Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are
By Rob Walker
Random House £25, 300 pages

Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers?
By Zygmunt Bauman
Harvard University Press, £16.95, 288 pages
FT Bookshop
price: £13.56

The Comfort of Things
By Daniel Miller
Polity Press £20, 300 pages

There is something alarming about the success of BzzAgent, a “word-of-mouth” marketing company founded in Boston in 2001. BzzAgent operates a network of several thousand volunteers who willingly enlist themselves as promoters of branded products. Take Al Fresco chicken sausage, for example. Agents tell their friends and people they meet how good the sausage is. Then they write reports on the responses. The company sells those reports to its clients. But the BzzAgents get paid nothing at all.