Stephen Partridge is Editorial Director of Business, Finance and Economics at Palgrave Macmillan.

Why bother with the humanities and social sciences? What do these “soft” subjects have to offer the hardnosed world of business, finance and economics? Well, contrary to the views of a depressingly large number of politicians in charge of education around the world, quite a lot, actually.

Palgrave Macmillan is a publisher firmly grounded in HSS and, while our business and economics lists contain a large number of excellent titles drawn from the harder, more analytical parts of these disciplines, we actively seek to draw on our heritage in HSS to explore areas of inter-disciplinary research to add a richness and nuance to our programme seldom seen elsewhere.

The strength and depth of that heritage is best evidenced by our republication of a book we first published back in 1936 – Keynes’ The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money – freshened up with new and lively contributions from Paul Krugman and Robert Skidelsky.

But it is not all about the past, our HSS heritage continues to shape our future. 2018 saw the first publication in a series that is rapidly becoming a flagship example of our HSS flavoured, interdisciplinary approach: Palgrave Studies in Business, Arts and Humanities edited by Samantha Warren and Steven S Taylor. Likewise, the Palgrave Handbook of Workplace Spirituality and Fulfillment will serve as the definitive text in this emerging area.

If I appear to be emphasizing our attention to those softer aspects of our disciplines it is because we believe that it is precisely those areas that offer the more people-centered skills that we need to be helping students develop to enable them to flourish in the AI driven world they will inherit. As an example, Entrepreneurial Negotiation by Samuel Dinnar and Lawrence Susskind presents entrepreneurship as a series of interactions among founders, partners, potential partners, investors and others at various stages of the entrepreneurial process.

That entrepreneurship is more than just compelling offerings, competent business models and securing funding is shown by the insights that the interdisciplinary research published in The Palgrave Handbook of Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Entrepreneurship, which includes contributions from the fields of sociology, philosophy and education policy, as well as cognitive neuroscience, technology and business systems theory.  

It is that approach of blending the “soft” and “hard” sides of our disciplines, and then enriching that blend with multiple perspectives from a variety of disciplines, that serves us so well in our other principal aim: publishing work that has an impact on real world problems, especially those set out in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. This is a focus for Springer Nature as a whole and we are proud of the work we have published in this area, such as Digitized Labor: The Impact of the Internet on Employment. For example, among this book’s many fascinating chapters is one by Jeffrey Sachs, Seth Benzell and Guillermo Lagarda which examines the case for intergenerational wealth and income redistribution to counteract the immiserization that technology may bring.  

Of course, making an impact is easier when more people can access the ideas contained in our books and 2018 saw a bumper year for Open Access publishing. We published the first books in our new Open Access series, Palgrave Studies in Digital Business & Enabling Technologies, and an important work by Sveinung Jørgensen and Lars Jacob Tynes Pedersen on Sustainable Business Model Innovation to name a few.

“Digital” is transforming every aspect of society but it is having a particular impact on the world of finance and it is no surprise that our most popular books in this discipline are on subjects that didn’t exist just a few years ago such as The Economics of Crowdfunding, FinTech Revolution and Regulation of Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technologies.

While novelty and change are fascinating, so too is the past. Returning to my earlier point about Palgrave Macmillan’s heritage in the humanities, An Economist’s Guide to Economic History, with contributions from a veritable who’s who in the field of economic history, looks set to become powerful force for pedagogical change in economics, demonstrating the use of historical thinking in economic research, and advising how to actively engage with economic history in teaching and learning. Likewise in The Palgrave Handbook of Political Economy two celebrated scholars have assembled a superb collection of contributions to reassess the field of political economy and fill a gap in the literature.

Selecting just a handful of titles to showcase from nearly 400 we published in 2018 is an impossible task. I have barely found room for two of our most successful books of the year, the bestselling Cracked It!, by a team of authors from HEC and McGill, which deserves a place on every MBA and executive education programme and our most talked about title, Financial Exposure by Elsie Bean, particularly relevant in the current US and UK political climates, which showcases how bipartisan legislation (in this case on financial fraud and tax abuse) is possible.

The cutting room floor around me is strewn with excellent books that all make important contributions to their field and many of them have the potential to make a meaningful impact on the world outside the academy. And many of them prove that even the calculating and analysis-driven worlds of business, finance and economics are enriched and advanced by insights from the humanities and social sciences.