The American Life Insurance Salesman: A Secular Theodicy

In: International journal of politics, culture and society, Band 4, Heft 1, S. 95-112

Abstract

An examination of the moral demands that training programs in personal sales impose on sales personnel, the tensions these demands produce in the work world of the salesperson, & the ways the personal sales industry & sales personnel themselves respond to these tensions, based on analysis of training materials produced in the US by the Life Insurance Marketing & Research Assoc & other documentary & interview data collected in 1987 & 1989 from life insurance sales agents in NY & Pa. It is argued that the life insurance industry expects its agents to endeavor to act as if they were professionals & prove their professionalism to the prospect. The industry responds to the discrepancies between the ideal of professional service inculcated in training programs & the realities encountered by the sales force in the field by means of three strategies: a philosophy of financial security that enables the agent to endure the psychic stress & metaphysical emptiness of life in personal sales; sales conventions, which are carefully staged productions designed by the industry as rituals of recognition that celebrate the virtues of the service ideal, reinforce a commitment to its principles, & reward agents who measure up to its requirements; & a sales force ethic of toughness, imperturbability, & nonchalance that endows agents with the iron-clad defenses & hardened sensibilities required to act with poise & affability in the face of insult & humiliation. Modified AA