Ordinary culture is penetrated by ideas, norms, and values about work and consumption that support particular modes of capitalist accumulation. This penetration, or “managerial hegemony,” is an aspect of cultural hegemony that pervades not only work and consumption but also “private” spheres of life. This essay focuses on the penetration of managerial ideology into infant care advice. Since the late 19th century, infant care advice has changed with broader shifts in the dominant ideas, values, and norms that control work and consumption. Infant care advice is connected to this changing aspect of culture in four ways. (1) Infant care has been promoted as a means of socialization into the world of production and consumption; (2) infant care instruction has been shaped by notions of women's role in the “workforce” and in the home; (3) infant care has been described and interpreted through metaphors of production and consumption and their associated infrastructures; (4) infant care advice implicitly assumes a particular distribution of expert knowledge. This analysis examines the relation between three eras of infant care advice in the 20th century and the three eras in managerial cultural hegemony.
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