Psychological Operations of the Consumer Culture

The social sciences have been and still are more about the surveillance and control of individuals rather than the disinterested gathering of “objective” knowledge. They are an important component in the creation of strategies to integrate workers, citizens, and consumers into existing corporate, governmental and consumerist institutions and ideologies. It is the institutional (managerial, commercial, governmental) use of the social sciences that transforms them into surveillance: marketing research, opinion polling, audience measurement to name a few. Within this context any innovation in the social sciences is destined to be recuperated by marketing research for the use of consumer surveillance. Just as Taylorism and other applications of social research to industrial work discipline served to formulate the role of the industrial worker within the strict disciplinary hierarchy of the factory, so the disciplining of the American consumer demanded the marshalling of social scientists to survey and map the desires and behavior of consumers in order to engineer a consumer more appropriate to the needs of the emerging economy of mass consumption. The general movement from a society of production to a society of consumption entails the movement from forms of social control based on the factory hierarchy of command to forms based on the social surveillance of the question and the interview. The surveillance of the consumer and the subsequent production of an informational commodity has always been at the heart of the “marketing concept” and indispensable to the smooth functioning of a society of consumption.

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