Consumer Negotiations

Wanting to relate their interest in the corporation's internal economic activities to the social world beyond the firm, business historians may find the study of consumption a valuable area of research. In Consumption and the l•orld of Goods, John Brewer and Roy Porter make this point that no matter how "entrenched" the field of economic history and how vast the scope of social and cultural history, the three fields should join forces in "what ought o be a fruitful and unifying mutual concern" [Brewer and Porter, 1993, p. 1]. My essay explores their recommendation as it applies to the twentieth century (especially the period 1900 to 1940). Compared to schohrs in other disciplines, business historians have been slow to study consumers. Asking how the firm affected the process of economic development, they selected as prime research topics methods of production, technological innovation, and bureaucratic forms of governance. Implicitly if not explicitly, they tended to assume consumers were irrelevant to questions inside the finn. This is not to say that the relationship between the firm and consumers has not been addressed. Various scholars of