Consumer Management in the Internet Age

This book analyzes online consumer management, a practice in which customers monitor, report on, and discipline workers through posting online reviews. Through examining reviewer communities, the author analyzes the ways in which our need for collective purpose is increasingly transformed into profit production under modern capitalism.

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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), Joshua Sperber analyzes how 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 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.