Ingo Köhler: Directors of structural change. The reception of the socio-economic upheaval in market research and consultancy in the 1970s.

Evening lecture as part of the conference The end of the ‘Golden Age’? Structural changes in the 1970s, their reception and consequences, from an interdisciplinary perspective. 

Structural changes in the 1970s helped the new market research sector of commercial market research and consultancy in Germany achieve a major breakthrough. With the use of external expertise, numerous industrial companies were searching for adaptive strategies that would ensure the sustainability of their market and organizational models. This lecture illuminates the discourse between consultants and companies, reconstructing which forms, consequences and risks of this upheaval were problematic for major stakeholders. Staging this upheaval as a crisis scenario, serves not only as a dominant interpretative narrative, but also as a clever business model for new “prognosis experts”.

Ingo Köhler is the academic coordinator at the DFG priority program 1859: “Experience and expectation. Historical foundations of economic behavior” at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and a college lecturer at the Institute for Economic and Social History, Georg-August-University Göttingen.

Please register for this event by 18.11: carina.gliese@hi.uni-stuttgart.de