Mackinac Island's Grand Hotel will have an extra lightning rod during this year's Detroit Regional Chamber conference.
The keynote speaker is author Malcolm Gladwell, a widely read and widely derided pop sociologist.
To his hosts, he's the right voice at the right time for the May 27-30 gathering of about 1,500 business and political leaders.
News release: “Malcolm Gladwell stands out as one of the most impactful, creative thought-leaders of our time, and his brand of forward-thinking is particularly relevant to Michigan,” said Chamber President and CEO Sandy K. Baruah. . . . “Learning from Gladwell’s ability to challenge conventional wisdom can help ensure that the cultural change under way in Michigan continues.”
This year's Mackinac Policy Conference chair, Plunkett Cooney law firm head Henry Cooney, also gushes in the handout:
Few people challenge the way we think about the world like Malcolm Gladwell. . . .Gladwell will certainly help us explore how to challenge conventional thinking.
Or not.
Gladwell does the opposite of challenging conventional thinking, a British scholar asserts in the New Republic two months ago.
"Pretending to present daringly counterintuitive views to his readers, he actually strengthens the hold on them of a view of things that they have long taken for granted," writes John Gray, a professor at the London School of Economics. "While reinforcing beliefs that everyone avows, he evokes in the reader a satisfying sensation of intellectual nonconformity."
The showcase speaker at May's island event, a New Yorker writer since 1996, certainly moves books. Best-sellers include of "The Tipping Point" (2002), "Blink" (2007) and "Outliers" (2011). Gladwell's latest, "David and Goliath," came out in October and creates fresh buzz -- not all favorable.
"He is routinely accused of oversimplifying his material or attacking straw men," Oliver Burkeman writes in The Guardian, a leading British newspaper. "To some critics, usually those schooled in the methods of the natural sciences, it's flatly unacceptable to proceed by concocting hypotheses then amassing anecdotes to illustrate them."
Here's how author Tina Rosenberg puts it in a review of his new book in The Atlantic:
'The underdogs win . . . of course they do. That's why Gladwell includes their stories. Yet you'll look in vain for reasons to believe that these exceptions prove any real-world rules about underdogs."
She and Burkeman are not, ahem, outliers. These are among other skeptics:
- Steven Pinker, Harvard psychologist: "Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. . . . When a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong. . . . The common thread in Gladwell’s writing is a kind of populism, which seeks to undermine the ideals of talent, intelligence and analytical prowess in favor of luck, opportunity, experience and intuition."
- MIT science blogger Paul Raeburn: "My work, my intellectual life, and even my social and emotional experiences with my family are based on knowing what's really going on -- not Gladwell's made-up ideas of how things should be."
- Christopher Chabris, psychology professor at Union College (Schenectady N.Y.): "He excels at telling just-so stories and cherry-picking science to back them. . . . This ['David and Goliath'] is an entertaining book. But it teaches little of general import, for the morals of the stories it tells lack solid foundations in evidence and logic."
- Maureen Tkacik, The Nation: "Gladwell promised readers mastery of the complex and competitive world around them, if only they would accept the facile conclusions he extrapolated from the findings of the many . . . scholars and researchers who were busy applying the scientific method to the investigation of everyday living."
Other Mackinac keynoters also have been polarizing. Education reformer Michelle Rhee kicked off last May's conference and Newt Gingrich had that role in 2010.
It doesn't take a pop sociologist to deduce that attention and controversy could be partly why they're invited.
Gladwell will read from "David and Goliath," takee questions and sign books at the Michigan Theater. Tickets: $15 and $35.
Mackinac Conference coverage in Deadline:
Education Reform: Why Michelle Rhee Is Wrong About Everything, May 30, 2013
