Where's the beef? Searching for evidence, real or perceived, in bestselling business books

Abstract

Scholars in fields as diverse as management, medicine, and education advocate for the use of evidence-based practice, the “conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of the best available evidence in making decisions” (Rousseau & Gunia, 2016: 669). Yet, even as scholars publish more than a million papers annually, studies suggest that less than 18% are easily accessible to the public (Laasko & Bjork, 2012) and fewer than half receive a single citation (Jasco, 2009). For business disciplines, however, purported best practices are often prescribed via popular literature, including over 17 million books sold in the “business/economics” genre each year (Milliot, 2016). In this study, the top five best-selling business books from 2014 were analyzed by hand to identify and organize more than 1,000 nuanced claims made by the books’ authors. These books were found to differ considerably in the degree to which claims made were accompanied by evidence, real or perceived, as well as in the total number and frequency of claims. However, analysis of ratings and reviews for these books revealed that readers overwhelmingly presumed that all five were authoritative sources of information and not just ‘good reads’. Implications for the diffusion of evidence-based business practice are discussed.