Consumer Modernity as Cultural Translation

European émigrés of the 1930s and 1940s played a prominent role in multidirectional transatlantic knowledge transfers. Using the example of consumer researchers and commercial designers, this article shows that the practices of American mass consumption at mid-century were shaped by transnational flows of knowledge at a fundamental level. The subsequent translation of marketing practices to post-war Western Europe, so-called Americanization, was similarly influenced by former émigrés as cultural brokers. Analyzing the transnational construction of marketing knowledge in design and consumer psychology, the essay provides concrete empirical evidence for the concept of reciprocal “Westernization.”