Consumer Management in the Internet Age: How Customers Became Managers in the Modern Workplace

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Consumer Management in the Internet Age: How Customers Became Managers in the Modern Workplace analyzes online consumer management, a practice in which customers monitor, report on, and sometimes unwittingly discipline workers through writing and posting online reviews. Based on case studies of the websites Yelp and Rate My Professors (RMP), the author describes the existence of widespread communities of online reviewers. Online reviewing, a popular contemporary hobby, tells us much about the collapse of the barriers separating work and leisure as well as our need for collective purpose and community--wherever we can find it. This book additionally explores the economic implications of online reviews, as reviews provide both valuable free content for websites and surveillance of, respectively, restaurant servers and college instructors. Employers can and in many cases, do invoke online reviews to discipline and even fire workers, selectively using reviews as a free and ubiquitous Mystery Shopper. Whether they are typically read by employers (as in the case of Yelp) or by workers themselves (as in the case of RMP), online reviews have had an effect on the ways in which employees think about and perform their work, illuminating some of the ways that capitalism and our roles within it are changing.

Reviews

The consumer has been alternatively depicted as the sovereign of the market, the unwitting dupe of advertisers, and the heroic boycotter whose activism helped create democracy. In this splendid and original study, Joshua Sperber gives us the consumer as the disciplinary agent of modern capitalism. Combining eye-opening empirical investigations of Yelp and Rate My Professor with a sophisticated Marxist account of the gig economy, Sperber shows how the consumer is increasingly serving a managerial function in the economy. Whether through surveillance of workers, detailed internet surveys, and online ratings and reviews, the consumer is doing for free what managers were once paid to do. With a prose that is as powerful as it is plain, Sperber documents how critical the consumer is to production: not as a market of taste outside the production process, but as a disciplinary force within the production process. -- Corey Robin, Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center
Joshua Sperbers Consumer Management in the Internet Age offers an insightful analysis of the ways that the Internet, specifically the websites Yelp and RateMyProfessors.com, conscripts diners and students into the project of employee management. Written in lively and engaging prose, Sperber draws historically deep and useful critiques of capitalism into this volatile and protean social terrain in order to show how the traditionally hierarchical relationship between management and labor seems to have been destabilized but is, in fact, being reproduced. -- Joe Rollins, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Joshua Sperber has made an important contribution in this research monograph to our understanding of prosumers by making it clear that their power (on Yelp and Rate My Professor) has grown online; they become not only consumers and producers, but also managers. -- George Ritzer, University of Maryland

Author Bio

Joshua Sperber is assistant professor of political science and history at Averett University.