If you’re looking for the best books on corporate power and society’s response, this week’s Ink & Time curation pairs classics on monopoly power, media manipulation, and managerial conformity with issues that matter in 2025.
If you’re not yet aware, Enshittification was coined by writer Cory Doctorow to describe the process by which online platforms and technology services gradually degrade in quality, prioritizing profits and shareholders over user and customer value.
But enshittification, Australia’s word of the year in 2024, is only the most recent corporate phenomenon to inspire backlash. Pushback has been ongoing since the dawn of capitalism.
Start with Ida Tarbell’s History of the Standard Oil Company for the original antitrust playbook; Compare with today’s tech platform cases.
Read H. G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay to understand hype cycles and speculative finance; Relate to bubbles from crypto to “miracle” wellness.
George Gissing’s New Grub Street and William Dean Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes dissect the content economy and media-capital ties long before algorithms.
Upton Sinclair’s Oil! illuminates resource politics; Still driving global trends!
Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, John Dos Passos’s The Big Money, William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man, and Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit unpack the workspace as a machine for status, conformity, and control, not unlike our own automated tools.
Our lists are always curated, not scraped: we cut duplications, emphasize public-domain access, and added a “why it matters today” to help you connect long-lost classics to present-day issues.
Before diving in, here’s one from the Ink & Time archives, still acutely relevant to the tension between corporate accountability and customer consequences.
13 Classic Novels on Business and Power
1. A Hazard of New Fortunes
William Dean Howells, 1890. 👉 Read on Internet Archive
A sweeping panorama of New York life at the dawn of modern capitalism. Journalists, workers, and elites collide in a city shaped by property and power, revealing how media and business interests intertwine.
Why it matters today: Upon reading it, one wonders if anything has really changed, as media still panders to big advertising, pitting the power of capital against any potential challengers, including labor and even customers. Serious consequences for the forces shaping modern democracy and society.
2. New Grub Street
George Gissing, 1891. 👉 Read on Project Gutenberg
A realist novel about writers and publishers in late Victorian London, showing how the business of content creation distorts creative life. It’s a prescient portrait of the “creator economy” a century and more before its time.
Why it matters today: The late 19th century classic beautifully illustrates today’s struggles of writers, artists, and creators struggling under the weight of algorithm-driven publishing and platform economies. The tools have changed but the economic dynamics remain largely the same.
3. The History of the Standard Oil Company
Ida M. Tarbell, 1904. 👉 Read on Project Gutenberg
A touchstone of investigative journalism that unpacked and called out Rockefeller’s monopoly practices, to enduring fame. Tarbell graphically documents the inner workings of corporate power consolidation and the related threats to a democratic America.
Why it matters today: It presents a timeless playbook for understanding the societal dynamics in relation to current day big tech, antitrust, and monopoly power.
What to read to understand antitrust today?
Tech Monopoly by Herbert Hovenkamp (2025): Clear analysis of antitrust in digital markets, specifically concerning platform dynamics, and market power.
Antitrust: Principles, Cases, and Materials by Daniel Francis and Christopher Jon Sprigman: A contemporary and accessible textbook, ideal for both foundational knowledge and detailed case studies on enforcement trends.
Antitrust by Amy Klobuchar: Widely recommended for its examination of antitrust enforcement in the US and how it affects both policy and daily life.
4. The Deluge
David Graham Phillips, 1905. 👉 Read on Project Gutenberg
A dark muckraking story about Wall Street financiers and their grip on American politics. The novel exposes greed and corruption within the financial elite providing prescient forewarning to today’s fight over inequality and economic inclusiveness, and the machinery of American democracy.
Why it matters today: Elite financial capture over the institutions of the state, and capture of the regulators, still dominate headlines in 2025 from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. These plutocratic trends are nothing new, so go back 120 years to see what the methods of control looked like then.
5. Tono-Bungay
H. G. Wells, 1909. 👉 Read on Project Gutenberg
A sharp and biting satire of unproven and illegitimate medicine, speculative finance, and social ambition. Wells investigates the rise and fall of a fraudulent business empire, exposing the deep psychology of capitalism and hype, with dire consequences.
Why it matters today: It’s a reflection of our contemporary economy full of crypto bubbles, unproven health fads, and ponzi-marketing “miracle cures.” There are a lot of modern parallels to make and Wells is simply an excellent story-teller for better and worse.
6. The Custom of the Country
Edith Wharton, 1913. 👉 Read on Project Gutenberg
A cutting satire that follows Undine Spragg, a ruthless social climber, perhaps an archetype that never died but only grew more prominent, whose ambitions are fueled by wealth and status. An enduring critique of money, marriage, and the business of social mobility.
Why it matters today: Supercharged by media of all stripes, and self-interested narratives mainstreamed to the point of caricature, wealth-driven ambition and status-chasing are sadly still defining features of corporate and social life in 2025. But do we really understand their roots?
8. The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists
Robert Tressell, 1914. 👉 Read on Project Gutenberg
A classic tale of the working-class featuring British house painters is a raw exposure on how workers’ labor subsidizes the profit of ruthless capitalists. Emotional and radical, Tressell’s novel remains one of the great exposes on the tradition of labor exploitation.
Why it matters today: Today it provides a stark reminder of how power differentials in modern business including wage suppression and cost-cutting, have led to the unfortunate situation for gig workers and the precariat across regions and economies.
9. Babbitt
Sinclair Lewis, 1922. 👉 Read on Internet Archive
George Babbitt is a real-estate salesman who embodies corporate civic religion and provides the vehicle to skewer middle-class conformity. The novel is hilarious and devastating in its timeless critique of unthinking business culture.
Why it matters today: Corporate values still translate to a perverse civic ideology, arguably only more prominent today with the mestasizing of public relations and the ever-present “thought leadership” on platforms ranging from Linked In to the WEF and local newspapers.
Other books like Babbitt applied to modern tech culture:
The Circle, by Dave Eggers - perhaps the most direct contemporary equivalent to Babbitt as related to Silicon Valley culture.
The Startup Wife, by Tahmima Anam - provides a feminist lens on tech culture conformity.
Microserfs, by Douglas Coupland - published in 1995, it serves as a foundational treatise on early tech culture satire.
10. Oil!
Upton Sinclair, 1927. 👉 Read on Internet Archive
An epic tale describing the rise and dominance of the American oil industry, and its steady sidekicks of political corruption, and manipulation of public perceptions. Sinclair is the master of explaining the entanglement of business, government, and media in shaping narratives and the mechanics of modern economic power.
Why it matters today: What more to say? Oil still drives geopolitics and sadly, climate policy, situating most societies in a quagmire of resource economics and environmental calamity. It would be hard to argue intelligently about the oil and gas industries without having read or being familiar with Sinclair’s classic take-down.
Looking for books like “Manufacturing Consent” for beginners?
Propaganda (1928) by Edward Bernays remains essential reading. As the "father of public relations," Bernays wrote this surprisingly accessible book explaining how public opinion can be engineered.
The Politics of News Media (1986) by Michael Parenti is frequently recommended as the most accessible alternative to Manufacturing Consent, published two years before Chomsky and Herman's work, covering similar ground.
Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman (1985) examines how television fundamentally changes public discourse. While focused on TV rather than news media specifically, Postman's analysis of how entertainment formats degrade serious discussion remains highly relevant to social media today.
11. The Big Money
John Dos Passos, 1936. 👉 Read on Internet Archive
As part of his famous U.S.A. trilogy, this innovative novel combines reportage, biography, and stream-of-consciousness techniques to engagingly illustrate corporate America’s unceasing influence on culture and mindsets.
Why it matters today: The fragmented style could be a precursor to attention-distracting social media posts and weirdly portraying a modern cultural milieu totally saturated by commerce and moneyed-interests. Pick it up in hard copy if you want to prevent digital distractions.
12. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
Sloan Wilson, 1955. 👉 Read about it on Wikipedia
A World War II veteran struggles to navigate postwar corporate America creates an engaging and enduring story that is highly relatable to modern times. The novel unpacks the moral compromises and personal costs of a career-driven character in a formative era of growing corporate conformity.
Why it matters today: How far have we come, and in the right or wrong direction? The work anticipates the modern struggles balancing work, family, and personal integrity in today’s white-collar world, when the stakes on mental health and social cohesian are naturally higher than ever. Don’t miss this early precursor of what many business people are most concerned about today.
13. The Organization Man
William H. Whyte, 1956. 👉 Read about it on Wikipedia
A seminal work of social criticism that tackles the persistent challenges of corporate bureaucracy. Conformity, groupthink, and managerial ideology are sadly enduring forces that shape individual ambition and American society, then and now, and undoubtedly in future years to come.
Why it matters today: For all the talk about resetting corporate culture, promoting wellbeing and workplace inclusiveness this 70 year old playbook gives useful food for thought in seeking to understand the phenomenon of corporate bureaucracy, from Big Consulting to Big Tech and really Big Corporate Everything.
Want more of the best novels about office conformity?
Joseph Heller's "Something Happened" (1974) offers one of the darkest examinations of corporate life ever written. Following middle manager Bob Slocum through his fears, anxieties, and moral compromises, Heller creates a devastating portrait of how corporate culture can corrupt the human spirit.
David Foster Wallace's "The Pale King" (2011), though unfinished at the time of his death, represents perhaps the most ambitious attempt to address the philosophical implications of boring, repetitive work. Set in an IRS processing center, the novel explores themes of attention, boredom, and finding meaning in tedious labor.
Ling Ma's "Severance" (2018) cleverly uses an apocalypse as metaphor for the routinized, mindless nature of contemporary work life. The novel's protagonist continues her corporate job even as the world ends around her, highlighting how work can become a form of living death.
Ink & Time Tuesday Curations are produced for readers who want to discover overlooked but resonant works of fiction and nonfiction within thematic areas such as this one on business, power, and society.
Have a request or a suggestion for future Curations? Or individual books to feature, works you have read but think most people are unaware of? Drop a note in the comments or write to us directly.