Gladwellian Pop versus Academic Scholarship (or, who is the David and who the Goliath?)

The internet has been bubbling with fascinating debates about the value and merits of Gladwell’s latest book David and Goliath (as a side, I have title envy – one of my subtitles in Chapter 9 of Talent Wants to Be Free is David and Goliath in a Competitive World and in presentations about my whistleblowing scholarship I have a slide titled David v. Goliath. So before the Gladwell book came out I was thinking about using that title for a next project.).

There are different heated strands in the debates to be had about the new Gladwell book, some of them about the conservative tilt in telling heroic stories of overcoming poverty against all odds and reframing of all social challenges as an individual’s opportunity to excel. The Guardian has an awesome parody of
the book that gives you a taste of how absurd and irritating such a zealous message, about overcoming adversity on your own, can get.

But I wanted to raise here a different aspect of the debate which possibly relates to our navel gazing conversations about our role as scholars and researchers. My stance is that there is important and wide room for both serious academic and pop non-fiction, as long as we can tell the difference. Psychologist Dan Gilbert who does both the serious and the pop tweeted yesterday, “Gladwell-hating scientists are like pop-hating classical snobs. Lighten up: it’s just for dancing! MG is the best ambassador we ever had.” There is a lot of benefit from freakonomics style books getting a broad lay audience interested in research and scholarly ideas. The danger lies in not being able to tell the difference, which might be what some commentators are worried about.

I think though many of the haters, to use Gilbert’s phrase, are more along the lines of mainstream haters, the way we commonly use the term - they get a kick out of snobbery or they are simply jealous of Gladwellian popularity. What do you think?