Engaging with experiences: the senses as lenses in business history

ABSTRACT

The senses have become an important part of business strategies and corporate activities, ranging from product design and marketing to customer relations. Reflecting on a growing interest in the senses among scholars and business practitioners, this essay provides a brief characterization of recent literature, proposes areas for future research, and discusses opportunities as well as challenges that arise from interpreting the senses in business history.

KEYWORDS:

• Senses
• taste
• sound
• food
• music
• business history

The forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present.

- Karl Marx (1988)

Vital for humans to perceive and interact with the world around them, the senses should occupy a prominent place in historical scholarship on producing and consuming as foundational aspects of existence. Throughout human civilization, the look, sound, smell, taste, and feel of things have been crucial to how people relate to their environments and to other individuals. In essence, the senses are connectors, and the multifaceted interconnections they engender are central to the human life experience. Engaging with the senses, therefore, appears conducive to historical inquiry across the discipline’s spectrum of subfields. Yet, business historians are in a particularly advantageous position: Given the commercial significance that sensory stimulation has gained in recent decades – entertainment, cuisine, wellness, hospitality, and other experience-focused branches of the economy have undergone significant evolution and growth – it seems timely and topical to trace this trajectory through earlier stages. Research on such industries and markets covers a wide range of subjects, but practitioners tend to ask similar questions, search for related patterns, and encounter common problems. Whether the emphasis is on the taste, smell, and look of foods – as in Ai Hisano’s scholarship – or on the sonic properties of music and visual characteristics of its by-products – as in Sven Kube’s research – studying sensory experiences still leads scholars onto new ground where complex connections await analysis. By exploring how innovation and enterprise shaped sensory experiences – and, by extension, influenced social, cultural, and ideological developments – business historians are strongly poised to generate knowledge that springs from a more profound understanding of the senses.

Since the late nineteenth century, scholars and cultural critics including Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen, and Walter Benjamin have probed the physiological and psychological effects that the production and purchase of goods have on human beings. Industrial psychologists such as John Watson conducted research on consumer behavior and psychological appeal for advertising campaigns, and corporate leaders like Alfred Sloan began building their business strategies around product diversification by expanding the range of styles and colors. Firms in many branches attempted to gather knowledge about seemingly irrational and subjective consumer psychology and experience. As industrialization and consumer market growth accelerated, it became not only possible but commercially desirable for companies to develop products that displayed sensually attractive features. Scientific research and technological innovation gave them the means to offer unique sensations, for instance by utilizing newly invented chemical additives, such as artificial dyes and flavors, as well as novel materials like nylon and plastic. Manufacturers, scientists, designers, and marketers collaborated to create a dizzying array of products, from cosmetics and toiletries to food and fashion, thus building what the historian of science Steven Shapin has called the ‘aesthetic-industrial complex’ (Shapin 2012, 179). In this new era of consumer capitalism, attention to sensory appeals became a crucial part of business strategies in a modern consumer-oriented economy.

Beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s, anthropologists and historians like David Howes, Constance Classen, and Mark M. Smith utilized sensory experiences as a critical analytical framework to enrich understandings of how individuals made sense of societies (Classen et al., 1994; Howes, 1991, 2003, 2004; Smith, 2001, 2004, 2007). Forging the so-called history of the senses (or sensory history), these scholars scrutinized the ways in which humans of different cultural backgrounds responded to the settings that surrounded them. They have noted that it is impossible to know how others perceive sensory stimuli and whether one person responds in the same way as another. From that angle, sensory perception depends to a significant extent on the individual. Notwithstanding, sensory experiences are neither strictly subjective nor are they simply biological phenomena that can be measured with scientific methods. As these scholars have argued, sensory experiences are shared experiences embedded in specific historical contexts. Historians of the senses also seek to deconstruct the dominance of vision, often associated with knowledge and rationality, in Western civilizations by stressing crucial functions of other senses and the multifaceted as well as transitory nature of visuality (Foster 1988; Jay 1993; Levin 1993).

In the field of business history, the senses are becoming an increasingly important framework to examine corporate activities, such as product development and marketing, and their effects on society. Investigating how the music industry shaped the culture of listening between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, David Suisman’s Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Suisman 2009) showed that capitalized and racialized recordings had major ideological and material significance. Regina Lee Blaszczyk’s The Color Revolution (Blaszczyk 2012) demonstrated that the ‘color revolution’ in the marketing and retailing of consumer goods, from automobiles to clothes, transformed business practices and visual environments in the United States. As Geoffrey Jones revealed in Beauty Imagined: A History of the Global Beauty Industry (Jones 2010), entrepreneurs in the beauty industry not only expanded global markets but also reformed people’s ideas about beauty: shape and color of the body and the face, smoothness of the skin, and bodily smell came to signify a person’s social and economic status while an increasing array of globally marketed products helped standardize what beauty meant across cultures. Other industries and business activities that touch on the senses include fashion, design, and marketing—see, for example, William Leach’s discussion on colorful window displays at department stores (Leach, 1994) and Véronique Pouillard’s research on fashion (Pouillard, 2021). Not all researchers who investigate corporate practices along these lines may identify themselves as historians of the senses, but studies of this kind enhance understandings of human perceptions and sensory experiences.

Historians of the senses use primary sources of various types and forms. Frequent challenges are not limited to locating sources but include questions about how to use them. Trade journals are a good example to illustrate this point. On the one hand, they are excellent sources to examine political and economic conditions that affected particular industries, the development of new technologies, and forms of business-to-business marketing. Yet, on the other hand, the representatives they feature may not explicitly address sensory aspects of their products or detail their business activities. In industry journals used for research on the color of foodstuffs, for instance, they would frequently reference the visual impact of foods and approaches to their visual presentation without mentioning ‘color’ or ‘vision’ directly. Consequently, researchers have to read trade journal articles very carefully and creatively to understand how industry representatives were thinking about the senses. It is thus important to utilize materials other than corporate records, such as government documents, newspapers, popular magazines, prescriptive literature, and images. One example, the 1871 lithograph reproduction ‘Fruits of the Tropics,’ sold by the New York-based print shop Currier & Ives to many middle-class households, depicted tropical fruits including pineapples, oranges, and bananas. Strikingly, it showed not only yellow bananas but also red ones, which were just as common in the United States of the 1870s. The image predates a rapid increase in banana production and consumption at the turn of the century, when companies like United Fruit prioritized the yellow variant on their plantations in Central and South America – red bananas had a thinner skin that rendered them less suitable for long-distance shipping. Consequently, yellow bananas became the dominant variant in the United States and around the world, representing the ‘natural’ color of this fruit to present-day consumers who are largely unaware of the business-driven selection process that unfolded more than a century ago (Hisano, 2019). Visual sources like ‘Fruits of the Tropics’ can help researchers to query common notions and shed new light on the interplay between business and the senses.

In that context, sound is another useful source to pursue new perspectives. After all, the sense of hearing is indispensable for many forms of communication and interaction. Humans’ ability to perceive vibrations and convert mechanical movements into electrical signals for the brain to process has yielded languages as humanity’s original social media and spawned countless cultural expressions. The French economic theorist Jacques Attali contended that ‘[m]ore than colors and forms, it is sounds and their arrangements that fashion societies’ (Attali 1985, 6). Researchers from multiple fields have shown that noises created for artistic and commercial purposes contain valuable information about the past. Music has accompanied the development of human civilization like a soundtrack of increasingly many tracks and layers (Smith 2004). Aural culture attained significance particularly from the twentieth century onward, as more sophisticated technology spurred its dissemination while its rising economic value further stimulated its production and consumption. At the heart of modern youth culture, popular music amplified cultural competition during the Cold War, a period of intense stylistic diversification and immense public demand. As music became big business, sound, a source of constant novelty and rejuvenation, was one of its major assets.

Scholars from different fields have utilized music as source material. Scrutinizing characteristics of genres, messages in song lyrics, and the careers of performers, they have produced an impressive body of literature on music’s connections with cultural, political, and social trends during the Cold War decades. One of music’s most discrete components, sound has played a rather understated role in such studies. Yet, from rock ‘n’ roll and beat music to progressive rock and heavy metal, and from disco to electronic music, Western styles derived much of their character and appeal from sonic qualities. The refusal of adolescent baby-boomers to adopt traditional norms of propriety reverberated in the loud and twangy buzz of rock ‘n’ roll, an aural offense to parental generations at the time. Counterculture adherents’ affection for self-exploration and consciousness expansion resonated in the echoes, distortions, and experimental noise of psychedelic rock. With electronically enhanced instrumental tracks, synthesizer pop conquered the charts at the dawn of the computer age, heralding digital transformations that would soon affect all of entertainment. The distinct sounds that shaped those styles speak to the technological and economic conditions that facilitated their creation. Specifically, the transition from analog to digital noise during the 1980s illustrates the significance of innovation and enterprise for cultural development in different types of societies. In the capitalist world, multinational joint ventures accelerated the invention of synthesizers, private companies competed to turn these new instruments into affordable consumer goods, and the new medium of Compact Disks enabled audiences to enjoy their crystal-clear output in high-definition quality. While multifaceted business activity underpinned this sonic revolution in the West, Eastern Bloc countries struggled to contain this development gap. Their long-term research plans, underfunded instrument factories, and neglected leisure markets kept them in the era of mechanical creation and analog reproduction of musical noise until the Iron Curtain fell. Over the span of the Cold War, the West-East divide became increasingly audible.

Experiencing recorded sound is one of the world’s most common leisure activities and invites business-focused historical inquiry from different angles. After all, perpetuating the sonic evolution has been a puzzle of many pieces. First, there are the devices that generate sounds. From electric guitars in the 1950s to synthesizer keyboards in the 1980s to twenty-first-century computer software, new instruments need to be invented and introduced before they can leave their marks on music. Second, there is the equipment necessary to manipulate and encapsulate sound. While manufacturers of microphones, mixing desks, and mastering tools cater to a smaller clientele, their innovations drive competition between studios and record labels. Then, there are music media. From the fragile disks of the past to the binary files of the present, new ‘sound carriers’ arrived in intervals to stimulate market growth. Last but not least, there are portable playback and home entertainment devices. Sony’s Walkman cassette players and Apple’s iPod items are just two examples of audio gadgets that propelled the rise of giant corporations. The diverse nature of industries and markets referenced here hints at the complexity of engaging with sound as a commodity, on the one hand, but on the other hand shows that there remains much ground for business historians to cover.

Interpreting the senses holds potential for yielding new historical understandings. Since the study of sensory experiences illuminates how individuals connected with each other and in what ways they related to their surroundings, inquiries centered on enterprise can yield additional insights into ideological, political, and social conditions. The ways in which ideas like modernity and progress manifest in sound is a case in point. Mid-nineteenth-century observers perceived the whistle of steam-powered locomotives as symbolic for the industrial transformation of the landscape, with railroads not only revolutionizing the economy but altering people’s concepts of distance and time. Nowadays, for most people trains just contribute another layer of common traffic buzz. Similarly, the ‘handshake’ noise of 56k dial-up modems, to which users listened with anticipation before entering the online world of early internet days, has vanished from everyday life and is commemorated in nostalgic clips on YouTube. But sensory experiences do not only lend themselves to tracking change over time, they also inform comparison between environments. The efforts of communist countries to substitute expensive ingredients with cheaper alternatives in order to retain fixed food prices, for instance, can be examined to highlight different approaches to economic organization during the Cold War (and to illustrate why Western commodities were so popular in the Eastern Bloc). Another more recent example is the remarkable variance in standardized products sold around the globe. Beverage companies that use high-fructose corn syrup to sweeten sodas in the United States and cane sugar just across the border in Mexico, like cereal brands whose European offerings divert from American color schemes, routinely tailor their merchandise to meet preferences and regulations in different markets. These examples also underscore that research on sensory experiences offers room for transnational and transcultural approaches. Generally, engaging with the senses can help business historians to cross over into other subfields and tap readerships in a variety of disciplines that range from cultural studies to law.

The flipside to this abundance of opportunity is, of course, risk. Research on the senses presents a number of persistent intricacies, among the trickiest of which is the subjective character of sensations. Inevitably, researchers in the here and now perceive ‘archived’ sensations in ways vastly different from those of previous generations. A recording that audiences regarded as revolutionary decades ago is unlikely to make the same impression on listeners who are attuned to today’s finely chiseled soundscapes. Similarly, people’s tastes are shaped by the culinary traditions of their time and place, which complicates efforts of defining benchmarks for novelty and quality. The inherent subjectivity of sensory experiences exacerbates not only work with primary sources but also the presentation of findings. Frequently, scholars feel the need to elaborate on sensations prior to evaluating them. While comparing, characterizing, and contextualizing experiences is important to give readers a better understanding (Smith 2007), it can render pieces for publication more descriptive than they should be, given that History (particularly in North America) champions argumentative writing. The most profound conundrum of all, however, is the elusiveness and ephemeral nature of the subjects under scrutiny. Sensations are hard to capture but even harder to conserve, a circumstance that greatly limits the types of sources that scholars have at their disposal. Thus, they oftentimes have to rely on objects like cookbooks and musical instruments, sorely aware of the contradiction inherent in probing something immaterial by way of examining artifacts. Since historians are removed from direct access to experiential moments, they are constantly challenged to find proxies for smells and sounds in order to ‘keep their thumb on the phenomenon.’ While this circumstance will continue to present challenges to anyone who dare tackle the senses, a growing hive mind of scholars might over time come up with practical remedies.

For business historians, the senses can serve as lenses to examine how enterprise factored in the evolution of human perceptions and interrelations – and, vice versa, how the sensory apparatus shaped the development of business activity. Investigating the connections between production and consumption, on the one hand, as well as sensations and experiences, on the other hand, offers scholars a vast playing field to experiment with new sources and methods. The commodification of sensory experiences in capitalism, their dissemination from cross-cultural perspectives, various interconnections between technology and sensory perceptions, and the construction of knowledge about the senses are just a few examples of where business historians encounter opportunities to break new ground and contribute original insights. Therefore, as understanding the human experience is central to all humanities disciplines, business history is well-equipped to lead the profession in interdisciplinary scholarship on the senses.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ai Hisano

Ai Hisano is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies at the University of Tokyo. She was a Newcomen Postdoctoral Fellow in Business History at Harvard Business School (2016-17) and taught at Kyoto University (2017-2021). Her first book, Visualizing Taste: How Business Changed the Look of What You Eat (Harvard University Press, 2019) won the 2020 Hagley Prize in Business History (Business History Conference) and the 2020 Shimizu Hiroshi Book Award (Japanese Association for American Studies). Hisano’s research interests include the history of the senses, business history, and the history of technology.

Sven Kube

Sven Kube is a historian of culture, business, and technology with special interest in music. Trained in Literature and Cultural Studies, he obtained a doctorate in History from Florida International University. Most recently, he was a National Endowment for the Humanities research fellow at the Hagley Museum and Library. His current research centers on recorded sound and popular music in cultural Cold War competition.