White Collar by C. Wright Mills — Read

Salesmanship seems a frenzied affair of flexibility and pep; the managerial demiurge, a cold machinery of calculation and planning. Yet the conflict between them is only on the surface: in the new society, salesmanship is much too important to be left to pep alone or to the personal flair of detached salesmen. Since the first decade of the century, much bureaucratic attention has been given to the gap between mass production and individual consumption. Salesmanship is an attempt to fill that gap. In it, as in material fabrication, large-scale production has been instituted, in the form of reliable salespeople and willing customers. The dominant motive has been to lower the costs of selling per head; the dominant technique, to standardize and rationalize the processes of salesmanship, not only in the obvious sense of mass retailing in department stores, but in the technique and organization of selling everywhere.

In selling, as elsewhere, centralization has meant the expropriation of certain traits previously found in creative salesmen, by a machinery that codifies these traits and controls their acquisition and display by individual salesmen. The rise of absentee selling, rooted in the mass media, has done much to spur these centralizing and rationalizing trends. From the very beginning, absentee selling, being expensive, has been in the hands of top management, which has had its use studied, probably more carefully than any other activity in modern society.