Eli Cook

2023 Detroit, MI, United States

Abstract: In our contemporary digital lives, nearly every worker is judged and graded by the all-seeing 5-star rating scale, be they an Uber driver, a college Professor, or the faceless janitor whose livelihood depends on whether you press a green or red smiley face as you leave the bathroom. Before the early twentieth century, however, the idea of subjectively rating workers did not exist. Yet by the 1930s, many American workers – especially those working in sales or department stores - found themselves being rated by their bosses on a monthly basis. They had one man to thank for that: Industrial psychologist and corporate consultant Walter Dill Scott. This paper focuses on Scott, the Northwestern Professor who invented and institutionalized the employee rating scale during the Progressive era. While Scott wrote some of the first works ever on the psychology of advertising, labor motivation, and personnel management, by far his most influential innovation was a 5-point rating scale which required bosses to rate their workers’ “appearance,” “loyalty,” “manner” “tact”, “energy”, “neatness” and “personality.” After implementing these rating scales on hundreds of army officers during World War One, Scott’s ratings scales took off in the 1920s and 1930s – despite constant pushback from unions. Unlike industrial laborers whose productivity could often be tracked by how many widgets they made or bricks they lifted, disciplining white-collar and service industry workers required a new form of Taylorism which relied not on objective measures but subjective opinion. Moreover, in rating the workers themselves and not their labor, Scott also sought to change the way these laborers saw themselves. In an emerging consumerist society in which smiling, energetic, loyal and clean-cut salespeople were not really selling goods as much as they were selling a part of themselves, Scott hoped the five-star rating would become not only a whip but a mirror.

2025 Atlanta, Georgia

Abstract: This paper traces the contested rise of pay-to-display “slotting fees” in American supermarket chains in the 1990s and the subsequent role they came to play in the business architecture of Big Tech platforms such as Google and Amazon. Following deregulation in the 1970s and 1980s, newly consolidated supermarket chains realized that their revenues no longer needed to come mostly from shoppers, as stipulated under New Deal anti-chain laws. Rather, as unencumbered “choice architects” with major market power, they could begin to make money not from selling food to consumers but from selling shelf space (sometimes referred to as “slots”) to suppliers. In 1968, only 28 percent of a food producer’s marketing budget went to retailers. The rest was spent on media advertising. By 2010, these ratios had flipped and, as this paper shows, food suppliers’ marketing expenses came to consist mostly of significant slotting and display fees to supermarket chains which insured that their products would make it onto the shelf or be placed in a prominent spot. Furious, small manufacturers demanded that the government step in as they had little chance to compete with the likes of Coca-Cola for shelf space. Yet as the paper demonstrates, regulators, judges and policymakers did very little – especially after Chicago School economists working for the FTC deemed such fees “efficient.” Many small producers were pushed out of the supermarket aisle entirely. The paper ends by showing how, by the early twenty-first century, the business architecture of supermarket slotting fees spread online and became the main source of Google’s enormous profits. It will also show how, when challenged by anti-trust regulators, companies like Google and Amazon refer explicitly to supermarket slotting fees in order to legitimize their own business model.

2026 London

Abstract: This paper uses the Pepsi Challenge as a window into the rise of consumer choice experiments and the broader ideological shift toward consumer sovereignty in the late twentieth century. Beginning in Dallas in 1975 and spreading nationwide, the Challenge invited millions of Americans to “let your taste decide.” Behind its cheery slogan lay a deeper story about how marketers, armed with behavioral science and experimental design, became powerful "choice architects" who learned how to shape people’s behavior by constructing carefully curated forms of structured choice. In removing brand names, the Pepsi Challenge was essentially wiping away society and the pressures, identities, emotions and collective memories that shape taste. When you entered the brandless void of the Challenge, you did so as an isolated individual with no past, relying only on your own seemingly innate and personal taste buds. The campaign taught Americans to see themselves as free, individualist and sovereign choosers whose "true" preferences could be revealed to them only in the controlled confines of a choice experiment. The Pepsi Challenge thus stands as a striking example of how the neoclassical idea of the sovereign consumer was popularized through choice experiments. Yet what appeared to be a neutral experiment in taste was, in fact, a powerful tool of persuasion that helped construct the very preferences it claimed to objectively measure. As the utter failure of New Coke reveals, the enormous success of the Pepsi Challenge did not lie in the ability of choice experiments to accurately predict what people inherently preferred (Coke ran thousands of taste tests before changing its recipe) but rather in its ability to construct a new, “neoclassical self.” Long before the digital age, the seemingly hackneyed Challenge thus offers us an early glimpse into how corporate choice architects have succeeded in not only shaping our consumer habits, but our very subjectivity. No wonder Steve Jobs hired the architect of the Pepsi Challenge to be Apple's CEO.