Marketplace Dignity Part 1: scam culture, the New Deal, and your favourite teacher
This essay comments on and expands some of the arguments in our forthcoming book, ‘Marketplace Dignity’, written by Cait Lamberton, Neela Saldanha and me. That book is now available for pre-order from all your favourite retailers, and will be published on 4 June.
“Of any economic system we must ask: Does it enhance human dignity? Does it create self-respect? Does it encourage creativity? Does it allow everyone to participate in the material blessings of this created world? Does it sustain a climate of equal regard — for employees as well as employers, the poor no less than the rich? Does it protect the vulnerable and help those in need to escape the trap of need? Does it ensure that no one lacks the means for a dignified existence? Do those who succeed share their blessings with those who have less? Does the economic system strengthen the bonds of human solidarity? And does it know its own limits — does it recognize that its values are not the only values, that there is more to life than a perpetual striving after wealth, that the market is not the only mechanism of distribution, and that an economic system is a means not an end?” — Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference, 2002
“We would prefer to have respect….Unfortunately these things happen only to the rich people.” — Research participant, Mathare Social Justice Centre, Nairobi, Kenya
“Understand this if you understand nothing: it is a powerful thing to be seen.” — Akwaeke Emezi, Freshwater, 2018
We talk about capitalism through metaphors. The economy is a machine, we say, or a household. At other times, we call it a jungle, or a beast red in tooth or claw. Sometimes the economy is a race or a battle, or a patient in need of treatment. All of these metaphors are wrong. The economy is just people. We organize to trade among ourselves; it’s one of the most elementary forms of human sociality (Fiske, 1992).
And if the economy is made of people, then we must do business accordingly. We must treat people as people. We must work to see the full complex humanity of our customers, and our employees, and our bosses.
Our book is about dignity. It’s one of the biggest ideas there is, appearing in every philosophical and moral tradition around the world (Debes, 2017). It’s to do with who we are as humans, and how we ought to treat each other. The three of us have been studying dignity for five years now. We’ve studied it in India, East Africa and the United States. We don’t claim to have all the answers as to what dignity means for the economy and society. There’s a long road of learning ahead. In the book, we share the practical lessons for businesses and organizations, from our work so far. We hope you’ll come along with us on the journey of how dignity has helped shape our responses to many of the hardest questions about today’s businesses and economy — and to the hardest question of all in business: ‘what therefore should we do?’.
Before that, though, another question: why should we bother? The impact of a dignity agenda is potentially huge. We think there are three big reasons why you should care about dignity:
- When people are treated in a way that respects their dignity, it unlocks new kinds of value. They are happier with the services they receive, more likely to return to them again, and more likely to recommend them to others. Respectful advertisements are more persuasive. They are happier and feel more empowered, more cooperative with others, and are better democratic citizens. When companies get this wrong, consumers are upset and angry, and quick to withdraw their business.
- It’s something consumers all over the world tell us they want, and are frequently denied. We’ve surveyed thousands of people, who shared their stories of disrespectful marketplace experiences, and how much they had stayed with them.
- It’s the right thing to do. A dignity approach aligns with and sharpens the impact of the purposes our organizations set and the values we hold as individuals.
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What does it look like, to treat people as people? Well, do you remember that special teacher you had in school? For Neela, it was Teacher Marilyn in India, who still gave her a prize (from her personal funds) in first grade, even though illness meant she had missed the crucial test and was therefore not eligible for school prizes. For Tom, growing up in the UK, it was Graham Best at the end of secondary school, who demanded that he go beyond decent grades, and try to wrestle with actual truth-seeking. For Cait it was Bruce Benson in her philosophy class in Illinois, who gave her the respect of real, bracing critique. All of these teachers saw us as who we already were in that classroom, and who we could be. The memories of these encounters last a lifetime.
There used to be more relationships in our lives like that, for a lot of people. You might know the names of the local shopkeepers, and they might know yours. The advice ‘consult your family doctor’ meant something to a lot more people than it does now. Intimidating though they might be, you could even talk to the bank manager too. These were interactions where you could be known, and explain your particular circumstances.
Now, things don’t feel like that so much — for better and for worse. The world has become more precarious. “Life without the promise of stability”, as Anna Tsing says (Tsing, 2015). Things change and race ahead, far beyond our individual ability to plan and control. It’s rare, in purchasing services or goods, to feel treated as a human. We find ourselves as lonely individuals interacting with mighty corporations. Every purchase seems to involve a contract with the terms set only by one party. You feel like you need an advocate at your side to make a purchase. A few months later, the company announces they are unilaterally changing the prices they charge; if only you had read the terms, they note, you would have known that you had agreed to let them do that. When something goes awry, we find that the system for redress is a rickety bureaucracy whose incapacities are defined by the logic of shareholder value. The sociologist of American life Tressie McMillan Cottom has called this ‘scam culture’. She writes:
“Corporations, platforms, politicians, friends and relations have sown so many tiny seeds of distrust that of course we do not trust our social institutions or one another. That is more than a bad investment deal or a shady business practice. That is an indictment of a culture….A scam culture is one in which scamming has not only lost its stigma but is also valorized. We rebrand scamming as “hustle,” or the willingness to commodify all social ties, and this is because the “legitimate” economy and the political system simply do not work for millions of Americans.” (Cottom, 2021).
Our memories of these disrespectful encounters last a long time, too.
Why did this happen? Not out of malice. There are real benefits to a consumer culture based on standardization and scale. The things we want are cheaper. There are more options, and new products we could not have dreamed of. When salespeople are bound by tight corporate processes, their idiosyncratic prejudices intrude less often. Some of those human relationships that we used to have felt intrusive. That older marketplace was particularly hard on anyone whose identity or choices put them outside the mainstream. There were good reasons for charting the course that brought us here.
In fact, this standardized consumer society once represented moral progress, as Lizabeth Cohen has shown. She quotes Robert Lynd, a member of the New Deal Consumer Advisory Board, who fretted that the consumer “stands there alone — a man barehanded, against the accumulated momentum of 43,000,000 horse power and their army of salesmen, advertising men, and other jockeys. He knows he buys wastefully…that his desires and insecurities are exploited continually” (Cohen, 2008). The very idea of the Consumer arose as an organized modernist identity around the New Deal, both potent and shorn of human complexity. In Roosevelt’s 1936 speech accepting renomination of his party, in Philadelphia, he said, “If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.” (Cohen, 2008). This idea was especially important for women and African Americans, with the organization of consumer boycotts for businesses that did not treat them as they would hope. Mid-century regulation leveled the playing field and brought a positive standardization. If we have concerns now about the inhuman quality of our consumer interactions today, we should take care to examine what proceeded it with more than just nostalgia.
There were bad reasons for ending up here, too. Some of them were integral to our capitalist system from the beginning. Capitalism can offer the fulfilment of the wants that proceed from our identities. Yet it means that people are continually being used as a means to someone else’s end — exactly what Kant’s theory of dignity warns against. That yields the feeling of estrangement that Marx identified. As companies have gotten bigger, they have increasingly fallen into the same bureaucratic traps that beset governments — their need to operate at scale means they struggle to see the people in front of them, in all their complex humanity (Scott, 1999). One of the great guardrails against this was companies’ belief in the need to focus on the customer; when that was replaced by a focus on value to shareholders instead, it’s no wonder the everyday humanity of doing business diminished. Nor is it any wonder that ‘purpose’, which many companies tout, has proven an insufficient sticking plaster to these great forces — something we’ll return to in the next chapter.
Can we keep the benefits of modern capitalism, and find a way to recover those relationships? Some businesses succeed in bucking the obvious incentives, and come out the other side and find out that the incentives align just fine.
Throughout the book, we share the stories of thinkers, companies and organizations that are working to make dignity real in the marketplace — as well as some cautionary tales. These stories have inspired us, and we hope that they spark ideas about practical ways that change your organization too. We hope that after reading this book, you reach out to us to share your stories as well. Consistent with the idea of dignity we propose, we hope to build a community of organizations committed to designing for dignity where we see and hear one another’s efforts and achievements.
We start, in the first chapter, by defining marketplace dignity and showing why it is important. But dignity is a huge word — we break it down into three pathways that any organization can follow to affirm people’s dignity. Those three are: representation, equality, and agency. Next, we explore the business case for dignity, showing how the dignity approach unlocks new value for businesses as well as consumers. We address arguments against designing for dignity. Our goal is make this idea implementable, so successive chapters then explore how to implement dignity at different stages of the consumer journey: pre-consumption when firms are segmenting, targeting and advertising to their audience; when consumers are evaluating their choices; the experience of consumption; and how to respectfully encourage customers to stay loyal. In a closing pair of chapters, we explore how to audit your organization’s culture of dignity, and distill our recommendations on how to design and maintain that culture.
