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Organising affluence: the NorwegianConsumer Council and comparativeproduct testing in the 1950s and 1960s.Technocratic roots and practicesChristine Myrvang aa Centre for Business History, BI Norwegian Business School , Oslo,NorwayPublished online: 09 Jun 2011.
To cite this article: Christine Myrvang (2011) Organising affluence: the Norwegian ConsumerCouncil and comparative product testing in the 1950s and 1960s. Technocratic roots and practices,Scandinavian Economic History Review, 59:2, 149-165, DOI: 10.1080/03585522.2011.572583
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Organising affluence: the Norwegian Consumer Council andcomparative product testing in the 1950s and 1960s.Technocratic roots and practices
Christine Myrvang*
Centre for Business History, BI Norwegian Business School, Oslo, Norway
The work of the Consumer Council, established in 1953, can be regarded asthe first overall attempt in Norway to organise the capitalist marketplace fromthe consumers’ point of view. As a source of counter-information to seductivecommercial marketing techniques that appealed to people’s hidden desires, theCouncil aimed to enlighten the consumer with objective expert advice on buyingthe best value-for-money goods according to their ‘true needs’. The idea of thegood and functional market was based neither on planning nor on the completeautonomy of market forces, nor was it opposed to an abundant commodityculture as such. In fact, publishing results from scientific product tests for certainitems could be seen as a major contribution to the spread and legitimisation of amodern consumer culture. The article discusses this attempt to organise affluencethrough the construction of a context-free, objective reality by a scientificbureaucracy of consumption and looks into the historical roots of such practices.
Keywords: consumer culture; consumer politics; comparative product testing;technocracy; Norway
Organising consumers
As a mass market of consumer goods developed during the nineteenth century, the
question of organising consumer interests came to attention in industrialising parts of
the world. Small-scale consumer cooperation flourished through wholesaling and
retailing networks, making room for exchange of goods outside the predominant
market institutions. The consumer co-operative movement exerted a powerful appeal
as a counterforce against profit-seeking capitalists and as a way of protecting
consumers. This heterogeneous movement was, in short, aiming at a more democratic
control of the means of consumption and securing the needs of its members.
Historically, there have been profound struggles regarding the political and
ideological meaning of consumer co-operatives’ potential of rearranging the economy
and society. By the beginning of the twentieth century, consumer co-operation was
both regarded as a ‘third way’ between free-competition capitalism and socialist
planning, and simultaneously � within the labour movement � presented as a ‘third
pillar of socialism’, along with trade unionism and political labour parties.1 In
Norway the co-operative movement grew strong during the first half of the twentieth
century, while it was also struggling for its ideological and organisational indepen-
dency in relation to the powerful labour movement. However, the country � as
*Email: [email protected]
Scandinavian Economic History Review
Vol. 59, No. 2, June 2011, 149�165
ISSN 0358-5522 print/ISSN 1750-2837 online
# 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/03585522.2011.572583
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Scandinavia in general � lacked other powerful consumer advocacy groups that could
raise consumption as an issue of civic engagement and promote general consumer
interests.2
In most countries, the co-operative way of organising consumer interests was
severely challenged in the decades after the Second World War. A new affluent and
pleasure-oriented consumer culture was a powerful force, and the post-war consumer
politics in countries such as the Social Democratic Norway put an emphasis on the
need for empowering individual buyers to navigate the dizzying array of marketplace
choices. In Scandinavian countries, state-sponsored consumer institutions emerged
after the war; the Danish Danske husmødres forbrugerrad (the Danish Housewives’
Consumer Council) in 1947, the Norwegian Forbrukerradet (the Consumer Council)
in 1953 and the Swedish Statens Konsumentrad (the State Consumer Council) in
1957. Such advocacy bodies soon became an important supplement to the co-
operative movement, and in the case of Norway, one can argue that the Council,
rather than the consumer co-operative union, NKL, in fact was given a ‘third pillar’
function inside the mixed market economy of the Social Democratic post-war state.
Today, the Consumer Council is regarded as the master voice of Norwegian
consumers.As Iselin Theien has pointed out, the Norwegian Consumer Council established in
1953 was mainly a result of joint efforts of the women of the consumer co-operative
movement and housewives’ organisations, in combination with the Norwegian
Price Directorate request for a consumer advisory body in matters regarding price
regulations.3 The women strongly demanded governmental quality control of goods
on the post-war market where nearly ‘anything’ could be sold. The ‘ashtray industry’
was the contemporary concept describing the production results of the powerful
demand pressure.4 The housewives’ initiative appeared at a time when Norwegian
politics went through an intense struggle on the issue of a planned economy. The
implementation of a new Price and Rationalisation Act would have given the
government an important tool for resource allocation, production control and market
regulations. However, the work on the Act was set aside by the Labour Party after
major confrontations with business and industry. A more moderate Price Act was
passed in Parliament while the attempt to increase the productivity of industrial
production was intensified through a new Productivity Institute.5
Post-war consumption was regulated in part by import restrictions, by price
and tax policy, and by a system of wage adjustments. Yet, the new Consumer Council
had ambitions to make further improvements on the market through white-coated
scientists and technical expertise bridging the information gap between sellers and
users of branded goods. This faith in science was a distinct feature of post-war
consumerist activism in many countries.6 The Norwegian Consumer Council was
politically neutral, but could still be regarded as the Labour Party’s baby during the
first decades of its existence. Both chairpersons of the Consumer Council during the
period examined by this paper were members of the Labour Party.7 The actual
Council was a body of seven individuals, who represented various housewives’
organisations, the consumer cooperative movement, and the Norwegian Confedera-
tion of Trade Unions (LO), in addition to the chairperson appointed by Parliament.
A key issue was mobilising each individual consumer in the capitalist marketplace
through knowledge production and distribution, whereby the imbalances between
business and consumers was meant to be confronted and altered. In fact, in 1954, the
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OEEC recommended an increase of organised consumer research and consumer
guidance as a way of creating more efficient markets in Europe.8 However, Norwegianbusiness and industry were hostile to the idea of a Consumer Council as they
considered it to be just another planning tool in the hands of social democrats.9
The Consumer Council was to embody various experiences and interests of the
consumers put forward by the housewives’, co-operatives, and labour organisations
who were represented on the Council. Here, different types of competencies were
gathered and re-institutionalised. Yet, in the 1950s and 1960s, these experiences were
of secondary importance compared with the Council’s extensive use of external,
technical expertise. One of the Council’s main activities was product testing. As latershown in this article, this meant systematically revealing and comparing the technical
qualities of different brands of consumer commodities primarily through laboratory
experiments. Subsequently, the test results were presented in the Council’s magazine
Forbruker-rapporten (Consumer Report), where consumers could study the results
carefully and then � in the marketplace � buy the products that corresponded to their
‘true’ and ‘rational’ needs.
However, as a point of departure I will first discuss the historical roots of the
Norwegian Consumer Council by focusing on three main legacies: first, thecorporatist heritage of obtaining consumer representation in an economic democracy,
and then two technocratic motivated sources of inspiration: the home economics
movement and the technocratic consumer activism, which focused on the construc-
tion of a rational consumer operating in the institutions of the market with the help of
science and technical expertise. This article mainly addresses the practices of product
testing and the publishing of these tests in the Council’s magazine, Consumer Report,
for informing purchase decisions. This was a time and labour-consuming practice
firmly stressed by the Council itself. My aim is to show that the state sponsoredConsumer Council was not just a distinct post-war Social Democratic institution. By
putting an emphasis on the historical roots, I investigate the impact of the inter-war
debate on economic democracy and stress the inspiration from the American
technocratic movement. The article explores the Consumer Council’s notion of
ultimate markets, ranging from its historical legacy to the construction of an affluent
market economy through the help of expert advice as a meaningful, rational system in
the 1950s and 1960s.
The corporatist heritage
When the Labour government, along with the price director, considered setting up a
Consumer Council in the early 1950s, the main task was to establish a body that
would allow for the representation of the interests of the consumer ‘in a rational
way’.10 The Council was seen as an important part of a corporatist structure based
on market regulation and economic democracy. Ever since the First World War, the
powerful Norwegian price director and liberal leftist Wilhelm Thagaard called fororganising consumer interests and representation regarding public control over
trusts, cartels, and the price mechanism.11 In the marketplace, consumers � not
workers � were considered to embody the true counter-interests of corporate power.
After the Second World War, the problem of representation became even more
urgent and the category of consumers became increasingly visible in the political
debate.12 The extensive system of price control established during the war was
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redeveloped in the subsequent years. In a wide range of Price Panels consumer
representation was achieved through workers, white-collar employees, ‘or others
representing consumer interests’.13 In some cases unionists had been appointedas consumer representatives, in others housewives, but none of these arrangements
was fully satisfactory. At times it was quite obvious that the unionists’ identity was
based more on their role as employees of companies than as consumers.
The consuming public was, of course, everyone. But when reflecting the problem
of proper representation, price director Thagaard was addressing the economic
function of consumers. This division of interests based on different functions and
roles in the economic system was important in the corporate planning tradition.
Ideologically the Norwegian labour movement became revolutionary during
the First World War, inspired by uprisings in Russia and Germany. The following
debate on socialisation put forward visions of an economic democracy organised
with the help of a vertical and horizontal council structure at a local/enterprise level,
a district/branch level, and a national level.14 And even though it was obvious that
the focus was primarily on the so-called productive part of the population (consumers
were not considered among them), consumers were supposed to be given a small role
in the socialist economy both through representation in the council system andthrough the notion that a democratic, socialised economic system’s main objective
was to effectively supply the needs of the population, in contrast to the capitalist
system that was geared towards maximising profit. The socialisation theorists
suggested the control of production by ‘the working and consuming people’.15 Yet it
was highly unclear who the consumer was and how this economic function should be
given representation. At the same time it was clear that technical and scientific
expertise was to be given a far more powerful position than both workers and
consumers, and that technocracy would precede democracy in the actual manage-
ment of a socialised economy.16 When it came to organising the future socialised
production based on consumers’ ‘true’ needs, the vision of the 1920s’ socialisation
theorists was that the Riksøkonomiradet (National Economic Council), comprised of
representatives of producers, consumers and scientists, would seek complete
harmony between production and consumption. In order to achieve this, they
would compile national statistics on both needs and recourses, which would be the
starting point for managed production in order to satisfy consumer needs and to
promote the efficient utilisation of production forces.17
Gradually the Labour Party left the revolutionary programme and became
reformist. During the depression years of the early 1930s, the ideas for handling the
capitalist crisis were, to a large extent, put in concrete terms in The Norwegian Three-
Year Plan: The Road Towards a Socialistic Planned Economy in Norway, published by
the economist Ole Colbjørnsen and agronomist Axel Sømme in 1933. The
Colbjørnsen and Sømme Plan was even more producerist than the socialisation
theories of the 1920s when it came to forming a corporatist council structure. In their
advisory National Economic Council there was no room for consumer representa-
tion at all.18 The Three-Year Plan � which was pragmatic state-capitalist rather than
utopian socialist in orientation � addressed the issue of purchasing power and the
raising of a standard of living on a broad scale, but was still more focused on a push
of supply rather than a pull of demand.19 The plan had hardly anything to say about
the satisfaction of human needs and how to decide what to produce, if not through
the market mechanism. In fact, the plan did not undermine private industry and
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retailing; this would exist along with new state enterprises just as the market
mechanism would exist side by side with public price regulations. The task of theoverall planning of economic life was to be put in the hands of a National Planning
Commission, which was a body of economic and technical experts who worked
alongside politicians.20
A socialist revolution never occurred in Norway, although the Labour Party
became the leading political party after the Second World War. The party set aside its
most ambitious plans for regulating economic life, but the corporatist inheritance
was of great importance at the time when the Consumer Council was established.
In 1953, general consumer interests were for the first time given some type oforganised form in Norway, while the Labour Party simultaneously abandoned
its radical planning ambitions. The hierarchal corporatist ambitions were trans-
formed into a ‘corporative pluralism’, in which representatives of organised interests
were brought into the sphere of public administration in great numbers.21 After ten
years of its existence, the Consumer Council was represented on 27 different panels
and committees, both publicly and privately organised.22 Yet, even though the
Council played a specific role in representing the consumer’s voice in a post-war
capitalist corporative state, I will argue that this was not its only main task in the1950s and 1960s. The Council was just as focused on directly addressing consumer
behaviour on the markets and, through its practical activity, on laying the
groundwork for what was considered to be both an affluent and a rational economic
order.
The technocratic heritage
Along with the corporatist legacy, I will point out two other important roots ofthe Norwegian Consumer Council, namely the home economics movement and
consumer activism. The corporatist tradition was also related to technocracy by
pushing for governance by competent elites.23 Still, these two movements held the
conviction that expertise could change the relations of the marketplace, especially by
changing the behaviour of the individual consumer.
First, the Council’s activities in the 1950s and 960s were based on the legacy of
the home economics movement. Throughout the progressive era in the USA at the
end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, there had been aprofound focus on professionalising the housewife by making housework more
scientific and rational. At the turn of the century, this movement was highly
influenced by the spirit of the organisation engineer Frederick W. Taylor. The gospel
of Taylorism, and of efficient housekeeping in general, spread to many countries,
including the Scandinavian ones.24 Home economists were educated to become
experts of the domestic household in a broad sense. They became teachers and
lecturers, presenting to housewives the modern scientific methods for doing
housework, for buying the right goods, and for running an efficient household. Inaddition, many of them became consultants, selling expert knowledge to business.25
Especially in the USA, but also in Scandinavia, home economists actively promoted
a commodity culture through their participation in business marketing practices. Of
particularly great importance throughout the twentieth century was their contribu-
tion to the diffusion of household durables such as electric cookers, washing
machines, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators and other technical appliances for the
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home. These household experts were seen in advertisements as well as in sales
demonstrations. They performed an interpreting function, framing the commodities
according to the lives of the housewives. However, they were also hired bycorporations to test and develop products, thereby providing expert advice on the
needs and desires of modern housewives. In this way, many household experts looked
upon themselves as mediators of the market, organising the relations between
consumers and producers.26
At the end of the nineteenth century, courses in home economics penetrated the
curriculum of North American high schools, women’s colleges, and state universities.
By the turn of the century, departments of home economics had been established in
30 colleges.27 Even though this was far from the case in Norway, the creation of
Statens lærinneskole i husstell (the National School for Domestic Science Teachers) in
1909 laid an important foundation for spreading the home economics message
through local housewife schools. Many of these Norwegian, middle-class domestic
science teachers promoted consumer products for business, just like their American
colleagues.28 During the period 1936�1939, Statens forsøksvirksomhet i husstell (the
National Research Unit for Domestic Science) was established, which among other
things specialised in the testing of consumer products, from the 1950s also oncommission for the Consumer Council. In 1940, Statens opplysningskontor i husstell
(the National Information Office for Domestic Science) was created. The chemist
Bergliot Quiller, who headed the research unit, was sent to study home economics in
the USA where she found that the Americans were at least 15 years ahead of Norway
when it came to domestic science research and education.29
Although they were primarily based on nutrition, hygiene and housework
discourses, the new domestic science institutions were also rooted in the idea that
housewives could be made into rational buyers. A corresponding programme could
be found among American consumer activists. During the progressive era, the first
wave of consumer activism occurred in the USA which among other things
contributed to the creation of protective food and drug legislation at the start of
the twentieth century. This first wave played an important role in placing consumer
exploitation and the issue of the standard of living on the political agenda. The
second wave of American consumer activism started at the end of the 1920s and
reached its peak during the depression years and New Deal in the 1930s. The focal
points here were mainly branded goods, advertising, and the confusion ofmisinformed consumers.30 The politics and practises of the Norwegian Consumer
Council in the 1950s and 1960s drew on the heritage from the second wave’s private
American watchdog organisations: Consumers’ Research Inc. (CR, established in
1929) and the Consumers Union (CU, 1936).31 There was a short-lived attempt to
establish an equivalent non-government consumer advocacy group in Norway in
1939, called Forbrukernes Kontroll-lag (the Consumer’s Control Association), but the
troubled wartime economy brought this to an end.32
The founders of the American Consumers’ Research were the accountant Stuart
Chase and the engineer Frederick Schlink, both of whom were influenced by
Thorstein Veblen’s critique of the business enterprise and by the Taylorist debates on
efficiency and waste, and both had the commitment to improve technical rationality
in an economy of abundance.33 In the book The Tragedy of Waste from 1925, Stuart
Chase discussed waste in consumption, which was a form of waste caused by the
affluent production of goods that had no root in real human needs. He regarded
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these commodities as illth (a concept he borrowed from the English artist and writer
John Ruskin), which was the opposite of wealth. Chase called for a more functional
society in which the satisfaction of human needs, not the maximisation of profit, wasthe criterion for an efficient and successful economic system.34 This perspective was
followed up by the book Your Money’s Worth (1927), which Chase wrote together
with Frederick Schlink. The engineer Schlink had discovered the consumer issue
while working at the Bureau of Standards in the 1910s, and later as assistant
secretary to the American Engineering Standards Committee. The Bureau of
Standards had been testing the quality of products for the government and had
amassed information on a vast number of brands. Schlink thought that this
information should ideally be handed over to the consumers so that they could get
the most value for their money.35 In Your Money’s Worth the authors described the
consumer as a helpless victim in a war of adjectives generated by the advertising
industry.36 However, not all the products could simply be ‘the best’, and there was
therefore a great need for scientific methods that could reveal the true qualities of the
products. ‘The great bulk of things which we consumers buy are not reviewed by any
impartial testing body’, Chase and Schlink wrote. ‘Most of them advance upon us
from behind a great smoke screen of advertising. Given time enough, and trial and
error enough, quality will in many cases make itself felt. But consider the waste ofthis trial and error method against a permanent source to which we might turn for
the results of scientific tests and the setting of impartial standards.’37 They summed
up their plea for scientific buying as follows: ‘If science could displace magic in
salesmanship, the whole curve of consumption would change. Science has taught the
manufacturer how to plan for mass production, but there is as yet no science, broadly
speaking, in consumption.’38
The book Your Money’s Worth was not directly anti-capitalist or hostile to the
market as such. It can rather be regarded as an attempt to create the neoclassical
perfect market with full information. The authors identified modern salesmanship,
especially the institution of advertising, as the main reason for existing dysfunction-
alities.39 Salesmanship created artificial desires and made people buy things
they could do without. According to the neoclassical concept of the ‘economic
man’, which had been developed before the making of modern marketing insti-
tutions, consumers possess full information about the qualities and prices of the
commodities and they are able to make rational choices. What Chase and Schlink
were asking for was objective counter-information to advertisement based onscientific methods so that the consumers were fully able to perform their function
in the market. This was the laboratory path to a functional economy � fair, just, safe
and efficient.
Within a few months Your Money’s Worth became a Book-of-the-Month best
seller. Shortly after, the two authors established the New York based Consumers’
Research Incorporated, financed by patrons of liberal magazines.40 Consumers’
Research organised impartial scientific tests of different types of branded goods and
published the results in the magazine Consumers’ Research Bulletin. The organisation
stated that its aim was to readjust the ‘rapidly increasing power of the manufacturer
and seller over the mind and judgment of the consumer’.41 However, after a strike hit
Consumers’ Research in 1935, some of the most active members left the organisation
and formed Consumers Union, Inc. in 1936. This new organisation addressed the
living conditions of the consumers and the standard of living issue in a broad sense,
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but Consumers Union continued in the footsteps of Chase and Schlink by specialising
in impartial product testing as well. The results were distributed by a new publication,
Consumers Union Reports, which later took the name Consumer Reports. After the
Second World War, the Consumers Union was the major consumer organisation in
America, with a growth of registered members from 55,000 in 1945 to close to 900,000
in 1960.42
Un/dressing consumers and commodities
It was these product testing practices in particular that were adopted by the
Norwegian Consumer Council. In fact, this state-financed body established in 1953
was the closest one got to the ‘second wave consumer activism’ in Norway. Quality
control, product labels and consumer guidance were considered to be important
tools. When the Consumer Council was established, the ambition was also to develop
certain standard products of good quality at low prices. The Council managed to get
one ‘People’s washing machine’ on the market, the relatively low-cost ‘Evalet
Populær’. However, in general such standardisation efforts were not very successful
due to lack of interest from manufacturers.43
Throughout the first decades, one of the Council’s main activities was conducting
various technical tests of consumer products carried out by external experts in
laboratories. First, the tests were made available as information for media in the
rather modest leaflet F-rapporten (the F-report) established in 1954. But the Council
was soon aiming for a more direct contact with consumers. From 1958 and onward,
the test results were published in the Council’s new magazine, Consumer Report,
edited by the economist Bjørn Gulbrandsen. This was the first Scandinavian
magazine that systematically presented advisory consumer product tests, and as
Jannike Wehn Hegnes has shown, it was highly inspired by the American Consumer
Reports.44 In 1957, the Council’s chairman Ragnar Christiansen had actually visited
CR and CU and other institutions on a trip organised by the post-Marshall agency
International Cooperation Administration (ICA). Christiansen was highly impressed
with the work of the American comparative testing organisations.45
In an increasingly abundant post-war economy these Consumer Reports were
meant to guide the confused consumer. ‘Think before you act’,46 was the Council’s
message to the shopping public. Consumer Report was soon to become a great
success, with nearly 80,000 subscribers in 1963 and close to 200,000 by the end of the
decade. This made it one of the largest consumer magazines in the world, taking into
account the country’s population (3.9 million in 1970).
As already mentioned, the neoclassical assumption of the perfect market was
based on rational choice of a fully informed consumer. However, the Consumer
Council’s critique of the affluent market was based on the consumer continuously
being misinformed through the corporations’ marketing activities. In this way, the
Consumer Council framed its mission along the same lines as Chase and Schlink. The
bureaucracy of the firm was occupied with designing markets, and through marketing
research the producers invented more and more sophisticated forms of ‘dressing up’
commodities. The techniques of advertising and product branding were based on
cultural and social connotations of the objects. Critics would claim that consumers
were persuaded to buy things on false pretences by the corporations’ construction of
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‘false’ needs through appealing to people’s vanity and other irrational feelings.
Therefore, the Consumer Council’s task was to strip these commodities from the same
connotations constructed by commercial interests. Only then could the ‘real’ but
hidden qualities of the goods be exposed. Through such professional guidance the
consumers would have actual freedom of choice, and only then would the market
experience healthy price and quality competition. ‘True’ needs of consumers would be
met and the standard of living lifted.47
In the 1930s, the marketing institutions, especially in America, intensified their
knowledge production. The ambition was that business should know as much about
efficiency in distribution as industry knew about efficiency in production.48 Market-
ing researchers aimed to develop scientific tools for mapping consumers’ wants, where
and when they were likely to buy an item, and at what price, as well as how to promote
commodities. During the next decades there was extensive discussion of how to
improve the marketing techniques and make them more reliable and effective. These
discussions challenged the statistical methods and problems of representation, as well
as psychological questions in connection with questionnaires and interviewing
techniques.
The first institute for measuring public opinion in Norway was called ‘Fakta’ �Facts � and was established in 1944. In 1946, the competing company Norsk Gallup
(Norwegian Gallup) was established based on the techniques of the American
psychologist George Gallup. For both Fakta and Norwegian Gallup, market research
was a central activity. In addition to measuring public opinion on commodities
through different surveys, the quantitative mapping of brand diffusion on the market
became an important task. Soon, the tools became more specialised. In the mid-
1960s, the company bought a bus, which it used as a mobile laboratory for conducting
advertisement and product tests; the latter measuring people’s reactions to actual
commodities to which they were exposed.49
The 1960s was, in general, a decade when Norwegian Gallup and other marketing
institutions developed more and more sophisticated qualitative methods, for example
motivation studies became a part of the portfolio.50 This had been one of the major
innovations of the market research discipline in the 1950s, especially in the USA.
Motivation research was considered to be an in-depth method for penetrating
underneath the surface of the consumer’s consciousness to the sub-conscious sphere
with the help of psychological techniques. Instead of asking what, when and where
consumers were buying, motivation researchers began to ask the question of why
they buy. Psychological techniques for commercial use in the advertisement industry
had been under development in America and Germany since the beginning of the
twentieth century. But motivation research took it even further, and even deeper. It
was based on the assumption that people often do not really mean what they say,
that they do not necessarily act in the ways they say they were going to act, and that
they often want other things than they actually express in interviews. Knowledge of
these hidden aspects of human nature was music to the ears of industry and business.
This meant that the marketing strategy, from product development to advertising
material, could be tailored to consumers’ hidden, emotional desires. Sociological
analyses of status systems according to social groups, as well as research on market
segmentation in the late 1950s, were of great importance when producers and
distributors targeted specific potential customers through advertising.51
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Organising affluence through comparative product testing
In general, the 1950s and 1960s were decades when large parts of the empirical social
sciences were developed in close contact with industrial and commercial interests,
especially in the USA. This gave fuel to an extensive critique of both researchers and
business: through their contribution to making marketing techniques more and more
sophisticated, psychologists and sociologists were accused of running errands for
forces that often were in direct opposition to common people’s interests. Although
commercial interests were largely convinced that they only gave people what they
truly desired, social scientists were criticised for lending business a helping hand by
persuading consumers to buy products they did not really need. As a counter-attack,
organised consumers arranged their own scientific, comparative product tests,
‘unwrapping’ the commodities from the social and cultural connotations that
business had packaged them in. As in the case of motivation research, this activity
also aimed at revealing something hidden; not the hidden wants of the consumers,
but the hidden qualities and facts of the commodities. The idea of the good and
efficient market was based neither on planning nor on the complete freedom of
market forces, nor was it opposed to the affluent economy as such, since publishing
the test results on certain brand-items, such as washing machines, refrigerators,
vacuum cleaners, cars, televisions and stereos, could be regarded as a major
contribution to the spread and legitimisation of a modern consumer culture.
The procedures for conducting an average commodity test were presented in an
edition of Consumer Report in 1967.52 According to this (normative) description of
techniques, the first step was how to decide on which type of product was going to be
tested. This selection, the magazine stated, was mainly a result of complaints received
from the public based on their personal experiences with the items, but it could also be
initiated by individuals within or outside the Council. The next step was for the
Council’s secretariat to find an independent research institute or laboratory to carry
out the test. This institution formulated a test programme on questions such as ‘What
type of qualities will be tested?’, ‘Which brands and how many samples are needed?’,
‘What type of procedures should be undertaken during the test?’ and so on. After
that, the plan was presented to producers and importers of the commodity, who were
invited to comment on the technical aspects of the test programme. Comments of a
more principled character were to be addressed directly to the Consumer Council.
The next step was for the Council to grant its approval for the test to be carried out.
Then a representative of the Council would buy the products anonymously in the
shop � ‘just like a regular consumer’ � or in special cases he or she would borrow the
items from the producer or the importer. The commodities were handed over to
the research institute, and then the lab experiments begun. The magazine write-up
emphasised in a scientific manner that one should be able to reproduce the same test
again under exactly the same circumstances. After completing the laboratory tests, the
results were translated into a report that was handed over to the Consumer Council.
Then the manufacturers or importers were invited to comment on the test performed
on their product or, in some cases, to challenge the results. Challenges on a technical
basis were again dealt with by the research institution, whereas the challenges based
on principle were considered by the Council. If necessary, new tests could be
conducted. The next step was another translation, namely the process in which the
report was popularised and published in Consumer Report. The final manuscript was
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controlled by technical and legal experts before being sent back to the research
institution for approval. Finally, the Council, the editorial committee and the editorwould decide on whether or not the results would be published. If so, the article was
printed with corresponding illustrations � and then it would be up to the consumer to
choose the best value-for-money commodity!
One striking aspect of this procedure for impartial, comparative scientific testing
is that it created a considerable bureaucracy of consumption, especially if it was seen
as a permanent, institutionalised practice that was crucial for a functional market.
Another is the amount of interpretation and representation that was carried out on
behalf of the consumer. By choosing the types of commodities and brands and byfocusing on certain types of qualities, the tests also produced certain frameworks
within which the ideal consumer and his or her needs were constructed. In the
following section, I will give an example of how the product of the test, namely the
final presentation in Consumer Report, also contained various types of interpreta-
tions. To make this small case study more complete, I will also show how the same
commodities were presented in advertising. The motivation for this is the fact that the
commodity tests were established as objective counter-information to advertising
messages. But, as we will see, both of them were in the business of defining situationsand framing objects and consumer practices through simultaneously created cultural
images of how people should live their lives. As pointed out by the Swedish sociologist
Boel Berner, experts have had a strong power in the making and maintenance of social
orders throughout these decades.53 Their special social position of authority has, for
example, naturalised the gendered division of labour in the household, but at the same
time changed routines of housework.
Buying the good cooker: two framings of ‘Rex’
The example I have chosen is based on a commodity test presented in a lengthy article
in Consumer Report, no. 6, 1963. Here, engineers from the Norwegian Control Agency
of Electrical Equipment, NEMKO, tested the technical qualities of 12 cookers. First,
however, I will describe how these products were presented in contemporary
advertisements. This is an example of a commercial marketing message targeting
the consumer, which the Consumer Council was trying to counter-balance.
In general, cooker advertisements in woman magazines contained technicalinformation, illustrations of the commodities and exclusive details, as well as
commercial slogans. The overall framings were often that housewives would both
become more efficient and be given more freedom with the new equipment. For
example, the ‘Elektra’ cooker from the company Per Kure was presented with a
‘thinking hotplate’, which could ‘regulate itself ’ with a thermostat mechanism. The
illustration was divided in three parts, showing the cooker, a hotplate surrounding
the housewife’s head in a ‘science fictional’ style, and a woman holding up her arms
as if she was liberated.54 Other advertisements stressed the look of the cookers. Forexample, ‘Beha de Luxe’ had ‘NEW elegance � clean modern lines’55 and ‘Let the
new KPS Super-T adorn your kitchen’.56 In addition, the overall focus on technology
as ‘automatic’ was strong in these advertisements. Scientific progress had reached the
kitchen.
I will now further examine the results for one of the brands presented in Consumer
Report: the ‘Rex’ cooker manufactured by the Norwegian company Elektrisk Bureau.
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An earlier advertisement of this cooker prior to the Council’s commodity test is highly
interesting as it contains expert advice from a home economist.57 The rather large
advertisement contains the headline ‘Automatic cooking and barbeque frying in athousand homes’ and the slogan ‘Tomorrow’s cooker’. We see a picture of the Rex
cooker, with a close-up of the control panel complete with a timer, and next to it we
find the consultant of home economics, Rigmor Holth. This also tells us that the
manufacturer is relying on the authority of expertise when addressing the consumer.
The advertisement may be viewed as an example of the phenomenon mention earlier,
whereby housekeeping experts spread a consumer culture by selling their names and
skills to companies’ marketing strategists.
Throughout the text, Rigmor Holth speaks in a direct tone to the consumers � or
more precisely, to the housewives. Relying on her knowledge of housework and
housewives, she draws on her authority as she makes a statement in favour of the Rex
cooker. She not only presents the many technical qualities of the commodity, she also
places them in a context that forms a cultural framework for the Rex cooker. The
narrative tells us that housewives are always very busy, whether or not they work
outside the home. The Rex cooker, however, is the solution to the problem. With the
help of the ‘beautiful and practical’ control panel you can leave the house while thecooker works for you. And with the barbeque technique � the ‘frying method of
the future’ � the nutrients and vitamins of the food are well preserved. The Rex
cooker was built on 40 years of experience and deserved the label ‘Tomorrow’s
cooker’, Holth concludes.
Moving on to the Consumer Report, the article on the Rex cooker was presented
in the same scientific spirit as the ad. The comparative cooker test was front page
material, containing a large colour photo of two white-coated male engineers baking
a cake at the NEMKO kitchen lab. These men were about to test the ovens of
12 different cookers by making identical cakes according to standardised procedures.
This type of focus on the specific practices of the commodity tests was very common
in the Consumer Report. But how was the actual commodity described?
The narrative of the Rex cooker comes in two versions: a table of technical results
and a descriptive text followed by a simple photo of the cooker. In the descriptive
text, the various functions as well as the volume, height, breadth and depth
are presented. The diameter of each of the hotplates and the regulating stages for theheat are also pointed out. The oven is equipped with a light and has a ‘heat guard’.
There is also a short statement about the baking test: ‘The cake was cooked through
and had a normal height. The baking evenness was completely satisfactory on both
the top and the underside of the cake.’58
The technical results of the test were presented in a simplified table so that
the different cookers could be easily compared. Here, the technical facts of size,
space, time and energy efficiency measured by the NEMKO engineers are shown in
the smallest detail. The table shows, among other things, that the actual temperature
measured in the oven was 1968C when the thermostat was set at 2008C, that the
boiling time of the largest hotplate was 8.76 minutes (for boiling 2 litres of water),
and that the efficiency of this plate was measured to be 65%.59 Neither the table, nor
the descriptive text or the general magazine article on the cooker tests said anything
about the life situations of the persons who would use this type of cooker. The
commodity is apparently de-gendered and the cultural context is removed, unlike
the narrative in the advertisement. But like the ad, the test article has a gender. The
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male engineers in their white laboratory coats provide the results with the necessary
authority, and maybe their voices seem to be more objective and scientific than thevoice of the female home economist. Of course, a major difference is that Rigmor
Holth was paid by Elektrisk Bureau to promote the cooker. There is no doubt she
was representing business interests. At the same time, however, the ad tries to connect
her to consumer interests, i.e. the housewives. The NEMKO engineers were paid by
the Consumer Council to perform the test; yet they are not associated directly with
the consumers. We notice that the home economist relies on a different type of
experience than the engineers. She uses her knowledge of women’s life situations,
while NEMKO’s men are more closely connected to the practices of objective science.While the home economist in the narrative of the ad can be regarded as an ally of the
producer and the consumer, the engineers seem to be more independent of the market
actors: the test was about their authority, the test situation and the test object.
From the Consumer Council’s point of view, the idea behind the comparative
product tests was not that they directly would state which brand was ‘best in test’. The
test results were presented in a way that enabled each consumer to find the best
product according to their individual needs. But at the same time, the professionals
performing and presenting the tests had to have some idea of what these needs mightrefer to. The inner core of this engineer-inspired organisation of the market is
connected to a correspondence between the consumer’s ‘real’ needs and the physically
measurable features of the cooker. Although the price of the cooker and the
evaluation of the baking results are also mentioned in the text, the article does not pay
much attention to it. The ‘automatic cooking’ emphasised in the advertisement is not
tested or commented on. In fact, the test results do not mention anything about how
modern the cooker is or if it could help people in their busy, daily activities. They do
not say whether it will look good in the kitchen or impress the next-door neighbour.The consumer had no need for such subjective pieces of information. However, the
commodity test article also says something about how the modern Norwegian
consumer should perform his or her duties. ‘Think before you act’ was the slogan of
the Consumer Council, but it was obvious that the proper type of thinking was strictly
engineer-oriented. The facts about commodities that the consumer should look at
before buying were highly detailed and technical. It was hard work finding the right
commodity. All this stood in sharp contrast to the light-hearted, easy-going and
leisurely consumer culture beginning to dominate mass media in the 1950s and 1960s.Expert advice was considered to be a guarantor of both a healthy affluent economy
and an economic democracy, but at the end of the 1960s voices were finally being
raised: did this strategy really work?
The ultimate market in a reform technocracy
The Norwegian sociologist Rune Slagstad has described the social democratic post-
war state as a ‘reform technocracy’.60 This was the great era of an engineeringmentality, and the Government was leaning heavily on a combination of scientific
paternalism and technocratic management at the state level. According to Slagstad,
social economists were the avant-garde of this social democratic reform technocracy
and the Labour Party aimed for an overall governance of the economy on a macro
level. When Slagstad made no room for the Consumer Council in this picture, it
might have been because it appeared on a different level of analysis and it was not a
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direct political instrument in the hands of the Labour Party. Still, the efforts of the
Norwegian Consumer Council in the 1950s and 1960s can largely be interpreted
as the pragmatic and practical side of a social democratic consumer policy. Aproducerist macro-political-economy level was supplemented by a consumerist
micro-market-economy level. The Consumer Council’s notion of the ultimate market
can be regarded as a consumer-driven production orientation. Competent consumers
were the ‘road to a higher standard of living’, as the editorial of the first edition of
Consumer Report stated. Consumers with a critical, alert and active attitude would
‘get an immediate raise in standard of living, and they will encourage sound price
and quality competition and thereby lay the groundwork for rational production of
commodities at reasonable prices’.61
However, at the end of the 1960s, this rather optimistic vision of the rational
consumer’s influence on production faded. Critique arose from within the organisa-
tion, from the subscribers of Consumer Report, and from a growing discussion abroad
on consumer policy issues in general. Increasingly, the international movement
questioned its own preoccupation with the rational, individualist, value-for-money,
choice-based consumerism.62 As the Swedish academic and consumer activist Brita
Akerman put it in a profound attack on the ambitions of testing more and moreproducts with increasingly sophisticated methods; the consumer activist would just be
‘running around in a hamster wheel’. Industry was constantly feeding consumers’
laboratories with testing objects and consumers felt powerful when sorting bad goods
from good ones. But industry would always be the initiating force, and there-
fore consumer activists would have to devise a whole new plan for influencing
production.63
This feeling of constantly lagging behind the forces of production was also
growing in the Norwegian Consumer Council. Commodity testing was an expensive
and labour-demanding business. As long as there was a continuous flow of new
products into the market, the job of testing was like housework � it was never done.
But the factor that really made the Council disillusioned was the results of a survey
conducted by the Norwegian Statistical Bureau in 1969 of the readers of Consumer
Report. The survey showed that the vast majority of readers belonged to a rather
wealthy and enlightened middle class, which was considered to be the segment of the
population that least needed guidance.64 This was indeed a democratic problem, and
along with growing dissatisfaction over the work of the Consumer Council, a debateon consumer research in general had arisen.65 An increasingly common belief was
that there was a need for more knowledge on the consumer, rather than on the
commodities. To speak in terms used in marketing research: not only business but
also consumer politicians and activists had to ask the question ‘why’. Why did
consumers prefer certain commodities? What social and cultural factors influenced
their choices? Commodity testing did not disappear from the agenda, but had to be
supplemented with psychological and sociological investigations on consumer
behaviour and problems. Therefore, social science had to become a tool in the
hands of the consumer, not only the commercial interests. In 1970, Statens institutt
for forbruksforskning og vareunderssøkelser (the National Institute for Consumer
Research and Product Testing) was established. The institute is today called Statens
institutt for forbruksforskning (SIFO) (the National Institute for Consumer
Research) and it conducts both comparative-testing in labs as well as broader forms
of political, economical, social and cultural consumer research.
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At the beginning of the 1970s, the Norwegian Consumer Council was also
reorganised in order to direct more of its activity toward the local level.
Simultaneously, the focus turned from the duties of the rational ‘think before you
act’-consumer in the marketplace to the juridical rights of a citizen consumer. Instead
of the time-consuming task of gathering technical information prior to making a
purchase, the consumer could now strike back through the use of the Act of
Consumer Purchases after a dissatisfactory acquisition. If you are not happy with the
cooker, complain and get your money back. The Consumer Council today points out
that consumers must be aware of their rights in order to be proven correct.
Educational efforts and comparative product testing are still carried out, but the
strong belief in organising an ultimate market through a continuous flow of highly
technical counter-information has been set aside as the authority of the scientific
experts has also been transformed. The Council’s current slogan, ‘Balanced
markets’66 is more a matter of countervailing power through protective legislation
than directly changing consumer practices in the marketplace through scientific
paternalism.
Today, the Norwegian magazine Consumer Report has ceased to exist due to an
ongoing decrease in the number of subscribers. In February 2010 the last paper issue
was published; from now on comparative product test results will be available on the
Council’s home page ‘Forbrukerportalen.no’. At the same time, the abundance of
tests and ‘best buy’ advice is a striking side of consumer information and journalism
on the internet and in other media. Some of these ‘tests’, often equipped with scores
represented by numbers on dices or smiley/grumpy faces, are conduced by consumers
themselves, others are in fact a part of the marketing strategies of commercial
interests. There is no guarantee of an interest-free source of information or that the
tests are being conducted in a scientific way. For ‘rational’ consumers trying to be
enlightened through the internet, the problem is then not a lack of tests but sorting
out impartial, ‘objective’ information on the one hand, and advertising on the other.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to my former colleagues Tian Sørhaug and Ketil Gjølme Andersen for thediscussions we had in relation to our joint project ‘Knowledge, meaning and economic order’,financed by the Norwegian Research Council.
Notes
1. Even Lange, ed., Organisert kjøpekraft: Forbrukersamvirkets historie i Norge (Oslo: PaxForlag, 2006), part 2; Ellen Furlough and Carl Strikwerda, ‘Economics, ConsumerCulture, and Gender: An Introduction to the Politics of Consumer Cooperation’, inConsumers against Capitalism? Consumer Cooperation in Europe, North America, andJapan 1840�1990, ed. Ellen Furlough and Carl Strikwerda (Landham: Rowman &Littlefield, 1999), 3.
2. Iselin Theien, Shopping for the ‘People’s Home’: Consumer Planning in Norway andSweden after the Second World War, in The Expert Consumer: Associations andProfessionals in Consumer Society, ed. Alain Chatriot et al. (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2006),139.
3. Iselin Theien, Shopping for the ‘People’s Home’, 144�5; Lange, Organisert kjøpekraft,253�62.
Scandinavian Economic History Review 163
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4. Einar Lie, Ambisjon og tradisjon: Finansdepartementet 1945�1965 (Oslo: Universitetsfor-laget, 1995), 131.
5. Gunnar Yttri, Pris- og rasjonaliseringslova: Ordskiftet i og ikring DNA-regjeringa 1952�1953. Major subject dissertation in history (Oslo: University of Oslo, 1993).
6. Matthew Hilton, Consumerism in 20th-Century Britain: The Search for a HistoricalMovement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), chapter 7.
7. Ragnar Christiansen (1953�1960) and Ebba Lodden (1960�1977).8. Instilling om forbruksforskning. The Consumer Research Committee, Committee report.
Oslo 1960, 58�59 (The Norwegian National Library Collection).9. Parliamentary records: St.prp. 1/11 1953, Om opprettelsen av Forbrukerradet. Printed in
Stortingsforhandlinger 1953, part 1b (Oslo: The Parliament, 1953), 31�6; Jannike WehnHegnes, Forbruksforskning som forbrukerpolitikk 1939�1984 (Oslo: SIFO, 2006), 55.
10. Parliamentary records: St.prp. 1/11 1953, 1.11. Parliamentary records: St.prp. 1/11 1953, 37.12. Theien, Shopping for the ‘People’s Home’, 142.13. Parliamentary records: St.prp. 1/11 1953, 37.14. Christine Myrvang, Sosialistiske produksjonsidealer � ‘dagen derpaa’. Storskala og
teknokrati i norsk sosialiseringsdebatt og -teori 1917�1924. TMV report no. 18 (Oslo:TMV/Pensumtjeneste, 1996).
15. Haavard Langseth, Omkring Socialiseringen (Kristiania: Det norske arbeiderpartis forlag,1921), 21.
16. Myrvang, Sosialistiske produksjonsidealer, 123, 133�7.17. Myrvang, Sosialistiske produksjonsidealer, 121.18. Ole Colbjørnsen and Axel Sømme, En norsk 3-arsplan: Veien frem til en socialistisk
planøkonomi i Norge (Oslo: Det norske arbeiderpartis forlag, 1933), 122�7.19. Kjetil Jakobsen, ‘Efter oss kommer overfloden’: Teknokratisk moderniseringsideologi i norsk
politikk og samfunnsvitenskap 1917�1953 (Dissertation, University of Oslo, 1994), 21�6,36�40.
20. Colbjørnsen and Sømme, En norsk 3-arsplan, 36 and 122.21. Francis Sejersted, Sosialdemokratiets tidsalder: Norge og Sverige i det 20. arhundre (Oslo:
Pax Forlag, 2005), 337.22. 10 ar for forbrukerne: Forbrukerradet 1953�1963 (Oslo: Forbrukerradet, 1963), 26.23. Myrvang, Sosialistiske produksjonsidealer, 133�9.24. Boel Berner, Sakernas tillstand: Kon, klass, teknisk expertis (Stockholm: Carlsson, 1996),
246.25. Carolyn M. Goldstein, ‘Part of the Package: Home Economists in the Consumer Products
Industries, 1920�1940’, in Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of aProfession, ed. Sarah Stage and Virginia B. Vincenti (Ithaca and London: CornellUniversity Press, 1997).
26. Goldstein, ‘Part of the Package’, 276.27. Emma Seifrit Weigley, ‘It Might Have Been Euthenics: The Lake Placid Conferences and
the Home Economics Movement’, in American Quarterly, vol. 26, 1974:1, 80�83.28. Myrvang, Christine, Forbruksagentene: Slik vekket de kjøpelysten (Oslo: Pax Forlag,
2009), chapter 7.29. Hegnes, Forbruksforskning som forbrukerpolitikk, 35�7.30. Lizabeth Cohen Cohen, ‘Citizens and Consumers in the United States in the Century of
Mass Consumption’, in The Politics of Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship inEurope and America, ed. Martin Daunton and Matthew Hilton (Oxford and New York:Berg, 2001), 204�5; Inger L. Stole, Advertising on Trial: Consumer Activism and CorporatePublic Relations in the 1930s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 22�3.
31. The so-called third wave consumer movement developed in America in the 1960s and1970s, and was, to a large extent, focused on the protection and legal rights of consumers.
32. Hegnes, Forbruksforskning som forbrukerpolitikk, 32�40.33. Robert B. Westbrook, ‘Tribune of the Technostructure: The Popular Economics of Stuart
Chase’, in American Quarterly 32 (1980): 4, 388; Charles McGovern, Sold American:Consumption and Citizenship, 1890�1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,2006), chapter 4.
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34. Stuart Chase, The Tragedy of Waste (New York: Workers Education Bureau of America,1926 [1925]), 30�1; Westbrook, ‘Tribune of the Technostructure’, 396�7.
35. Kathleen G. Donohue, Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Idea of theConsumer (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 175.
36. Stuart Chase and F. J. Schlink, Your Money’s Worth: A Study in the Waste of theConsumer’s Dollar (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 2.
37. Chase and Schlink, Your Money’s Worth, 4.38. Chase and Schlink, Your Money’s Worth, 258.39. Donohue, Freedom from Want, 176�8.40. Norman Isaac Silber, Test and Protest: The Influence of Consumers Union (New York:
Holmes & Meier, 1983), 17�18.41. Hayagreeva Rao, ‘Caveat Emptor: The Construction of Nonprofit Consumer Watch-
dog Organizations’, in The American Journal of Sociology 103, no. 4 (1998): 930.42. Silber, Test and Protest, 20�7. Rao, Caveat Emptor, 935�7; Brita Akerman, Makt at
konsumenten (Stockholm: Raben & Sjogren, 1968), 96.43. 10 ar for forbrukerne, 17�19; Aftenposten 30 October 1954; Hegnes, Forbruksforskning som
forbrukerpolitikk, 63�4.44. Hegnes, Forbruksforskning som forbrukerpolitikk, 85.45. Hans Georg Lindbom, Forbruksvareforskning og �opplysning I U.S.A.: Rapport fra en
studiereise februar � mars 1957 (Oslo, 1957).46. The Norwegian expression ‘Tenk før du handler’ actually has two meanings: ‘Think
before you act’ and ‘Think before you shop’.47. Forbruker-rapporten no. 1 (1958), 3.48. Ferdinand C. Wheeler, ed., The Technique of Marketing Research (New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1937), vii.49. Svend A. Eggen, Norsk gallup institutt gjennom femti ar: Menigmanns meninger og maktens
redskap (Oslo: Norsk Gallup, 1996), 48.50. Eggen, Norsk gallup institutt, 46.51. Sissel Myklebust, ‘Farlig kunnskap? Manipulasjon, kommunikasjon og livsstil’, in
Temmet eller uhemmet: Historiske perspektiver pa konsum, kultur og dannelse, ed. ChristineMyrvang, Sissel Myklebust and Brita Brenna (Oslo: Pax Forlag, 2004); Myrvang,‘Forbruksagentene’, chapter 4.
52. Forbruker-rapporten no. 6 (1967).53. Boel Berner, ‘Housewives’ films and the modern housewife. Experts, users and household
modernization: Sweden in the 1950s and 1960s’, in History and Technology no. 3 (2002),158�61.
54. Alle kvinner no. 10 (1963), 68.55. Alle kvinner no. 36 (1963), 62.56. Alle kvinner no. 38 (1963), 55.57. Alle kvinners blad no. 47 (1958), 80.58. Forbruker-rapporten no. 6 (1963), 13.59. Forbruker-rapporten no. 6 (1963), 9�15.60. Rune Slagstad, De nasjonale strateger (Oslo: Pax Forlag, 1998), 277.61. Forbruker-rapporten no. 1 (1958), 3.62. Hilton, Consumerism in 20th-Century Britain, 242.63. Akerman, Makt at konsumenten, 107�8.64. Innstilling om forbrukerradets arbeidsoppgaver, sammensetning og organisasjon m.v. (Oslo:
Dep. for familie- og forbrukersaker. (St.meld. nr. 65 (1971�72)), 1971), 31�2, 44.65. See Berit As, Forbrukeren i det moderne samfunn. En orientering om psykologisk og
sosiologisk forbrukerforskning (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1966).66. Balanced Markets. The Consumer Council of Norway’s strategic plan for 2002 through
2005, http://forbrukerportalen.no/engelsk_fransk/1023793458.07 (accessed 11 May 2010).
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