This book traces the development of market research, its technical resources, its personnel and its organizations. Among its key themes are:

• the rise and fall of occupational control
• development of new techniques for studying consumers
• the impact of ICTs
• establishing and maintaining relationships with clients and consumers
• the changing contours of industrial competition.

This academically and critically rigorous assessment of the market research industry will be of interest across a number of spheres including marketing, organization studies, sociology, consumer behaviour, contemporary economic and social history, and geography and institutional economics.