Selling Friendship: The Making and Meaning of Commodified Relationships in Multi-Level Marketing (Culture and Economic Life) [9781503650268]

Overview

Your college friend whom you haven't heard from in years contacts you out of the blue. After exchanging pleasantries, they admit that they've reached out in order to offer you a lucrative business opportunity, and you quickly realize that the exchange was all part of a multi-level marketing operation.

  How should we understand a world in which everything is for sale, even our cherished relationships? In Selling Friendship, Curtis Child argues that MLMs offer a window into the emotional and moral inner workings of our hyper-commodified world. Child explores how the companies persuade people to commodify their close relationships, how sellers make sense of and justify their work, and why the experience of being sold to in this context can be so vexing. He finds that the industry intentionally creates a sense of belonging and meaning to draw people to the work, and sellers learn strategies that downplay their economic interests in efforts to preserve good relationships.

  As the logic of business intermingles with the logic of mutual affection, commodification—so often perceived in theoretical terms—becomes a visceral, powerful, and dynamic force. One that individuals sustain, ignore, and resist it in discrete, identifiable moments. This book uncovers and makes tangible those moments.