1 The Tyranny of Structurelessness – Jo Freeman | Feminist theory / organizational sociology | 1972 | Why groups that pretend to have no structure quietly grow cliques and informal power anyway. | You’re stuck in a “flat” team where decisions mysteriously get made in side chats. | Reads like someone finally turning the lights on in every “we don’t do hierarchy here” workplace I’ve ever known. I underlined half of it and immediately thought about three different project teams. |
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2 Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk – Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky | Behavioral economics / psychology | 1979 | Shows how we systematically misjudge gains and losses, caring more about not losing than about winning. | You’re trying to understand why everyone freaks out over small risks but shrugs at big, fuzzy ones. | Not exactly bedtime reading, but once you get the basic curve-in-your-head idea, you start spotting it everywhere from salary talks to splitting the bill with friends. |
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3 Walking in the City (from The Practice of Everyday Life) – Michel de Certeau | Cultural theory / urban studies | 1980 | Contrasts the god’s‑eye, planner’s view of the city with the messy, inventive ways ordinary people actually walk it. | You’re taking the long way home and feel like turning your wander into a tiny piece of fieldwork. | This is the one that made me feel less guilty about my habit of ducking down side streets “just to see.” It reads like someone quietly narrating your own city-walking montage. |
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4 Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective – Donna Haraway | Feminist epistemology / science studies | 1988 | Argues that all knowledge is from somewhere and some body, and that admitting our partial views makes science better, not worse. | You’re side‑eyeing claims of “pure objectivity” in a report or study at work. | Dense but oddly energising, like a very good ranty podcast transcript. I kept thinking about dashboards and KPIs and who gets to decide what counts as a “fact” in an office. |
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5 On Face-Work: An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction – Erving Goffman | Sociology / social psychology | 1955 | Dissects all the little rituals we do to save face and help others save theirs in everyday interaction. | You’re replaying a slightly awkward meeting and wondering why that one comment landed so weirdly. | Reads like the script notes for every office conversation ever. After this, you start seeing “face-work” in Slack threads and status updates, not just in dinner‑party faux pas. |
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6 The Myth of the Paperless Office – Abigail Sellen & Richard Harper | Human–computer interaction / workplace studies | 2002 | Explains why paper stubbornly survives in “digital” offices and what that says about how we actually work. | You’re staring at a desk that’s half notebooks, half spreadsheets, and feeling mildly hypocritical. | It’s technically a research‑driven book, but it reads like a very detailed ethnography of our collective stationery habit. Made me feel oddly vindicated about printing slide decks to scribble on the margins. |
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7 The Narrative Construction of Reality – Jerome Bruner | Cognitive psychology / narrative theory | 1991 | Argues that stories aren’t just how we tell what happened; they’re part of how we decide what counts as “real” in the first place. | You’re planning a presentation and trying to explain a messy project without putting everyone to sleep. | This one quietly rewired how I write status reports. Once you see that you’re always choosing a plot, you start asking whose version of the story you’re telling—and who’s missing from the cast. |
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TheLysts
