Hagley Perspectives on Business and Culture – serie

Leading historians explore how our ideas of what is attractive are influenced by a broad range of social and economic factors. They force us to reckon with the ways that beauty has been made, bought and sold in modern America.

Leading historians explore how our ideas of what is attractive are influenced by a broad range of social and economic factors. They force us to reckon with the ways that beauty has been made, bought and sold in modern America.

Negotiating the divide between "respectable manhood" and "rough manhood" this book explores masculinity at work and at play through provocative essays on labor unions, railroads, vocational training programs, and NASCAR racing.

Negotiating the divide between "respectable manhood" and "rough manhood" this book explores masculinity at work and at play through provocative essays on labor unions, railroads, vocational training programs, and NASCAR racing.

This original collection abandons culinary nostalgia and the cataloguing of regional cuisines to examine the role of food and food marketing in constructing culture, consumer behavior, and national identity.

This original collection abandons culinary nostalgia and the cataloguing of regional cuisines to examine the role of food and food marketing in constructing culture, consumer behavior, and national identity.

Scientists have developed a featherless chicken designed to make industrial chicken production more efficient, while specially trained Pacific bottlenose dolphins are being deployed in the Persian Gulf to disarm mines and protect our Navy. Everyone knows Darwin's theory of natural selection, but what about his idea of artificial selection--how humans, not nature, rework natural organisms to meet our needs? Industrializing Organisms brings us to the threshold of the new field of evolutionary history--from the mobilization of war horses in the 19th century to today's engineered plants and manipulated animals.

Scientists have developed a featherless chicken designed to make industrial chicken production more efficient, while specially trained Pacific bottlenose dolphins are being deployed in the Persian Gulf to disarm mines and protect our Navy. Everyone knows Darwin's theory of natural selection, but what about his idea of artificial selection--how humans, not nature, rework natural organisms to meet our needs? Industrializing Organisms brings us to the threshold of the new field of evolutionary history--from the mobilization of war horses in the 19th century to today's engineered plants and manipulated animals.

The term "technological fix" should mean a fix provided by technology--a solution for all of our problems, from medicine and food production to the environment and business. Instead, technological fix has come to mean a cheap, quick fix using inappropriate technology that usually creates more problems than it solves. This collection sets out the distinction between a technological fix and a true technological solution.Bringing together scholars from a variety of disciplines, the essays trace the technological fix as it has appeared throughout the twentieth century. Addressing such "fixes" as artificial hearts, industrial agriculture and climate engineering, these essays examine our need to turn to technology for solutions to all of our problems.

The term "technological fix" should mean a fix provided by technology--a solution for all of our problems, from medicine and food production to the environment and business. Instead, technological fix has come to mean a cheap, quick fix using inappropriate technology that usually creates more problems than it solves. This collection sets out the distinction between a technological fix and a true technological solution.Bringing together scholars from a variety of disciplines, the essays trace the technological fix as it has appeared throughout the twentieth century. Addressing such "fixes" as artificial hearts, industrial agriculture and climate engineering, these essays examine our need to turn to technology for solutions to all of our problems.

In recent years, the integrity of food production and distribution has become an issue of wide social concern. The media frequently report on cases of food contamination as well as on the risks of hormones and cloning. Journalists, documentary filmmakers, and activists have had their say, but until now a survey of the latest research on the history of the modern food-provisioning system-the network that connects farms and fields to supermarkets and the dining table-has been unavailable. In Food Chains, Warren Belasco and Roger Horowitz present a collection of fascinating case studies that reveal the historical underpinnings and institutional arrangements that compose this system.The dozen essays in Food Chains range widely in subject, from the pig, poultry, and seafood industries to the origins of the shopping cart. The book examines what it took to put ice in nineteenth-century refrigerators, why Soviet citizens could buy ice cream whenever they wanted, what made Mexican food popular in France, and why Americans turned to commercial pet food in place of table scraps for their dogs and cats. Food Chains goes behind the grocery shelves, explaining why Americans in the early twentieth century preferred to buy bread rather than make it and how Southerners learned to like self-serve shopping. Taken together, these essays demonstrate the value of a historical perspective on the modern food-provisioning system.

How has Paris, the world's fashion capital, influenced Milan, New York, and Tokyo? When did the Marlboro Man become a symbol of American masculinity? Why do Americans love to dress down in high-tech Lycra fabrics, while they wax nostalgic for quaint, old-fashioned Victorian cottages?Fashion icons and failures have long captivated the general public, but few scholars have examined the historical role of business and commerce in creating the international market for style goods. Producing Fashion is a groundbreaking collection of original essays that shows how economic institutions in Europe and North America laid the foundation for the global fashion system and sustained it commercially through the mechanisms of advertising, licensing, marketing, publishing, and retailing.The collection reveals how public and private institutions-from government censors in imperial Russia to large corporations in the United States-worked to shape fashion, style, and taste with varying degrees of success. Fourteen contributors draw on original research and fresh insight into the producers of fashion-advertising agents, architects, corporate executives, department stores, designers, editors, government officials, hairdressers, haute couturiers, and Web retailers-in their bid for influence, acclaim, and shoppers' dollars.Producing Fashion looks to the past, revealing the rationale behind style choices, while explaining how the interplay of custom, invented traditions, and sales imperatives continue to drive innovation in the fashion industries.

During the twentieth century sound underwent a dramatic transformation as new technologies and social practices challenged conventional aural experience. As a result, sound functioned as a means to exert social, cultural, and political power in unprecedented and unexpected ways. The fleeting nature of sound has long made it a difficult topic for historical study, but innovative scholars have recently begun to analyze the sonic traces of the past using innovative approaches. Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction investigates sound as part of the social construction of historical experience and as an element of the sensory relationship people have to the world, showing how hearing and listening can inform people's feelings, ideas, decisions, and actions.The essays in Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction uncover the varying dimensions of sound in twentieth-century history. Together they connect a host of disparate concerns, from issues of gender and technology to contests over intellectual property and government regulation. Topics covered range from debates over listening practices and good citizenship in the 1930s, to Tokyo Rose and Axis radio propaganda during World War II, to CB-radio culture on the freeways of Los Angeles in the 1970s. These and other studies reveal the contingent nature of aural experience and demonstrate how a better grasp of the culture of sound can enhance our understanding of the past.

Emphasizing the economic and cultural dimensions of travel, The Business of Tourism explores the enterprises and technologies of tourist activity with a particular focus on tourism as a phenomenon through which nations, regions, and individuals produce and consume experiences. The volume is divided into three sections. "Commodifying Place" examines how tourist enterprises have helped to create a distinctive sense of identity for specific locales. "Engaging Religion" addresses the ways in which religion and religious travel have been marketed. "Marketing Communism" explores the role of tourism in buttressing ideas and attitudes in communist settings. The essays in The Business of Tourism present a vigorous, novel, and empirically grounded vision of tourism as a local and global enterprise from the 1860s to the 1990s. They transport readers from Egypt in the 1860s, where Thomas Cook & Son laid the foundations for international mass tourism, to Burgundy's gastronomic festivals between the two world wars; from Branson, Missouri, to Belfast, Ireland, in an examination of religion in sightseeing; and in the final leg of the journey, from the Stalinist Soviet Union to post-Soviet Cuba, to see the changing relationship between marketing and communism. Taken together, the essays link the cultural practice of tourism to the businesses that create cultural experiences.

In recent years, the integrity of food production and distribution has become an issue of wide social concern. The media frequently report on cases of food contamination as well as on the risks of hormones and cloning. Journalists, documentary filmmakers, and activists have had their say, but until now a survey of the latest research on the history of the modern food-provisioning system-the network that connects farms and fields to supermarkets and the dining table-has been unavailable. In Food Chains, Warren Belasco and Roger Horowitz present a collection of fascinating case studies that reveal the historical underpinnings and institutional arrangements that compose this system.The dozen essays in Food Chains range widely in subject, from the pig, poultry, and seafood industries to the origins of the shopping cart. The book examines what it took to put ice in nineteenth-century refrigerators, why Soviet citizens could buy ice cream whenever they wanted, what made Mexican food popular in France, and why Americans turned to commercial pet food in place of table scraps for their dogs and cats. Food Chains goes behind the grocery shelves, explaining why Americans in the early twentieth century preferred to buy bread rather than make it and how Southerners learned to like self-serve shopping. Taken together, these essays demonstrate the value of a historical perspective on the modern food-provisioning system.

During the twentieth century sound underwent a dramatic transformation as new technologies and social practices challenged conventional aural experience. As a result, sound functioned as a means to exert social, cultural, and political power in unprecedented and unexpected ways. The fleeting nature of sound has long made it a difficult topic for historical study, but innovative scholars have recently begun to analyze the sonic traces of the past using innovative approaches. Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction investigates sound as part of the social construction of historical experience and as an element of the sensory relationship people have to the world, showing how hearing and listening can inform people's feelings, ideas, decisions, and actions.The essays in Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction uncover the varying dimensions of sound in twentieth-century history. Together they connect a host of disparate concerns, from issues of gender and technology to contests over intellectual property and government regulation. Topics covered range from debates over listening practices and good citizenship in the 1930s, to Tokyo Rose and Axis radio propaganda during World War II, to CB-radio culture on the freeways of Los Angeles in the 1970s. These and other studies reveal the contingent nature of aural experience and demonstrate how a better grasp of the culture of sound can enhance our understanding of the past.

Recent events-the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and efforts to increase the minimum wage, among others-have driven a tremendous surge of interest in the political power of business. Capital Gains collects some of the most innovative new work in the field. The chapters explore the influence of business on American politics in the twentieth century at the federal, state, and municipal levels. From corporate spending on city governments in the 1920s to business support for public universities in the postwar period, and from business opposition to the Vietnam War to the corporate embrace of civil rights, the contributors reveal an often surprising portrait of the nation's economic elite.Contrary to popular mythology, business leaders have not always been libertarian or rigidly devoted to market fundamentalism. Before, during, and after the New Deal, important parts of the business world sought instead to try to shape what the state could accomplish and to make sure that government grew in ways that were favorable to them. Appealing to historians working in the fields of business history, political history, and the history of capitalism, these essays highlight the causes, character, and consequences of business activism and underscore the centrality of business to any full understanding of the politics of the twentieth century-and today.Contributors: Daniel Amsterdam, Brent Cebul, Jennifer Delton, Tami Friedman, Eric Hintz, Richard R. John, Pamela Walker Laird, Kim Phillips-Fein, Laura Phillips Sawyer, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Eric Smith, Jason Scott Smith, Mark R. Wilson.

Recent events-the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and efforts to increase the minimum wage, among others-have driven a tremendous surge of interest in the political power of business. Capital Gains collects some of the most innovative new work in the field. The chapters explore the influence of business on American politics in the twentieth century at the federal, state, and municipal levels. From corporate spending on city governments in the 1920s to business support for public universities in the postwar period, and from business opposition to the Vietnam War to the corporate embrace of civil rights, the contributors reveal an often surprising portrait of the nation's economic elite.Contrary to popular mythology, business leaders have not always been libertarian or rigidly devoted to market fundamentalism. Before, during, and after the New Deal, important parts of the business world sought instead to try to shape what the state could accomplish and to make sure that government grew in ways that were favorable to them. Appealing to historians working in the fields of business history, political history, and the history of capitalism, these essays highlight the causes, character, and consequences of business activism and underscore the centrality of business to any full understanding of the politics of the twentieth century-and today.Contributors: Daniel Amsterdam, Brent Cebul, Jennifer Delton, Tami Friedman, Eric Hintz, Richard R. John, Pamela Walker Laird, Kim Phillips-Fein, Laura Phillips Sawyer, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Eric Smith, Jason Scott Smith, Mark R. Wilson.

At a time when the human impact on the environment is more devastating than ever, business initiatives frame the quest to "green" capitalism as the key to humanity's long-term survival. Indeed, even before the rise of the environmental movement in the 1970s, businesses sometimes had reasons to protect parts of nature, limit their production of wastes, and support broader environmental reforms. In the last thirty years, especially, many businesses have worked hard to reduce their direct and indirect environmental footprint. But are these efforts exceptional, or can capitalism truly be environmentally conscious?Green Capitalism? offers a critical, historically informed perspective on building a more sustainable economy. Written by scholars of business history and environmental history, the essays in this volume consider the nature of capitalism through historical overviews of twentieth-century businesses and a wide range of focused case studies. Beginning early in the century, contributors explore the response of business leaders to environmental challenges in an era long before the formation of the modern regulatory state. Moving on to midcentury environmental initiatives, scholars analyze failed business efforts to green products and packaging-such as the infamous six-pack ring-in the 1960s and 1970s. The last section contains case studies of businesses that successfully managed greening initiatives, from the first effort by an electric utility to promote conservation, to the environmental overhaul of a Swedish mining company, to the problem of household waste in pre-1990 West Germany. Ranging in geographic scope from Europe to the United States, Green Capitalism? raises questions about capitalism in different historical, sociocultural, and political contexts.Contributors: Hartmut Berghoff, Ann-Kristin Bergquist, Brian C. Black, William D. Bryan, Julie Cohn, Leif Fredrickson, Hugh S. Gorman, Geoffrey Jones, David Kinkela, Roman KÖster, Joseph A. Pratt, Adam Rome, Christine Meisner Rosen.

A dynamic social history of shadow capitalism spanning the late nineteenth and twentieth centuriesObservers see free markets, the relentless pursuit of profit, and the unremitting drive to commodify everything as capitalism's defining characteristics. These most visible economic features, however, obscure a range of other less evident, often unmeasured activities that occur on the margins and in the concealed corners of the formal economy. The range of practices in this large and diverse hidden realm encompasses traders in recycled materials and the architects of junk bonds and shadow banking. It includes the black and semi-licit markets that allow wealthy elites to avoid taxes and the unmeasured domestic and emotional labor of homemakers and home care workers. By some estimates, the unmeasured economic activity that occurs within the household, informal market, and underground economy amounts to a substantial portion of all economic activity in the world, as much as 30 percent in some countries.Capitalism's Hidden Worlds sheds new light on this shadowy economic landscape by reexamining how we think about the market. In particular, it scrutinizes the missed connections between the official, visible realm of exchange and the uncounted and invisible sectors that border it. While some hidden markets emerged in opposition to the formal economy, much of the obscured economy described in this volume operates as the other side of the legitimate, state-sanctioned marketplace. A variety of historical actors-from fortune tellers and forgers to tax lawyers and black market consumers-have constructed this unseen world in tandem with the observable public world of transactions. Others, such as feminist development economists and government regulators, have worked to bring the darkened corners of the economy to light. The essays in Capitalism's Hidden Worlds explore how the capitalist marketplace sustains itself, how it acquires legitimacy and even prestige, and how the marginalized and the dispossessed find ways to make ends meet.Contributors: Bruce Baker, Eileen Boris, Eli Cook, Hannah Frydman, James Hollis, Owen Hyman, Anna Kushkova, Christopher McKenna, Kenneth MourÉ, Philip Scranton, Bryan Turo.

Surveillance Capitalism in America offers a crucial historical perspective on the intimate relationship between surveillance and capitalism. While surveillance is often associated with governments, today the role of the private sector in the spread of everyday surveillance is the subject of growing public debate. Tech giants like Google and Facebook are fueled by a continuous supply of user data and digital exhaust. Surveillance is not just a side effect of digital capitalism; it is the business model itself, suggesting the emergence of a new and more rapacious mode of capitalism: surveillance capitalism.But how much has capitalism really changed? Surveillance Capitalism in America explores the historical development of commercial surveillance long before computers and suggests that surveillance has been central to American capitalism since the nation's founding. Managers surveilled labor, merchants surveilled consumers, and businesses surveilled each other. Focusing on events in the United States, the chapters in this volume examine the deep logic of modern surveillance as a mode of rationalization, bureaucratization, and social control from the early nineteenth century forward. Even more, business surveillance has often involved collaborations with the state, through favorable laws, policing, and information sharing. The history of surveillance capitalism is thus the history of technological, legal, and knowledge infrastructures built over decades.Together, the chapters in this volume reveal the long arc of surveillance capitalism, from the violent coercion of slave labor to the seductions of target marketing.

Recent events-the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and efforts to increase the minimum wage, among others-have driven a tremendous surge of interest in the political power of business. Capital Gains collects some of the most innovative new work in the field. The chapters explore the influence of business on American politics in the twentieth century at the federal, state, and municipal levels. From corporate spending on city governments in the 1920s to business support for public universities in the postwar period, and from business opposition to the Vietnam War to the corporate embrace of civil rights, the contributors reveal an often surprising portrait of the nation's economic elite.Contrary to popular mythology, business leaders have not always been libertarian or rigidly devoted to market fundamentalism. Before, during, and after the New Deal, important parts of the business world sought instead to try to shape what the state could accomplish and to make sure that government grew in ways that were favorable to them. Appealing to historians working in the fields of business history, political history, and the history of capitalism, these essays highlight the causes, character, and consequences of business activism and underscore the centrality of business to any full understanding of the politics of the twentieth century-and today.Contributors: Daniel Amsterdam, Brent Cebul, Jennifer Delton, Tami Friedman, Eric Hintz, Richard R. John, Pamela Walker Laird, Kim Phillips-Fein, Laura Phillips Sawyer, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Eric Smith, Jason Scott Smith, Mark R. Wilson.

At a time when the human impact on the environment is more devastating than ever, business initiatives frame the quest to "green" capitalism as the key to humanity's long-term survival. Indeed, even before the rise of the environmental movement in the 1970s, businesses sometimes had reasons to protect parts of nature, limit their production of wastes, and support broader environmental reforms. In the last thirty years, especially, many businesses have worked hard to reduce their direct and indirect environmental footprint. But are these efforts exceptional, or can capitalism truly be environmentally conscious?Green Capitalism? offers a critical, historically informed perspective on building a more sustainable economy. Written by scholars of business history and environmental history, the essays in this volume consider the nature of capitalism through historical overviews of twentieth-century businesses and a wide range of focused case studies. Beginning early in the century, contributors explore the response of business leaders to environmental challenges in an era long before the formation of the modern regulatory state. Moving on to midcentury environmental initiatives, scholars analyze failed business efforts to green products and packaging-such as the infamous six-pack ring-in the 1960s and 1970s. The last section contains case studies of businesses that successfully managed greening initiatives, from the first effort by an electric utility to promote conservation, to the environmental overhaul of a Swedish mining company, to the problem of household waste in pre-1990 West Germany. Ranging in geographic scope from Europe to the United States, Green Capitalism? raises questions about capitalism in different historical, sociocultural, and political contexts.Contributors: Hartmut Berghoff, Ann-Kristin Bergquist, Brian C. Black, William D. Bryan, Julie Cohn, Leif Fredrickson, Hugh S. Gorman, Geoffrey Jones, David Kinkela, Roman KÖster, Joseph A. Pratt, Adam Rome, Christine Meisner Rosen.

A dynamic social history of shadow capitalism spanning the late nineteenth and twentieth centuriesObservers see free markets, the relentless pursuit of profit, and the unremitting drive to commodify everything as capitalism's defining characteristics. These most visible economic features, however, obscure a range of other less evident, often unmeasured activities that occur on the margins and in the concealed corners of the formal economy. The range of practices in this large and diverse hidden realm encompasses traders in recycled materials and the architects of junk bonds and shadow banking. It includes the black and semi-licit markets that allow wealthy elites to avoid taxes and the unmeasured domestic and emotional labor of homemakers and home care workers. By some estimates, the unmeasured economic activity that occurs within the household, informal market, and underground economy amounts to a substantial portion of all economic activity in the world, as much as 30 percent in some countries.Capitalism's Hidden Worlds sheds new light on this shadowy economic landscape by reexamining how we think about the market. In particular, it scrutinizes the missed connections between the official, visible realm of exchange and the uncounted and invisible sectors that border it. While some hidden markets emerged in opposition to the formal economy, much of the obscured economy described in this volume operates as the other side of the legitimate, state-sanctioned marketplace. A variety of historical actors-from fortune tellers and forgers to tax lawyers and black market consumers-have constructed this unseen world in tandem with the observable public world of transactions. Others, such as feminist development economists and government regulators, have worked to bring the darkened corners of the economy to light. The essays in Capitalism's Hidden Worlds explore how the capitalist marketplace sustains itself, how it acquires legitimacy and even prestige, and how the marginalized and the dispossessed find ways to make ends meet.Contributors: Bruce Baker, Eileen Boris, Eli Cook, Hannah Frydman, James Hollis, Owen Hyman, Anna Kushkova, Christopher McKenna, Kenneth MourÉ, Philip Scranton, Bryan Turo.

Surveillance Capitalism in America offers a crucial historical perspective on the intimate relationship between surveillance and capitalism. While surveillance is often associated with governments, today the role of the private sector in the spread of everyday surveillance is the subject of growing public debate. Tech giants like Google and Facebook are fueled by a continuous supply of user data and digital exhaust. Surveillance is not just a side effect of digital capitalism; it is the business model itself, suggesting the emergence of a new and more rapacious mode of capitalism: surveillance capitalism.But how much has capitalism really changed? Surveillance Capitalism in America explores the historical development of commercial surveillance long before computers and suggests that surveillance has been central to American capitalism since the nation's founding. Managers surveilled labor, merchants surveilled consumers, and businesses surveilled each other. Focusing on events in the United States, the chapters in this volume examine the deep logic of modern surveillance as a mode of rationalization, bureaucratization, and social control from the early nineteenth century forward. Even more, business surveillance has often involved collaborations with the state, through favorable laws, policing, and information sharing. The history of surveillance capitalism is thus the history of technological, legal, and knowledge infrastructures built over decades.Together, the chapters in this volume reveal the long arc of surveillance capitalism, from the violent coercion of slave labor to the seductions of target marketing.

Capitalism and the Senses is the first edited volume to explore how the forces of capitalism are entangled with everyday sensory experience. If the senses have a history, as Karl Marx wrote, then that history is inseparable from the development of capitalism, which has both taken advantage of the senses and influenced how sensory experience has changed over time.This pioneering collection shows how seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching have both shaped and been shaped by commercial interests from the turn of the twentieth century to our own time. From the manipulation of taste and texture in the food industry to the careful engineering of the feel of artificial fabrics, capitalist enterprises have worked to commodify the senses in a wide variety of ways. Drawing on history, anthropology, geography, and other fields, the volume's essays analyze not only where this effort has succeeded but also where the senses have resisted control and the logic of markets. The result is an innovative ensemble that demonstrates how the drive to exploit sensorial experience for profit became a defining feature of capitalist modernity and establishes the senses as an important dimension of the history of capitalism.Contributors: Nicholas Anderman, Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Jessica P. Clark, Ai Hisano, Lisa Jacobson, Sven Kube, Grace Lees-Maffei, Ingemar Pettersson, David Suisman, Ana María Ulloa, Nicole Welk-Joerger.

Explores how marketers have leveraged feelings of personal familiarity in modern consumer capitalismOur wired world connects us with corporations in ways that, just a generation ago, would have been hard to imagine. Marketers track users' habits down to the swipe and scroll; brand influencers reach out to followers in ever more personal ways. Yet, however much we may feel individually recognized (or targeted) by today's marketers, the connections they make are, in truth, fleeting and tactical. They are also nothing new. Marketplace transactions have long been mediated by interactions that blur the line between the putatively public and rational world of commerce and the supposedly private and emotional realm of personal relations. That there is an affective tenor to every sales scenario has never been a secret to talented marketers.How, exactly, marketers have tried to set those moods by endowing commercial relationships with an aura of personal affinity is the subject of Commercial Intimacy. Its chapters explore the broad theme of commercial intimacy (that is, market-based feelings of spatial and emotional closeness) in US consumer culture from the mid-nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. They show how experiences of intimacy have been orchestrated by marketers operating at a variety of distances, from the face-to-face solicitations made by retail clerks and direct-sales agents to the long-distance appeals made by mail-order merchants, print and TV advertisers, telemarketers, and e-commerce platforms. The volume pays especially close attention to how these revenue-minded acts of ingratiation worked, how they were shaped by the technologies behind them, and how they capitalized on contemporary dynamics of gender and sexuality. At the heart of this volume, then, is the question of how our understanding of business history changes when we take the emotional, sensational, and affective dynamics of intimacy to be foundational elements of commercial persuasion.Contributors: Samuel Backer, Jennifer M. Black, Donna J. Drucker, Isabelle Marina Held, Julie A. Johnson, Lindsay Mitchell Keiter, Stephanie Kolberg, Brenton J. Malin, Cynthia B. Meyers, Richard K. Popp, Nicole E. Weber, Wendy A. Woloson.

Explores how marketers have leveraged feelings of personal familiarity in modern consumer capitalismOur wired world connects us with corporations in ways that, just a generation ago, would have been hard to imagine. Marketers track users' habits down to the swipe and scroll; brand influencers reach out to followers in ever more personal ways. Yet, however much we may feel individually recognized (or targeted) by today's marketers, the connections they make are, in truth, fleeting and tactical. They are also nothing new. Marketplace transactions have long been mediated by interactions that blur the line between the putatively public and rational world of commerce and the supposedly private and emotional realm of personal relations. That there is an affective tenor to every sales scenario has never been a secret to talented marketers.How, exactly, marketers have tried to set those moods by endowing commercial relationships with an aura of personal affinity is the subject of Commercial Intimacy. Its chapters explore the broad theme of commercial intimacy (that is, market-based feelings of spatial and emotional closeness) in US consumer culture from the mid-nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. They show how experiences of intimacy have been orchestrated by marketers operating at a variety of distances, from the face-to-face solicitations made by retail clerks and direct-sales agents to the long-distance appeals made by mail-order merchants, print and TV advertisers, telemarketers, and e-commerce platforms. The volume pays especially close attention to how these revenue-minded acts of ingratiation worked, how they were shaped by the technologies behind them, and how they capitalized on contemporary dynamics of gender and sexuality. At the heart of this volume, then, is the question of how our understanding of business history changes when we take the emotional, sensational, and affective dynamics of intimacy to be foundational elements of commercial persuasion.Contributors: Samuel Backer, Jennifer M. Black, Donna J. Drucker, Isabelle Marina Held, Julie A. Johnson, Lindsay Mitchell Keiter, Stephanie Kolberg, Brenton J. Malin, Cynthia B. Meyers, Richard K. Popp, Nicole E. Weber, Wendy A. Woloson.