Research Summary
Research Summary
Overview
Description
Dr. Burch’s research focuses on capitalism, work, and gender in the twentieth-century United States. Her work reinterprets the history of direct selling by placing it at the center, rather than on the margins, of narratives about advanced capitalism. Examining the history of firms including Fuller Brush, J.R. Watkins Medical Company, Stanley Home Products, Avon Products Inc., and the Amway Corporation, Dr. Burch traces the evolution of independent salesmanship across the twentieth century. In so doing, she demonstrates not only that direct sales has been a consistent, meaningful part of the modern U.S. economy, but also how direct sales firms relied as early as the 1930s on many of the employment, labor management, and distribution strategies more commonly associated with late twentieth-century capitalism. In the 1930s leading executives in the direct sales field, for example, helped establish independent contractor status as a category of work in response to the new labor regulations imposed as part of the New Deal. In the 1970s and 1980s, direct sales executives were again pivotal in reaffirming the independent status of direct sellers, as well as other workers, as statutory non-employees through key legal and regulatory cases. Conventional accounts of the sector have emphasized the ways that direct sales firms drew on an older model of face-to-face salesmanship. By contrast, Dr. Burch’s research highlights the ways that such firms, while extending a long tradition of independent salesmanship, also charted new paths. Direct sales, as low-wage, non-union, casual, often “feminized” work, in many ways prefigured the temporary, supplemental work many consider the hallmark of the post-Fordist labor economy. Examining the long history of direct sales firms and of direct sellers can thus help scholars sharpen our understanding – both conceptually and chronologically – of exactly what we mean when we talk about labor in what is variously referred to as the post-industrial, postmodern, or post-Fordist economy. The history of direct sales offers a novel vantage point from which to assess what is truly new about the new economy of the twenty-first century.