The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Works of popular psychology and popular sociology are differentiated from academic works of the same genres by their comparative accessibility to a broader audience and their flexibility of purpose and design. Works of "pop" psychology and sociology often appear on bestseller lists and win mainstream literary awards, while many of the most highly regarded and influential academic works in the same subjects may be known only to subject-matter experts in their fields. The rapidly growing popularity of pop psychology and sociology is a late-20th century phenomenon that persists into the present day. In terms of sales and influence, Gladwell is one of the most successful authors in this genre.

Successful pop psychology/sociology books take compelling concepts and theories from the academic realm and communicate them to mass audiences with a minimum of specialty jargon, or specialized language. Gladwell's communication of concepts such as broken windows theory and famous studies like the Stanford prison experiment in The Tipping Point demonstrates this process. He removes some nuance from his discussion of these subjects in adapting the original academic studies, but due to his efforts, many more people now understand basic insights about these studies than they would if the concepts had remained limited to an academic audience. Gladwell removes most jargon from his explanations but defines any terms that it is necessary to use. For example, in his explanation of the concept of “geometric progression” (11), he provides the example of folding one piece of paper dozens of times to help make this term comprehensible to a non-expert reader.

In the late-20th century and continuing into the 21st, many successful works of popular psychology and sociology became bestsellers and award winners while also becoming notorious and controversial in academic circles. In fact, a defining feature of these popular works is the extremely polarized response from members of the academic community. Gladwell’s work exemplifies this: The Tipping Point sold millions of copies and was ranked by The Guardian as the 94th greatest book of the 21st century so far, but it was also vehemently criticized by academics who disagree with some of his conclusions. The importance Gladwell places on broken windows theory to explain the sudden fall of New York City’s crime rate in the mid-1990s is one of his most contested points. Respected commentators such as Steven Levitt—the author of Freakonomics, another highly successful work of popular sociology—refute Gladwell's interpretation of this theory's impact. Another example of popular works that provoked a backlash is Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, an interdisciplinary work published in 1996 that won the Pulitzer Prize but was also criticized by academics like Kathleen Lowrey for understating the West’s history of colonial imperialist criminality.

The interdisciplinary nature of these popular works is another defining feature of their genre. Gladwell’s works tend to be positioned more as popular sociology than as psychology, but he incorporates aspects of both fields, in addition to history and cultural studies. Popular works differ in their target audiences and their methodology from academic studies. An academic journal article is written for an audience of expert readers in the field and uses dense, discipline-specific language to present its specialized research in dialogue with other publications and discussions within the discipline. In contrast, popular works incorporate research and observations from a plethora of sources, fields of study, and genres to convey their arguments in language that is accessible to a broader readership. Gladwell, for example, meshes history and sociology in his explanation of the importance of Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen by tying these concepts to the story of Paul Revere, which is likely to be familiar to most US readers, and writing in a journalistic style rather than an academic one.