What Is the Tipping Point Concept? Malcolm Gladwell on the Book, Law of the Few (2002)
Gladwell defines a tipping point as "the moment of critical mass, the
threshold, the boiling point." The book seeks to explain and describe
the "mysterious" sociological changes that mark everyday life. As
Gladwell states, "Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread
like viruses do." The examples of such changes in his book include the
rise in popularity and sales of Hush Puppies shoes in the mid-1990s and
the steep drop in the New York City crime rate after 1990.
Malcolm
Gladwell and his co-partner, John Decker both received an estimated
US$1--1.5 million advance for The Tipping Point, which sold 1.7 million
copies by 2006. In the wake of the book's success, Gladwell was able to
earn as much as $40,000 per lecture. Sales increased again in 2006 after
the release of Gladwell's next book, Blink.
Some of Malcolm
Gladwell's analysis as to why the phenomenon of the "tipping point"
occurs (particularly in relation to his idea of the "law of the few")
and its unpredictable elements[16] is based on the 1967 small-world
experiment by social psychologist Stanley Milgram. Milgram distributed
letters to 160 students in Nebraska, with instructions that they be sent
to a stockbroker in Boston (not personally known to them) by passing
the letters to anyone else that they believed to be socially closer to
the target. The study found that it took an average of six links to
deliver each letter. Of particular interest to Gladwell was the finding
that just three friends of the stockbroker provided the final link for
half of the letters that arrived successfully.[17] This gave rise to
Gladwell's theory that certain types of people are key to the
dissemination of information.
In 2003, Duncan Watts, a network theory
physicist at Columbia University, repeated the Milgram study by using a
web site to recruit 61,000 people to send messages to 18 targets
worldwide.[18] He successfully reproduced Milgram's results (the average
length of the chain was approximately six links). However, when he
examined the pathways taken, he found that "hubs" (highly connected
people) were not crucial. Only 5% of the e-mail messages had passed
through one of the hubs. This casts doubt on Gladwell's assertion that
specific types of people are responsible for bringing about large levels
of change.
Watts pointed out that if it were as simple as finding
the individuals that can disseminate information prior to a marketing
campaign, advertising agencies would presumably have a far higher
success rate than they do. He also stated that Gladwell's theory does
not square with much of his research into human social dynamics
performed in the last ten years.[19]
Economist Steven Levitt and
Malcolm Gladwell have a running dispute about whether the fall in New
York City's crime rate can be attributed to the actions of the police
department and the "Fixing Broken Windows" effect (as claimed in The
Tipping Point). In his book Freakonomics, Levitt attributes the decrease
in crime to two primary factors: 1) a drastic increase in the number of
police officers trained and deployed on the streets as well the hiring
of Raymond W. Kelly as police commissioner (owing to efforts made by
former mayor David Dinkins) and 2) a decrease in the number of unwanted
children because of Roe v. Wade, causing crime to drop nationally, in
all major cities, "Even in Los Angeles, a city notorious for bad
policing."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tipp...
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