Commercial Intimacy: Affinity and the Marketplace, co-edited by Rick Popp, Brenton J. Malin, and Wendy Woloson, is now available from the University of Pennsylvania Press. The collection of essays explores how marketers have leveraged feelings of personal familiarity in modern consumer capitalism and is part of the series Hagley Perspectives on Business and Culture.

How, exactly, marketers have tried to endow commercial relationships with an aura of personal affinity is the subject of Commercial Intimacy. Its chapters explore the broad theme of commercial intimacy (that is, market-based feelings of spatial and emotional closeness) in US consumer culture from the mid-nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. They show how experiences of intimacy have been orchestrated by marketers operating at a variety of distances, from the face-to-face solicitations made by retail clerks and direct-sales agents to the long-distance appeals made by mail-order merchants, print and TV advertisers, telemarketers, and e-commerce platforms. The volume pays especially close attention to how these revenue-minded acts of ingratiation worked, how they were shaped by the technologies behind them, and how they capitalized on contemporary dynamics of gender and sexuality. At the heart of this volume, then, is the question of how our understanding of business history changes when we take the emotional, sensational, and affective dynamics of intimacy to be foundational elements of commercial persuasion.

Contributors: Samuel Backer, Jennifer M. Black, Donna J. Drucker, Isabelle Marina Held, Julie A. Johnson, Lindsay Mitchell Keiter, Stephanie Kolberg, Brenton J. Malin, Cynthia B. Meyers, Richard K. Popp, Nicole E. Weber, Wendy A. Woloson.

You can receive a 30% discount on your purchase with the code PENN-COMMERCIAL30 (or CSPENN30 if you are from outside the US).