The consumer has been alternatively depicted as the sovereign of the market, the unwitting dupe of advertisers, and the heroic boycotter whose activism helped create democracy. In this splendid and original study, Joshua Sperber gives us the consumer as the disciplinary agent of modern capitalism. Combining eye-opening empirical investigations of Yelp and Rate My Professor with a sophisticated Marxist account of the gig economy, Sperber shows how the consumer is increasingly serving a managerial function in the economy. Whether through surveillance of workers, detailed internet surveys, and online ratings and reviews, the consumer is doing for free what managers were once paid to do. With a prose that is as powerful as it is plain, Sperber documents how critical the consumer is to production: not as a market of taste outside the production process, but as a disciplinary force within the production process.

Corey Robin, Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center

Joshua Sperber’s Consumer Management in the Internet Age offers an insightful analysis of the ways that the Internet, specifically the websites Yelp and RateMyProfessors.com, conscripts diners and students into the project of employee management. Written in lively and engaging prose, Sperber draws historically deep and useful critiques of capitalism into this volatile and protean social terrain in order to show how the traditionally hierarchical relationship between management and labor seems to have been destabilized but is, in fact, being reproduced.

Joe Rollins, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Joshua Sperber has made an important contribution in this research monograph to our understanding of prosumers by making it clear that their power (on Yelp and Rate My Professor) has grown online; they become not only consumers and producers, but also managers.

George Ritzer, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland, Author of The McDonaldization of Society