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Financial Institutions and Social Transformations pp 158–188Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Marketing the Soul: from the Ideology of Consumption to Consumer Subjectivity

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Abstract

It comes as no surprise to recognise that just as the physical sciences facilitated the control over and exploitation of nature for human purposes, so the social sciences have been massively implicated in the exercise of power in the management of populations and individual subjects. Foucault (1973, p. 345) drew our attention to the transition in nineteenth-century Western culture whereupon human beings transformed themselves from being merely the agents of knowledge to also being its object. However, the development of the human sciences was not just about adding another object to the scientific enterprise; the human subjects of its concern were already producing representations of the life, production and language by which their existence was governed. In short, the human sciences have as their object of knowledge beings who themselves have a prior claim to produce such knowledge for themselves in their everyday lives. Theories about human life are, then, second-order constructs or theories relating to everyday first-order theoretical representations (Giddens, 1979a, p. 12, 1984, p. 284; see also Mouzelis, 1993, p. 688).

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Authors
  1. David Knights
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  2. Andrew Sturdy
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Manchester School of Management, UMIST, UK

    David Knights (Professor of Organizational Analysis, Director of the Financial Services Research Centre) (Professor of Organizational Analysis, Director of the Financial Services Research Centre)

  2. Baruch College, City University of New York, USA

    Tony Tinker (Professor of Accountancy) (Professor of Accountancy)

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© 1997 David Knights and Andrew Sturdy

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Knights, D., Sturdy, A. (1997). Marketing the Soul: from the Ideology of Consumption to Consumer Subjectivity. In: Knights, D., Tinker, T. (eds) Financial Institutions and Social Transformations. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25953-3_8

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