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, the direct sales companies’
core crisis strategy was to recruit new sellers. To this end, the Thai
direct sales company Mistine, known for a maverick marketing approach,
launched a costly new campaign, while Amway adopted television advertising
for the first time in Thailand.
This response indicates how vital the distributor is to direct sales corporations
– as the key source of profit and growth, but also as the essential
subject of the rationale and rhetoric of the industry. The optimistic rhetoric
fashioned to respond to the Asian economic crisis only amplifies the very
neo-liberal logic which has propelled the formation, growth and global
expansion of the industry as a whole. The central figure of this logic, the
direct sales distributor, embodies and enacts two central axioms of contemporary
economic logic: entrepreneurship and decentralized distribution.
As the epigraph to this article makes clear, this exemplary self-help
role resonates favorably with the economic calculus of transnational and
national authorities – the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Thai and
multinational business sectors and, to a large extent, the Thai government:
that individuals or households will find their own solutions to the economic
hardship wrought by global finance. Indeed, neo-liberal economic strategies
have ensured that private solutions are virtually all that is available to
ordinary citizens. Thus, though they may be simply seeking extra income
or recuperating a lost wage, the people adopting direct sales are engaged
with a larger discourse about individual and national futures in these new
times.
Paradoxically, the form and figure of the entrepreneur is represented
as both very American and very universal. Certainly direct sales discourses
and practices are now transnational, as Avon’s New York-Mexico City-
Bangkok networks make clear. The industry has been successful in Thailand;
hence, it can be seen (or presented as) a viable recourse for income
or advance. Rather than read the relative success of direct sales recruitment
as testimony to the transparent universality of its operations, I suggest we
view the efficacy and powers of direct sales in its American and migratory
contexts.
In this article, I explore direct sales in Thailand in the years leading up
to the 1997 crisis, the waning phase of three decades of economic boom.
My exploration of direct sales here draws on a two-year multi-sited research
project investigating the construction of gender and sexual identities in and
through six modern markets in Bangkok (Wilson, 1997). As Sharryn
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Critique of Anthropology 19(4)
Downloaded from https://coa.sagepub.com at University of the West of Scotland on November 27, 2009
References
Following Thai convention, Thai names are alphabetized according to given (first)
names.
Apisit Buranakanonda (1997) ‘Opportunity Knocks for some Extra Bucks’, Bangkok
Post Business Post 8 Sept. (Internet 2/10/98) <https://www.bkkpost.samart.
co.th/news/BParchive/BP970908/0809>.
Ash, Mary Kay (1981) Mary Kay. New York: Harper Collins.
Bernstein, Ronald A. (1984) Successful Direct Selling: How to Plan, Launch, Promote and
Maintain a Profitable Direct-Selling Company. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Biggart, Nicole Woolsey (1989) Charismatic Capitalism. Chicago: University of
Chicago.
Brenner, Suzanne Apr