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Stanley Milgram was a young researcher at Yale in the 1960s when he recruited volunteers to help in a psychology experiment. These volunteers were asked to give electric shocks to "learners" whenever they got an answer to a question wrong. The "learners" were in on the deception, and were not actually receiving shocks, but the volunteers were unaware of this. To widespread surprise, Milgram reported that 40 to 65 percent of his volunteers did what the researcher told them, and gave the maximum shock to the "learners" even when they screamed in pain.

Kenneth Waltz's Theory of International Politics created a "scientific revolution" in international relations, starting two major debates. In the 1980s it defined the controversy between the neorealists, who believed that competition between states was inevitable, and the neoliberals, who believed that states could cooperate with each other. As the debate wound down with the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, a second more fundamental debate began.

Published in 1925, The Gift is one of French sociologist Marcel Mauss's few non-collaborative works. In it, he elevates what might appear to be a simple gift from the status of innocent object to something that has the capacity to motivate people and define social relationships. The Gift analyzes cultures across the world and across time, with the way gifts are given and received working as a guide to understanding the rules and traditions of many different societies.

Michel Foucault had already written extensively about medicine, madness, and prisons. But in the latter days of his career, he turned to the subject of sexuality, planning six volumes on the subject. He completed three before dying of an AIDS-related illness in 1984. Foucault's History of Sexuality Vol. 1 is a study of the evolution of cultural ideas about sex in the West since the end of the 17th century. Volume two looked at attitudes toward sex in ancient Greece; volume three investigated sex in ancient Rome.

Traditionally, managers assumed people were lazy and would not work unless strictly controlled. McGregor, however, believed this form of management to be based on faulty assumptions about human nature, and felt that managers should reflect on their assumptions about what motivates people. He proposed they draw on research in psychology and the other social sciences to create working conditions that allow all employees to realize their full human potential.

Some people think nationhood is as old as civilization itself. But for anthropologist, historian, and political scientist Benedict Anderson, nation and nationalism are products of the communication technology of the era known as the modern age, which began in 1500. After the invention of the printing press around 1440, common local languages gradually replaced Latin as the language of print. Ordinary people could now share ideas of their own.

Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics was first published in 1916, three years after his death. The book aims to explain Saussure's theory that all languages share an underlying structure, and that this underlying structure is the same, regardless of historical or cultural context. Although the book marked a break with the traditional, history-focused study of linguistics of the time, Saussure still uses examples based on more traditional studies.

On the Genealogy of Morality was written in 1887 when Friedrich Nietzsche was at the height of his powers as a philosopher and master of German prose writing. Here, he criticizes the idea that there is just one conception of moral goodness, dissecting the contemporary practice of morality and looking at it from a historical viewpoint. Rather than following a metaphysical or religious approach, Nietzsche adopts a naturalistic framework, which is grounded in history and natural science, to understand our concepts of good and evil in the Christianized Western world.

De Beauvoir's book charted the oppression of "the second sex" in terms never before seen in the academic world. Her most startling theory became a rallying cry for the feminist movement: "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." She argued that gender identity was shaped by upbringing in a world ruled by men. A leading light in the existentialist movement, de Beauvoir applied the radical philosophy of personal choice and freedom to argue that women were subjugated in every area of life.

The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 offers a thorough account of the emergence of the antislavery movement in Britain and the United States. But what makes the work unique is the way it explores and unpicks the complex relationships between changes in our understanding of what is moral, the impact of political action, and its effect on social change.

How many books can claim to be so influential as to inspire the development of a whole school of thought? The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle's Metaphysics did exactly that, laying the foundations for a new branch of philosophy - metaphysics - concerned with the cause and nature of being.

Philosopher Judith Butler's 1990 work, Gender Trouble, shook the foundations of feminist theory and changed the conversation about gender. While many thinkers already accepted that "gender" was a category constructed by society rather than defined by one's genitalia, Butler went further and argued that gender is performative - it exists only in the acts that express it. Society determines that wearing makeup is "feminine" - but some men wear makeup. Are they "women"?

A professor at Harvard Business School, Kotter spent years coaching organizations - large and small; successful, less successful, and nearly bankrupt - through their own change processes. Some worked; others didn't. Distilling wisdom from these experiences, Kotter identifies eight common mistakes managers make implementing change. He then uses them to propose an eight-stage model that he argues can lead to successful organizational transformation.

Reflections on the Revolution in France may read like an exercise in political theory. But when it was first published in 1790, Edmund Burke was fighting a real political battle. Burke saw that the Enlightenment ideas that had inspired radical political change in France the year before were beginning to take root in England. He wanted to discredit these dangerous thoughts before they sparked a revolution in his own country.

Social anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard wrote Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande after 20 months' fieldwork with the Azande people of the South Sudan. It became the founding text in the anthropology of witchcraft, and has been hailed as a classic. Although Witchcraft had little impact when it first appeared in 1937, its popularity grew after World War II. Alongside his subsequent work on the Nuer people, Witchcraft established Evans-Pritchard's reputation as an important anthropologist.

More than two centuries after its initial publication in 1781, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason remains perhaps the most influential text in modern philosophy. Kant himself claimed his work as a revolutionary document and insisted that it changed the discipline of philosophy as thoroughly as Copernicus had changed astronomy 300 years earlier, when he said the Earth revolved around the sun and not the other way round.

James E. Lovelock says the Earth (Gaia) is a superorganism, made up of all living things, interacting with the air, the oceans, and the surface rocks of the planet. He suggests Gaia takes an active role in keeping the planet safe for life, with automatic feedback mechanisms making adjustments as needed. Lovelock describes feedback mechanisms that are widely accepted. It is the implication that Gaia is somehow self-aware that is controversial.

Richard Dawkins' 1976 investigation into the science of evolution has become an enormous success, selling over a million copies in 25 languages. Drawing on the work of renowned evolutionary scientists, Dawkins makes his argument about evolution by focusing on the gene itself. While others considered evolution to occur at the level of the individual or the group, here Dawkins sees the process of natural selection differently.

What is history? In his 2001 book In Defence of History, British historian Richard J. Evans debates the very nature of the subject. Certain thinkers known as postmodernists consider history to be not very far removed from a work of fiction, something based on a scholar's own interpretation of the past. Evans, however, argues that historians do not have free reign. Rather, they are constrained and enabled by the nature of the surviving evidence.

Since it was first published in 1973, A Random Walk Down Wall Street has been a highly influential best seller. Burton G. Malkiel demolishes the idea that investment "experts" can predict stock price changes and thereby "beat the market." With all available information that could affect the value of a company's shares known almost instantly to all investors, Malkiel says, shares quickly find the price that reflects that information. This is known as the efficient market hypothesis.