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.