Loyalty programs are seen as an important means for conceptualizing contemporary marketing practices, the use of personal information, and personal identity in an information oriented society.

The research is based on interviews with loyalty program executives, international survey results, and focus groups to both describe the relationship between corporate information processing and consumers as well as the current and potential social effects and issues embedded in this relationship. They are a means of surveillance through which corporations systematically collect consumption data in order to influence, manage, entitle, or control consumers (Lyon 2001). These interrelated yet distinctive perspectives provide different means to understand loyalty programs as information portals in the increasingly monitored, measured and marketed lives of consumers. These are marketing and business literature, theoretical frameworks of surveillance, the branding of consumers and corporations, consumer ambivalence towards surveillance and privacy issues, and the mutual shaping of consumers and these programs. Focusing on the Canadian context, the research investigates the relationship between the personal information economy and loyalty marketing through several interrelated perspectives. Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada (April, 2008)Ībstract This research examines loyalty marketing as an empirical case study of consumer surveillance.

LOYAL SUBJECTS? Consumer Surveillance in the Personal Information EconomyĪ thesis submitted to the Department of Sociology In conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Hossein khonsari queensu qspace