City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 2-2017 Customer Management in the Internet Age Joshua Sperber The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1773 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] CUSTOMER MANAGEMENT IN THE INTERNET AGE by JOSHUA SPERBER A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Political Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, the City University of New York 2017 Customer Management in the Internet Age by Joshua Sperber This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Political Science in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. FRANCES FOX PIVEN Date Chair of Examining Committee ALYSON COLE Date Executive Officer COREY ROBIN JOE ROLLINS Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK ii ABSTRACT Customer Management in the Internet Age by Joshua Sperber Advisor: Professor Frances Fox Piven This dissertation examines how companies in the twenty-first century are utilizing the Internet to use customers to assist in managing employees, and what the effects and significance of this online management are. While customer management has existed since the early twentieth century, it has quantitatively and qualitatively expanded via the Internet. The Internet’s ubiquity enables almost every customer to cheaply and easily monitor and report on employees to management, intensifying labor discipline. Customer management is significant for demonstrating capitalism’s success in incorporating new technologies to reduce costs in general and in recruiting customers to perform unpaid labor in particular. Examining cases of customer management on the websites Yelp and Rate My Professors, I argue that while customer management is effective in disciplining labor, it ironically also reveals the overall weakness of consumer power. First, online customer management increases websites’ traffic and advertising revenue, producing profit that customer managers are excluded from. Second, by demonstrating that customer feedback is only selectively adopted by management, and by addressing the areas of customer feedback that are ignored altogether, I show that customer management is iii subordinate to and contingent upon the needs of management, contradicting the assumptions and expectations of consumers who invoke the authority of the “sovereign consumer.” iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It has been the privilege of my academic career to work with Frances Fox Piven, who has astutely guided this dissertation. Frances provided invaluable historical context while identifying analytical weaknesses that she helped me resolve. Her exemplary coaching made this project a generally smooth and enjoyable one. Frances’s dissertation group meetings were a highlight of my time in New York, as we all ate, drank, laughed, and argued, becoming better thinkers in the process. Corey Robin sustained interest in and attention to this project from its beginning and was a source of great encouragement. Over many conversations, he analyzed my arguments, identified their implications, and proposed numerous critical insights. He helped me connect the work to multiple literatures, elucidating divergent themes that he then helped me synthesize. Corey’s rigorous readings greatly improved the clarity of my work and thought. Joe Rollins brought great incisiveness, enthusiasm, and creativity to this project. Joe challenged me to expand my methodological horizons, teaching me how to conduct and interpret research while jettisoning jargon along the way. Demonstrating the importance of paying attention to the unanswered questions and the proverbial doodles in the margins, Joe helped me become more sensitive to the subtleties of qualitative research. Elliot Sperber and Khalilah Walters both provided me with invaluable assistance and encouragement. My time at the Graduate Center has been greatly enriched by the support of fellow students including Sobukwe Odinga, Kristofer Petersen-Overton, Aaron Shapiro, Joanna v Tice Jen, John McMahon, Jon Keller, Alan Koenig, Puangchon Unchanam, Adam McMahon, Mike Miller, Lizzie Eisenberg, Douglas Medina, Asaf Shamis, Robert Castle, Liz Nelson, Fanny Lauby, Lucia Green-Weiskel, Yekaterina Oziashvili, Wilson Sherwin, Chris Michael, Gerry Martini, Andre Guzzi, Erika Iverson, Dan Rogers, Humayun Kabir, Tom Waters, Kamran Moshref, Ximena Garcia Bustamante, Emily Crandall, Rachel Brown, Jorge Matos, and Kabir Dandona. This work is the culmination of many years of learning under the tutelage of inspiring teachers including Richard Pritchard, Harold Ravitch, and Jim Marteney at LA Valley College; Deborah Gerson, Bill Bonds, Anthony D’Agostino, Chris Jackson, and Fred Astren at San Francisco State University; Nicholas De Genova, Mark Mazower, Carl Wennerlind, and Thaddeus Russell at Columbia University; and Jerry Watts, Christa Altenstetter, Joe Rollins, Corey Robin, and Frances Fox Piven at the City University of New York Graduate Center. I dedicate this to them. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract iii Acknowledgements v Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Literature Review 26 Chapter 2: The Evolution of the Consumer 56 Chapter 3: Yelp 87 Chapter 4: Rate My Professors 120 Conclusion 156 Bibliography 190 vii INTRODUCTION This dissertation examines online consumer management, a practice in which customers monitor, report on, and discipline workers through writing and posting online reviews. Based on case studies of the websites Yelp and Rate My Professors (RMP), I examine online consumer management from the perspectives of consumer reviewers, employers, and workers. While these different sets of actors constitute a triadic relationship characterized by alternately complementary and competing interests, I argue that it is ultimately employers who, due to structural advantages over both consumers and workers, benefit most from consumer management. Indeed, numerous consumer managers function as informal “mystery shoppers,” providing employers with an unpaid resource that they can call upon in their management of employees. Whereas consumer reviewers have a variety of interests, the efficacy of their reviews is generally contingent upon the needs of employers who incorporate reviews in a highly selective manner. Simultaneously, online consumer reviewers provide unpaid content and, via increased traffic and advertising revenue, profit to privately owned websites, which can be seen as the fare reviewers must pay in order to amplify their voices through these websites’ mass platforms. While consumer reviewers frequently derive enjoyment and satisfaction from writing reviews and interacting within likeminded online communities, I argue that consumer reviewers nonetheless are, in strict economic terms, exploited insofar as they are excluded from the wealth that they help create for website owners via increased advertising revenue. I additionally argue that consumer reviewing simultaneously reduces the social alienation of reviewers while reproducing material alienation as consumer reviewers are prompted by 1 and produce content for websites that they do not own. Finally, I argue that consumer management intensifies the work and alienation of the employees who are targets of reviews. It is my emphasis on the anti-labor character of consumer management that helps distinguish this study from numerous other accounts of consumer behavior. While such accounts tend to view consumers as either apolitical objects manipulated by advertisers (e.g., Adorno and Horkheimer 2007 [1944]; Marcuse 1991 [1964]) or progressive political subjects (e.g., Glickman 2012; Newman 2004), this dissertation focuses on a particular form of consumer activity that expresses both agency and conservative, i.e., anti-labor, political content. In describing consumers as either naïve objects being acted upon by capitalists or progressive political subjects acting upon institutions they seek to reform, this literature additionally frequently depicts consumers as existing outside of the production process itself. Applying the concept of prosumption, I argue that consumers should not be viewed as existing apart from the production process but should instead be seen as playing a critical role within it. *** Online consumer management1 combines two discrete but overlapping phenomena: prosumption and consumer management. An examination of online consumer management therefore requires understanding each of these two practices and the historical circumstances in which they converged. The neologism prosumption was coined 1 I use the terms consumer management and customer management interchangeably. 2 by Alvin Toffler in 1980 but describes a process that has been in various forms present throughout human history (Toffler 1980; Ritzer and Jurgenson 2010). Prosumption is a form of consumption in which consumers – or prosumers – are incorporated into the production process through, for instance, helping to create and design products (e.g., via company contests that recruit consumers to share ideas for new potato chip flavors), assuming control of services previously provided by businesses (e.g., pumping one’s gas and participating