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Consumers, Markets, and Research: The Role of Political Rhetoric and the Social Sciences in the Engineering of British and American Consumer Society, 1920–1960

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Engineering Society

Abstract

This chapter addresses the role that the idiom of social-technical expertise and social science research methods have played in ensuring the ongoing hegemony of market-and choice-based approaches in contemporary social policy-making. I argue that far from being ‘objective’ and ‘apolitical', European and American market and consumer researchers at times deliberately connected their social and scientific expertise to ideological questions about power structures within market capitalism. The chapter therefore studies in detail how specific rhetorical devices that ‘mobilized’1 and redefined people as consumers came to be used by market research companies and advertising agencies in order to project the marketplace as a democracy of goods in which consumer choices act as ‘votes’ that decide the fate of products and companies.

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Notes

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Authors
  1. Stefan Schwarzkopf
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. German Historical Institute London, UK

    Kerstin Brückweh (Research Fellow) (Research Fellow)

  2. Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, UK

    Dirk Schumann (Professor of Modern and Contemporary History) (Professor of Modern and Contemporary History)

  3. German Historical Institute Washington DC, US

    Richard F. Wetzell (Research Fellow) (Research Fellow)

  4. University of Sheffield, UK

    Benjamin Ziemann (Professor of Modern German History) (Professor of Modern German History)

Copyright information

© 2012 Stefan Schwarzkopf

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Schwarzkopf, S. (2012). Consumers, Markets, and Research: The Role of Political Rhetoric and the Social Sciences in the Engineering of British and American Consumer Society, 1920–1960. In: Brückweh, K., Schumann, D., Wetzell, R.F., Ziemann, B. (eds) Engineering Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137284501_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137284501_13

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-349-32680-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-28450-1

  • eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)

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