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This paper aims to chart the influence of McCarthyism and of FBI surveillance practices on a number of prominent American social scientists, market researchers, opinion pollsters and survey research practitioners during the post-war years. Hitherto disparate sets of historical evidence on how Red Scare tactics influenced social researchers and marketing scientists are brought together and updated with evidence from original archival research.

The paper draws on the existing secondary literature on how social research practitioners and social scientists reacted to the unusually high pressures on academic freedom during the McCarthy era. It supplements this review with evidence obtained from archival research, including declassified FBI files. The focus of this paper is set on prominent individuals, mainly Bernard Berelson, Samuel Stouffer, Hadley Cantril, Robert S. Lynd, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Herta Herzog, Ernest Dichter, but also the Frankfurt School in exile.

Although some of the historiography presents American social scientists and practitioners in the marketing research sector as victims of McCarthyism and FBI surveillance, it can also be shown that virtually all individuals in focus here also developed strategies of accommodation, compromise and even opportunism to benefit from the climate of suspicion brought about by the prevailing anti-Communism.

Anyone interested in questions about the morality of marketing, market research and opinion polling as part of the social sciences practiced in vivo will need to pay attention to the way these social-scientific practices became tarnished by the way prominent researchers accommodated and at times even abetted McCarthyism.

Against the view of social scientists as harassed academic minority, evidence is presented in this paper which shows American social scientists who researched market-related phenomena, like media, voters choices and consumer behaviour, in a different light. Most importantly, this paper for the first time presents archival evidence on the scale of Paul F. Lazarsfeld’s surveillance by the FBI.

This paper aims to show the genesis of motivation research in work done from the 1920s through 1954, especially with the growth in reception of European “depth psychology”. This has been followed up by Fullerton (2013).

Standard historical methodology – heavy reliance on sources written at the time (primary resources), avoidance of anachronism, heavy use of contemporary quotations, efforts to explain and interpret.

Motivation research dates to the 1920s with the work of Paul F. Lazarsfeld and others. It grew rapidly in the USA, part of the great expansion of the behavioral sciences, and amidst a zeitgeist of growing discontent with older psychologies and of Economic Man.

This paper takes motivation research back to its origins for the first time, placing it clearly in line with contemporary intellectual developments.

During the 1920s and into the 1930s, German‐language work on consumer behavior led the world; for example, segmentation was clearly discussed from the late 1920s. The purpose of this paper is to show how marketing thought in Germany and Austria reached a peak even as the environmental substructure that sustained it was being seriously eroded by political and economic changes that forever consigned it to a peripheral position upon the world stage.

The design of the study is a critical historical one relying heavily upon documents produced during the period discussed. Statements are weighed and evaluated.

The paper finds that very impressive, at times world‐leading, work was being done in the 1920s and early 1930s, particularly in the areas of segmentation and what would later become known as consumer behavior. Much of what later became known as Motivation Research, or example, was pioneered in Germany and Austria before 1934.

The primary implication is that a great deal of marketing thought developed outside the USA, sometimes drawing upon US marketing thought, in other cases developing completely independently. A second implication is that marketing thought can be weakened by political and economic conditions, as Germany and Austria painfully experienced.

This is the first study to explore historical German and Austrian marketing thought in a cross‐cultural manner, comparing and contrasting them with thought developed elsewhere.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the evolution of marketing’s philosophical conversation over the past 120 years, focusing on the emergent meaning of the notion that marketing should become more “scientific”.

This paper focuses on the US academic marketing literature, primarily journal articles and books published in the first half of the 20th century.

The Aristotelian distinction between techné, epistemé and phronesis provides a rich basis for framing philosophical discussion in marketing, and should supplant the art-science debate and Anderson’s distinction between science₁ and science₂. Prior to 1959, the marketing journals provided a forum for phronesis, though this diminished as the academic marketing community largely abandoned the inductive, contextual approach in favour of a deductive, “scientific” methodology. The Ford Foundation played an important role in effecting this change.

The paper highlights the importance of forums where practitioners can reflect on the ethical and social implications of their practices and then work to enhance these practices for the greater social good.

Questions the value of distinctions between marketing theorists and practitioners and the consequential focus of marketing journals.

Advances the concept of phronesis in the marketing literature and distinguishes it from epistemé, which has dominated academic marketing discourse over the past 60 years.

During the 1980s, market research practitioners and academic marketing researchers witnessed a growing interest in qualitative research. A review of the practitioner and academic literature on qualitative market(ing) research reveals the commonalities and the differences in the ways each group represents, thinks about and practices qualitative research. Areas where both groups might benefit from sharing ideas and information and from closer links generally are discussed.

The paper's aim is to explain historical methodology in a marketing context.

The paper draws on the author's personal experience, being trained in the history method and using the historical method.

An awareness of time contexts and complex change is essential, so too is an appreciation of primary sources (as defined by historians). Reading the present into the past (anachronism) is to be avoided, and the interpretation and explanation of events are essential to good history.

The paper represents the author's own personal experience.

This paper is devoted to the topic of how mathematics might be more efficiently used in educational administration. The position taken here is that mathematics is a branch of philosophy whose subject matter is a set of abstract entities and identified operational rules. It is a vocabulary of symbols that can be used to label objects and, more importantly, a set of grammatical rules for using the vocabulary. The paper begins with a review of some recent developments reported in the social science literature on the uses of mathematics in political science, sociology and economics, and ends with some illustrations of how these developments could lead to similar applications in both the practice and theory domains of educational administration.

Undiscovered public knowledge is a relatively unstudied phenomenon, and the few extended examples that have been published are intradisciplinary. This paper presents the concept of ‘facet’ as an example of interdisciplinary undiscovered public knowledge. ‘Facets’ were central to the bibliographic classification theory of S.R. Ranganathan in India and to the behavioural research of L. Guttman in Israel. The term had the same meaning in both fields, and the concept was developed and exploited at about the same time in both, but two separate, unconnected literatures grew up around the term and its associated concepts. This paper examines the origins and parallel uses of the concept and the term in both fields as a case study of interdisciplinary knowledge that could have been, but was apparently not, discovered any time between the early 1950s and the present using simple, readily available information retrieval techniques.

The purpose of this paper is to show how 1940s and 1950s motivation research laid the foundations of present day consumer behavior as a discipline.

This research uses standard historical methodology – heavy reliance upon primary sources, avoidance of anachronism, heavy use of contemporary quotations, and effort to explain and interpret.

Using sociology, anthropology, and clinical psychology to explain how and why consumers buy, motivation research provided business with valuable information, and, in the long run, began today's consumer behavior field of study.

This paper offers a different view of motivation research, stressing its use of sociology and anthropology. It offers a corrective to the prevailing over‐emphasis on Ernest Dichter.

The purpose of this paper is to examine motivational research (MR) – the most maligned and misunderstood branch of market research. It argues that MR has been too easily dismissed by researchers. In so doing, they have ignored a potentially significant insight into the post World War II consumer's motivations and domestic life.

This paper utilises previously unexamined primary source material to examine David T. Bottomley's construction of MR.

By looking at in‐depth market research studies, a greater, more rounded picture of the postwar consumer can be gained. Throughout the 1960s, some market researchers turned to consumer motivations to uncover the psychological dimensions of purchasing behaviour by determining the symbolic meanings goods had to their consumers. Rather than viewing consumer behaviour as predictable by factors such as economic class, motivational researchers held that consumers are multi‐faceted subjects and life‐stage and attitudes to colour are important factors influencing consumer behaviour.

Research that considers consumer motivations should not be so easily dismissed as deceptive or corruptive research without genuine merit for historical research. Nor should Dichter's style of research be considered to be the only version of MR.

Previous scholars have largely ignored the significance of market research to the development of the consumer market and the construction of the postwar consumer. Given the dearth of scholarly examinations, the paper is based almost entirely on primary research data.