Publisher's Synopsis
This study explores the moral ethos of personal sales in contemporary American life by focusing on the training of agents in the life insurance industry. Viewed more broadly, it evaluates the meaning and consequences of certain features of the commercialization of American life. Beyond the American scene, the larger interest of this study lies in the same direction - in the question of the consequences that can be expected from the penetration of modern culture as a whole and the domination of all spheres of contemporary life by the conceptual apparatus and the logic of sales.;Training programmes in personal sales define the sales process, but in a contradictory fashion, by employing two antithetical conceptual and rhetorical idioms. In one idiom, the sales process is conceived as a strategic interaction that typically involves a contest between salesperson and prospect, the purpose of which is to maximise the salesperson's commissions. In the other idiom, the sales process is understood as the performance of a service to a client whose needs are paramount in the transaction. The author shows how these two conflicting definitions of the sales process generate a number of antinomies, and how the identity of sale personnel is framed by the paradoxes they entail. The study concludes with an examination of the means by which the life insurance industry diminishes the impact of these antinomies on the performance of its agents.
