sea shores attracted Scandinavian entrepreneurs, notably the Swedish Nobel family, helping to develop Baku into a booming industrial hub. Tom Trier focuses on the years of upheaval surrounding World War I and the collapse of the Russian Empire, when Georgia—along with Armenia and Azerbaijan—briefly emerged as an independent republic. The four-decade relationship ended abruptly during the Bolshevik Red Army's invasion of the South Caucasus from 1920 to 1921. Drawing on both Scandinavian and Georgian perspectives, Blue Sea, Black Gold, Red Banner examines how Nordic merchants, consuls, and diplomats navigated the shifting political landscape and how Georgia's social democratic leadership looked to neutral Scandinavia as a gateway to broader European political, diplomatic, and economic engagement. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

  8. Aug 28

    Mark S. LeClair, "Foul Play in the Nonprofit Sector: Analyzing Corruption in US Charities" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)

    It is quite easy to find corruption within nonprofits. This is particularly the case in the subsector of not-for-profits that are incorporated as traditional 501(c)(3) entities. With the continuing erosion of public confidence in charities, these institutions must act now, both individually and collectively, to bolster trust and ensure public support for nonprofits that has been a hallmark of American democracy. This book explores the causes of malfeasance in the nonprofit realm. It examines how the current inadequate regulatory environment—together with inherent “agency” problems―can lead organizations astray as they turn away from fulfilling donor wishes to instead act in their own self-interest. The book highlights the distinction between “soft corruption” in the nonprofit sector and “hard corruption.” The former includes the misuse of donor funds that do not cross the line into illegality and the latter covers explicitly illegal misappropriation of contributions. In Foul Play in the Nonprofit Sector: Analyzing Corruption in US Charities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), economist Mark S. LeClair provides constructive overviews regarding charity evaluation. Is it truly fair to judge nonprofits on their financials? The financial figures so frequently dictate the value of a nonprofit, and this often isn’t the best way to judge a charity’s performance. The manuscript includes suggestions for internal sectoral changes and regulatory reforms that can deter corruption at nonprofits. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

See All (600)

Ratings & Reviews

4.9
out of 5
13 Ratings

About

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork

Information

You Might Also Like