Engineered to Sell: European à migràs and the Making of Consumer Capitalism

Logemann, Jan L.

ISBN 10: 022666015X / ISBN 13: 9780226660158

Published by University of Chicago Press, 2019

Very Good - Crisp, clean, unread book with some shelfwear/edgewear, may have a remainder mark - NICE PAPERBACK Standard-sized. Seller Inventory # M022666015XZ2

Synopsis:

The mid-twentieth-century marketing world influenced nearly every aspect of American culture—music, literature, politics, economics, consumerism, race relations, gender, and more. In Engineered to Sell, Jan L. Logemann traces the transnational careers of consumer engineers in advertising, market research, and commercial design who transformed capitalism from the 1930s through the 1960s. He 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. Logemann explains the rise of a dynamic world of goods and examines how and why consumer engineering was shaped by transatlantic exchanges. From Austrian psychologists and little-known social scientists to the illustrious Bauhaus artists, the emigrés 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. By focusing on the transnational lives of emigré consumer researchers, marketers, and designers, Engineered to Sell details the processes of cultural translation and adaptation that mark both the midcentury transformation of American marketing and the subsequent European shift to “American” consumer capitalism.

About the Author: Jan Logemann is assistant professor at the Institute for Economic and Social History at the University of G ttingen. He is the editor of The Development of Consumer Credit in Global Perspective, and the author of Trams or Tailfins: Public and Private Prosperity in Postwar West Germany and the United States, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Engineered to Sell: European à migràs and ...
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication Date: 2019
Binding: Paperback
Condition: Very Good