Jan L. Logemann
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226660011
- eISBN:
- 9780226660295
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226660295.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
Engineered to Sell traces the transnational careers of consumer engineers in advertising, market research and commercial design who transformed capitalism, from the 1930s through the 1960s. It argues ...
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Engineered to Sell traces the transnational careers of consumer engineers in advertising, market research and commercial design who transformed capitalism, from the 1930s through the 1960s. It argues that the history of marketing consumer goods is not a story of American exceptionalism. Instead, the careers of immigrants point to the limits of the “Americanization” paradigm. First, the book traces changes in marketing approaches increasingly tailored to consumers which gave rise to a dynamic world of goods. Second, it asks how and why this consumer engineering was shaped by transatlantic exchanges. From Austrian psychologists and little-known social scientists to the illustrious Bauhaus artists, the émigrés at the center of this story illustrate the vibrant cultural and commercial connections between metropolitan centers: Vienna and New York; Paris and Chicago; Berlin and San Francisco. These mid-century consumer engineers crossed national and disciplinary boundaries not only within arts and academia but also between governments, corporate actors, and social reform movements. By focusing on the transnational lives of émigré consumer researchers, marketers, and designers, Engineered to Sell details the processes of cultural translation and adaptation that mark both the mid-century transformation of American marketing and the subsequent European shift to “American” consumer capitalism.Less
Engineered to Sell traces the transnational careers of consumer engineers in advertising, market research and commercial design who transformed capitalism, from the 1930s through the 1960s. It argues that the history of marketing consumer goods is not a story of American exceptionalism. Instead, the careers of immigrants point to the limits of the “Americanization” paradigm. First, the book traces changes in marketing approaches increasingly tailored to consumers which gave rise to a dynamic world of goods. Second, it asks how and why this consumer engineering was shaped by transatlantic exchanges. From Austrian psychologists and little-known social scientists to the illustrious Bauhaus artists, the émigrés at the center of this story illustrate the vibrant cultural and commercial connections between metropolitan centers: Vienna and New York; Paris and Chicago; Berlin and San Francisco. These mid-century consumer engineers crossed national and disciplinary boundaries not only within arts and academia but also between governments, corporate actors, and social reform movements. By focusing on the transnational lives of émigré consumer researchers, marketers, and designers, Engineered to Sell details the processes of cultural translation and adaptation that mark both the mid-century transformation of American marketing and the subsequent European shift to “American” consumer capitalism.
Chris Chen
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474440387
- eISBN:
- 9781474481236
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474440387.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Centered on the work of contemporary experimental poet and critic Erica Hunt, this chapter argues that the author’s chapbook Piece Logic (2002) offers an implicit critique of postwar liberal ...
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Centered on the work of contemporary experimental poet and critic Erica Hunt, this chapter argues that the author’s chapbook Piece Logic (2002) offers an implicit critique of postwar liberal antiracist ideals of racial progress understood primarily in terms of desegregated national inclusion within what Roland Marchand has called a “democracy of goods.” In this chapbook, Hunt explores how relations between subjects within and beyond the boundaries of the United States have been reshaped by an increasingly comprehensive system of differential economic valuation that redefines the meaning of racial difference, citizenship, family, and the material limits of formal equality. Hunt’s collection draws attention to how postwar processes of racial group formation are shaped by what Karl Marx calls “the fetishism of the commodity”, in which the life cycle of disposable objects mirrors the fate of racialized disposable or “surplus” populations. The devaluation and destruction of commodities, the chapter maintains, reflect a postwar racial order in which blackness comes to signify a limit case of relative expendability and the “broken” underside of postwar dreams of limitless consumer abundance.Less
Centered on the work of contemporary experimental poet and critic Erica Hunt, this chapter argues that the author’s chapbook Piece Logic (2002) offers an implicit critique of postwar liberal antiracist ideals of racial progress understood primarily in terms of desegregated national inclusion within what Roland Marchand has called a “democracy of goods.” In this chapbook, Hunt explores how relations between subjects within and beyond the boundaries of the United States have been reshaped by an increasingly comprehensive system of differential economic valuation that redefines the meaning of racial difference, citizenship, family, and the material limits of formal equality. Hunt’s collection draws attention to how postwar processes of racial group formation are shaped by what Karl Marx calls “the fetishism of the commodity”, in which the life cycle of disposable objects mirrors the fate of racialized disposable or “surplus” populations. The devaluation and destruction of commodities, the chapter maintains, reflect a postwar racial order in which blackness comes to signify a limit case of relative expendability and the “broken” underside of postwar dreams of limitless consumer abundance.
