The Rhetoric of the Consumer and Customer Control in China

Not only in business, but also in contexts as diverse as politics, health care and education the rhetoric of the sovereign consumer has become pervasive in Western societies (Keat et al., 1994). The dissemination of this notion received impetus and vitality with the rise to dominance of neo-liberal economics in the United States and United Kingdom in the 1980s and is closely entwined with characterizations of the consumer as a rational, maximizing individual. Ensuing the spread of this notion, researchers interested in customer orientated workplaces have adumbrated the extent to which the rhetoric of the consumer is utilized by management, both to reinforce and ‘mystify’ their control over workers. Despite this theoretical inclination, few studies have explored these practices in actual workplaces. This chapter aims to make such a contribution. It explores the extent to which the rhetoric of the sovereign consumer and the use of the customer as a device of managerial control have been transferred to the subsidiaries of multinational retailers in China. Study in China also enables exploration of how management by customers might operate differently in novel institutional and cultural contexts.