ABSTRACT
Books about business were a backwater in the modern American publishing industry until the early 1980s, when they emerged not only as blockbusters but also, in some cases, as works of considerable literary interest. The Eighties catalyzed the popularity of three categories of business books that have shown enduring appeal over the decades: The business narrative, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) memoir, and the business guru book. Then, a writer for the New Yorker magazine, Malcolm Gladwell, pioneered a fourth category with “The Tipping Point”: Books that popularized research from academic social scientists that could be useful to executives in management or marketing. We explore the growth of the field from the 1980s to the present.
