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Blackwell Publishing Ltd.Oxford, UK and Malden, USATSQThe Sociological Quarterly0038-02532006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
20064714168WORK CULTURESSuccess through a Positive Mental Attitude?David Schweingruber
The Sociological Quarterly ISSN 0038-0253
SUCCESS THROUGH A POSITIVE MENTAL

ATTITUDE?: The Role of Positive Thinking in
Door-to-Door Sales
David Schweingruber*
Iowa State University
This case study focuses on the use of a motivational philosophy called “positive mental attitude”
(PMA) by door-to-door salespersons. While agreeing with Leidner’s finding in her study of a simi-
lar company that PMA functions as a form of worker control, I show here how the flexibility of PMA
makes it useful to salespersons, who draw upon it to deal with everyday work problems. Dealers
draw upon their personal goals and values to form motivational foci—the content of the positive
thinking they wish to maintain—and attempt to keep these thoughts in mind through motivational
practices learned during their training.
“Remember that time is money. He that can earn ten shillings a day by his labor, and
goes abroad, or sits idle, one half of that day, though he spends but sixpence during his
diversion or idleness, ought not to reckon that the only expense; he has really spent,
or rather thrown away, five shillings besides.” Ben Franklin, quoted in The Protestant
Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. (Weber [1904–1905] 2002)
“You alone can control the hours you work in running your own business. Similarly,
you alone can control what you put into those hours. . . . Some of the most successful
people in the business commit themselves to working 131/2 hours every single day!
They go to work before 8 a.m. and they never come home before 9:30 p.m.” (Enter-
prise Company sales manual)
INTRODUCTION
Sociologists have a long-standing concern with the encroachment of capitalism on the
selves of workers. This concern has been expressed in at least two different ways. First,
organizational scholars have noted the growing importance of “premise control” (Perrow
1986), also called “normative control,” the control of workers by changing the way they
think, and decried its “totalitarian” nature. “In this view, then, normative control is a
sophisticated and manipulative form of tyranny in the workplace, a threat to both free-
dom and dignity, an unwarranted invasion of privacy” (Kunda 1992:15). A second thread
of sociological criticism has focused on a more general Spirit of Capitalism. Max Weber
[1904–1905] 2002 pointed to the self-improvement literature of Benjamin Franklin as an
early example of this spirit in that it advanced “the idea of the duty of the individual to
*Direct correspondence to David Schweingruber, Department of Sociology, East Hall 107, Iowa State
University, Ames, IA 50011; Phone: (515) 294–4079; e-mail: dschwein@iastate.edu
The Sociological Quarterly 47 (2006) 41–68 © 2006 Midwest Sociological Society 41

Success through a Positive Mental Attitude? David Schweingruber
increase his wealth” (p. 16). This philosophy of “self-improvement” has been supported
by a self-help industry that has persisted and evolved from Poor Richard’s Almanac’s
appearance in 1732 to the current motivational universe of books, tapes, speakers, and
seminars (Biggart 1983; Anker 1999a, b). Although products of this industry have
attracted less scholarly attention than premise control has, they have been the target of
criticism and ridicule for being banal, selfish, ridiculous, and possibly harmful. However,
“scant attention has been paid by researchers to the reactions of purchasers and readers of
self-help works” (Starker 1989, p. 150).
This article addresses both of these concerns with an examination of the on-the-job
use of “positive mental attitude” (PMA) at a door-to-door sales company. PMA is a vari-
ant of the “positive thinking” tradition, a venerable strand of self-improvement philoso-
phy. PMA was developed by Napoleon Hill, author of many motivational books, and W.
Clement Stone, founder and chairman of Combined Insurance, and is described in their
book Success through a Positive Mental Attitude (Hill and Stone 1960). PMA is both an
individual self-improvement strategy (the focus of the book) and a program of premise
control that was enacted among door-to-door salespersons at Combined Insurance.
Robin Leidner (1993), in her study of Combined Insurance, views PMA primarily as a
form of worker control and work routinization. According to her analysis, managers
attempt to transform the personalities of workers through PMA so they will be enthusi-
astic about the job and the standardized sales routines prescribed by the company, and
will be able to approach prospects with confidence.
My research focused on another door-to-door sales company, which I call the Enter-
prise Company, that uses PMA as a form of premise control. Company managers hope to
inspire their salespersons, mostly college students on their summer breaks, to put in over
80 hours a week at an extremely demanding job. However, my investigation reveals a
more complicated story. By focusing on how PMA is actually used by salespeople in the
“book field,” I show how it only functions as a form of premise control when it is useful to
these salespeople in dealing with everyday work problems. This analysis shows that PMA
in practice is characterized not just by standardization, but also by flexibility and personal
variation. Salespersons use motivational practices associated with PMA as a personalized
tool kit to deal with everyday work problems. I focus in particular on three common prac-
tices: reading and listening to “positive material,” such as self-help books and motiva-
tional tapes, memorizing and repeating “positive phrases,” and committing specific goals
to writing. Dealers also draw from their personal goals and values to form motivational
foci: the content of the positive thinking they are supposed to maintain. This article shows
that without this flexibility, PMA would be much less appealing to its users and, therefore,
less useful to managers who intend that its adoption by salespersons will lead them to
continue carrying out company work routines.
LITERATURE REVIEW
In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber argued that modern
capitalism involved not just the development of a new form of social organization, but
42 The Sociological Quarterly 47 (2006) 41–68 © 2006 Midwest Sociological Society

David Schweingruber Success through a Positive Mental Attitude?
also the creation of a new “economic ethic.” This ethic involves “the idea of the duty of
the individual to increase his wealth” (p. 16) such that “this striving becomes under-
stood completely as an end in itself.” The “subjective acquisition of these ethical max-
ims by capitalism’s particular social carriers (such as businesspersons or workers in
modern capitalist companies) constitutes a condition for capitalism’s further existence”
(p. 18). Weber pointed to the self-help writings of Benjamin Franklin as exemplifying
this ethic.
Although self-help literature continues to exemplify and teach this ethic, social scien-
tists since Weber have not made use of its potential for understanding the capitalist ethic.
They also have given scant attention to how people use this literature (for an exception,
see Simonds 1992). To the extent that they have noticed self-help literature, researchers
and commentators have tended to be critical of the genre and its claims. For instance,
Kaminer’s (1992) overview calls the self-help tradition “covertly authoritarian and con-
formist, relying as it does on a mystique of expertise, encouraging people to look outside
themselves for standardized instructions on how to be. . . . It is anathema to independent
thought” (p. 6) (see also Schneider and Dornbusch 1958; Cawelti 1965; Huber 1971;
Ehrenreich and English 1978; Meyer 1980; Elson 1985; Starker 1989; Zimmerman, Holm,
and Starrels 2001). However, readers of self-help books report finding them helpful. For
instance, Starker (1989) reports that respondents to his survey of Portland, Oregon, resi-
dents read 2.82 self-help books a year with 64.7 percent reporting reading at least one
“really helpful” book at some point. In addition, 83.3 percent of respondents said self-
help books in general were either “often helpful” or “sometimes helpful,” while none said
that the books were harmful.
A few scholars have focused on how motivational techniques found in the self-help
literature are used in formal organizations. Particularly important are the works of Nicole
Woolsey Biggart (1989), who examined the direct-sales industry, and Robin Leidner
(1993), who studied Combined Insurance, which was founded by PMA-cocreator W.
Clement Stone in 1922 and where the techniques of PMA developed by its founder are
still being used. Biggart and Leidner both view these techniques as a form of what Charles
Perrow (1986) calls “premise control,” the control of workers by “control of the cognitive
premises underlying action.” Premise controls are most important at the top of organiza-
tions and where work is not routine (Perrow 1986:130). However, premise controls
are also found in sales jobs, particularly in direct sales, where direct and bureaucratic
control are less useful and dealers need to engage in skillful interactions with prospects
(Butterfield 1985; Biggart 1989; Leidner 1993; Pratt 2000; Chan 2001; Lan 2001;
Schweingruber and Berns 2003).
Premise control, also called “unobtrusive control” or “normative control” (Etzioni
1961; Kunda 1992) and the associated concept of corporate culture (Scott 1998:312), rep-
resent another long-standing concern of sociologists, the encroachment of capitalist
firms on the minds of workers. The concept of corporate culture has had great visibility
in both popular and academic literature (e.g., Davis 1984; Frost et al. 1985; 1991; Jelinek,
Smircich, and Hirsch 1983; Denison 1990; Ashby 1999) since the 1980s, thanks largely to
Peters and Wasserman’s (1982) In Search of Excellence, which argued that successful

companies are characterized by a strong corporate culture, that good leaders create and
maintain it, and that good workers internalize it (see also Deal and Kennedy 1982). Such
culture is “inculcated and reinforced by rituals and ceremonies that provide collective
occasions for expressing solidarity and commitment; by the raising up of heroes that
personify common goals; and by the creation of slogans and symbols that signify shared
values” (Scott 1998:312–13). Biggart’s discussion of network-selling organizations
described corporate cultures organized around “value rationality”: The “conscious belief
in the value for its own sake of some ethical, aesthetic, religious or other form of behavior,
independently of its prospects of success” (Weber 1978:25). “Committed distributors see
their work as a superior way of life that embraces political values, social relations, and reli-
gious beliefs. It gives them not a job, but a worldview, a community of like-minded
others, and a self-concept” (Biggart 1989:9). This worldview is built through controls
such as (1) creation of a new self; (2) celebration of group membership; and (3) stake-
holder claims, “practices designed to promote organizational continuity” (p. 135). These
controls are implemented through exercises such as confessionals, rituals, and
regularized group contact. Although some scholars (e.g., Kantor 1985) have viewed the
increasing importance of corporate culture positively, there is a long tradition of social
criticism regarding the encroachment of the corporation on the worker’s mind, heart,
and “soul.” “Hard work and deference are no longer enough; now the ‘soulful’ corpora-
tion demands the worker’s soul, or at least the worker’s identity” (Edwards 1979:152) (see
also Bendix 1956; Mills 1956; Whyte 1956; Hochschild 1983; Willmott 1993; for an over-
view see Kunda 1992:14–6).
Gideon Kunda (1992) took a more nuanced approach to corporate culture and
premise control in his study of a high-tech firm. He describes the problems and limita-
tions of this type of control, in particular “a contradiction between the requirements of
internal and external control of the self ” (p. 214). Workers engage in a balancing act
between role embracement and role distancing.
This balancing act may be observed in the ironic stance that permeates ritual perfor-
mance and social interaction; in the self-consciousness that infuses members’ dis-
course; in the humor that at once highlights and denies ambivalence; in the rapid
frame shifts in the course of presentations; and in the qualifiers that precede many
statements and the escape clauses designed into them. More tellingly, perhaps, it is
evident in the pervasiveness and centrality of the metaphor of drama in the construc-
tion of experience, and the oft-repeated and widely shared insight that things are
never as they seem. (P. 215)
Many workers experience “burnout,” which Kunda views not as a psychological condi-
tion, but a “loss of the required capacity of self-management: maintaining boundaries
and managing role distance” (p. 199). Kunda does describe workers who embrace their
company’s ideology, but they appear to do so because they like some aspect of their work
or the company itself, not because they use this ideology to get things done. Workers
struggle with the demands of normative control; managers use it to manage workers.
Robin Leidner’s work provides the closest parallel to the present study, since she also
researched a door-to-door sales company that uses positive mental attitude. As part of her

research, she went through the company’s sales training, which was built around the phi-
losophy of positive mental attitude. Building on Biggart’s work, Leidner views PMA as a
way to routinize work by transforming the personalities of its workers. Leidner contrasts
Combined Insurance with McDonald’s in her book, Fast Food, Fast Talk, a study of the
routinization of service work. McDonald’s provides an example of routinization by pre-
specifying all of the workers’ decisions as they interact with customers. Combined Insur-
ance represents an example of “routinization by transformation.” This type of
routinization is an attempt to change, and standardize, the thinking of salespersons.
According to Leidner (1993):
When prespecification has been extended as far as possible but workers’ discretion is
still required, employers may then try to transform their workers into the sorts of peo-
ple who will make decisions that employers would approve. The effort to train work-
ers to deal with varied situations may include teaching them a variety of routines and
a set of decision rules that govern when to use each routine. This strategy may seem
more like skills training than routinization, but to the extent that the process involves
transforming workers’ characters, personalities, and thought processes so that their
reactions to variable work situations will be predictable, it is in fact another form
of routinization, one that extends more deeply in workers’ psyches than does task
prespecification. (Pp. 36–7)
One of the advantages of PMA as a worker-control method is its nonfalsifiable explana-
tion for failure: “insufficient belief or effort on the part of those who fail. . . . Under the
Combined Insurance system, then, all failure was personal, and doubt in the system was
evidence of insufficient commitment and of negativity” (p. 104).
Although Biggart and Leidner both examine motivational techniques as a form of
worker control, they both also give some attention to the advantages of working in orga-
nizations reliant on premise control. First among these is that the controls “hardly seem
like controls. What a sociologist sees as ‘controlling’ is to a distributor an expression of
belief and enthusiasm” (Biggart 1989:156). For this reason, workers feel they are freer
than their counterparts at bureaucratic organizations. Indeed, “the organization is per-
ceived as helping individuals achieve their own goals, not as manipulating workers to an
alien end established by management” (Biggart 1989:164). Leidner reports that Com-
bined Insurance salespersons did not necessarily resent attempts to routinize their work
since the standardized sales practices helped them in their interactions with prospects. In
particular, salespersons found useful several PMA practices that helped them maintain
“confident optimism.”
Leidner’s richest descriptions of these practices, which include those recommended
by Stone and Hill, focus on training, where the view of PMA as a form of control through
transformation is most obvious. Salespersons learned and chanted positive slogans
like “I feel healthy, I feel happy, I feel terrific!” They put in writing their “commitment to
succeeding with Combined Insurance Company by applying myself to the system, as
learned in Chicago, in its entirety for eight hours a day, minimum, quality time, for five
days a week, minimum, for three months.” They committed to reading “self-help
material” daily and “playing self-improvement tapes.” She reports that agents used PMA

practices in the field and found them useful. Although Biggart provides less detail about
these practices, she does report that “my interviews suggest that the consumption of
[motivational books and tapes] is considerable and widely viewed by distributors as an
efficacious, even critical, practice” (p. 137). Maintaining enthusiasm, one of the pur-
poses of these motivational techniques, is especially important for salespersons, who
have to deal with unpredictability, pressure to perform, and other difficulties connected
to sales work (Prus 1989a:256–63, b). However, Leidner, Biggart, and others who study
direct sales (Chan 2001; Lan 2001) give little or no attention to how dealers use these
practices to motivate themselves when they are actually working outside of contact with
their companies, how they personalize these practices, and what these practices mean to
them.
DESCRIPTION OF RESEARCH
The focus of this study is the Enterprise Company, the oldest extant door-to-door sales
company in the United States. Its door-to-door sales program was started in the late 1860s
to help young Southern men impoverished by the Civil War pay their way through college
by selling Bibles and other religious books during the summer. Although the company
now sells mostly educational books designed to help elementary and high-school stu-
dents do better in school, it continues to employ college students during their summer
vacations.
The Enterprise Company was chosen as a research site to investigate premise control.
Because salespersons work alone and are technically independent contractors, the
company’s opportunities for direct and bureaucratic control (Perrow 1986) are limited.
Instead, company managers attempt to change the way workers think and feel, a process
they call “emotional training.” The overarching research questions of the project were:
How does premise control work (or not work) in a company, and how does it affect the
experience of company workers. Using a grounded theory approach (Strauss and Corbin
1998), I attempted to discover the key meanings in Enterprise Thinking (my term) and
explore how workers use and/or resist these meanings to pursue their personal goals,
which may or may not correspond to the company’s official goals. Positive mental atti-
tude is one of a number of the key meanings that make up Enterprise Thinking. Enter-
prise managers also teach student dealers proper thinking about money (Schweingruber
and Berns 2003), self-transformation (Schweingruber and Berns 2005), and teamwork.
The principles of Enterprise Thinking are designed so that adopting them requires,
at least in theory, carrying out official company work routines (Schweingruber
forthcoming).
My approach to the corporate culture of the Enterprise Company is drawn from Ann
Swidler (1986, 2001) and Howard Becker (1982), both of whom describe actors who use
culture to get things done. In particular, I use Swidler’s (1986) metaphor of the tool kit to
describe how salespersons draw from elements of self-help literature to accomplish their
purposes in the face of everyday work problems. This approach is compatible with the
work of Colin Campbell (2005), who shows how consumers appropriate, personalize,

and customize products, sometimes subversively, for their own purposes. It can be
contrasted with an approach that renders workers as “cultural dopes” (Garfinkel 1967)
of corporate culture and also with Kunda’s (1992) more nuanced approach, which treats
workers as intelligent actors but does not investigate how they use elements of corporate
culture to get things done.
The research for this article was conducted during the spring and summer of 1997
using a variety of research methods. During the spring of 1997, I observed Enterprise
managers recruit and train college students at a large university, which I will call Midwest-
ern University (names of people and institutions in this article are pseudonyms). I con-
ducted interviews with both the managers and the student dealers-in-training, and then
followed this team to sales school at Enterprise headquarters in a large Southern city,
where they underwent an intensive week of training. I also attended a second week of sales
school, which is held throughout the spring and summer, so I could observe sessions
designed both for rookie dealers and “student managers” (salespersons with at least one
summer’s experience). During these two weeks, I also examined and copied a variety of
company documents.
During the summer, I followed seven student dealers for one day of selling educa-
tional books door-to-door. Since dealers occasionally “follow” another dealer as a form of
training, I was able to adopt this role during these days and was able to both watch sales-
persons in action and converse with them about their work. These days typically lasted 15
hours since they included breakfast, 12.5 to 13.5 hours of going door-to-door and a
return trip to the dealer’s “headquarters” (their residence, usually a rented room in a pri-
vate home). I also attended eight “Sunday meetings,” group meetings of salespersons held
during their only day off, in five different states. At the end of the summer, I attended three
days of “check out” at the company headquarters to talk to student dealers who had just
completed a summer of selling. I conducted nine focus groups there with a total of 34 par-
ticipants. I also reinterviewed salespersons from Midwestern University.
Although I primarily used qualitative research methods, I also conducted a two-wave
survey of rookie dealers. The primary goal of the survey, which had both open-ended and
forced-answer questions, was to examine how students’ adoption of various components
of Enterprise Thinking affected them, including their sales performance and their evalu-
ation of the summer. The first survey was given to approximately 460 first-year student
dealers during two of the company’s week-long sales schools and was returned by 327 for
a response rate of 71 percent. A second survey was designed for these same dealers at the
conclusion of their summer, but only 91 of these were returned. The low response rate of
the second wave is due in part to the high drop-out rate of student dealers and in part to
the difficulty of distributing the second wave of the survey. The first survey was distrib-
uted at sales school, which is run by the company’s marketing department. I was present
at this distribution. The second survey was supposed to be distributed by the various sales
managers’ “organizations” that comprise the company. Some organizations failed to dis-
tribute the survey consistently or distributed it to the wrong students. Although these
data from the second wave of the survey are less than ideal, I use some of them here as sup-
portive data for findings from the qualitative portion of the study.

WHAT IS POSITIVE MENTAL ATTITUDE?

As I will describe below, users of self-help books tend to read them looking for particular
techniques or ideas, not for a coherent argument. However, it is worthwhile to describe
the arguments of Success through a Positive Mental Attitude (1960) by Napoleon Hill and
W. Clement Stone and give an overview of its historical context. As suggested by the
book’s title, Success through a Positive Mental Attitude’s premise is that success, broadly
defined (“physical, mental, and moral health; happiness; wealth; or any other worthwhile
goal whose attainment does not violate the laws of God or the rights of your fellow man,”
[p. xiii]), will result from adopting a positive mental attitude. The authors claim that con-
scious reasoning and decision making are subject to the “inner urges” of the subconscious
and promise to help the reader train his or her subconscious mind. The result is changing
one’s future.
When Henley wrote the poetic lines, “I am master of my fate, I am the captain of my
soul,” he could have informed us that we are the masters of our fate because we are the
masters, first, of our attitudes. Our attitudes shape our future. This is a universal law.
The poet told us with great emphasis that this law works whether the attitudes are
destructive or constructive. The law states that we translate into physical reality the
thoughts and attitudes which we hold in our minds, no matter what they are. (P. 8)
Hill and Stone offer two different claims about how PMA leads to success. The first claim
is that people with PMA will develop “complete control of both conscious mind and
unconscious impulses” (Cawelti 1965:214). They will work harder, develop good habits,
and not give up. They will do whatever it takes to achieve success despite any obstacle or
circumstance. The second claim is that the mind can achieve success independently of
the body’s action. “Your brain sends out energy in the form of brain waves. And this
energy is power which can affect another person or object” (Hill and Stone 1960:64).
Explaining either of these claims is not the book’s strong point since it resembles a col-
lection of stories and metaphors more than an attempt at a sustained argument. One key
metaphor is that the mind is an “invisible talisman” with two sides. One side is “embla-
zoned” with the initials PMA. The other side has the initials NMA (negative mental
attitude). By flipping this talisman to the PMA side, a person can “attract” success. The
NMA side “repels” success. Any situation can be approached with a PMA or NMA. Flip-
ping the talisman to the PMA side means reframing a seemingly negative situation as a
positive one. What is important is not objective circumstances, but the attitude a person
has toward them.
The bulk of the book consists of anecdotes that illustrate the importance of develop-
ing a PMA and 16 other “success principles.” These include: definiteness of purpose,
going the extra mile, self-discipline, enthusiasm, teamwork, learning from defeat, cre-
ative vision, and using “cosmic habit force.” Again, these stories are often quite vague on
how a PMA works. Some seem like fairy tales. For instance, a woodcutter with NMA will
not finish the job, allowing a man with PMA to find $2,250 in a log.
Although Hill and Stone may have coined the phrase “PMA,” the concept is part of the
“positive thinking” tradition that is “the most popular and historically resilient self-help

idea” (Kaminer 1992:46). It has its roots in the “New Thought” movement associated
with Phineas Quimby, Ralph Waldo Trine, and others in the late 1890s (Anker 1999a, b;
see also Cawelti 1965; Weiss 1969; Huber 1971; Meyer 1980; Kaminer 1992). An early, bal-
anced critique of the movement appeared in William James’ ([1902] 1985) The Varieties
of Religious Experience, and Sinclair Lewis’ (1927) Elmer Gantry contained a satire of it.
New Thought was “an amorphous collection of beliefs about the power of mind and spirit
to transcend mere material realities (and generate wealth)” (Kaminer 1992:45). One
strand of the movement was characterized by the claim that belief is “a cause-effect mech-
anism by which the believer might readily attain results that address felt needs, whether
for health or wealth” (Anker 1999a:210). Norman Vincent Peale’s (1963) The Power of
Positive Thinking represents one of the most popular examples in this genre. Current
advocates of this tradition include talk-show host Oprah Winfrey (Lowney 1999) and
celebrity financial consultant Suze Orman (1997). The entire positive thinking tradition,
of which Success through a Positive Mental Attitude is an exemplar, has attracted much rid-
icule, both for its presentation and its substance. Regarding Hill’s (1960) Think & Grow
Rich, Kaminer (1992) comments, “Hill is worth quoting at length, not because any of his
statements make sense but because none of them do; virtually impossible to satirize, he
need only be quoted” (p. 53). The claims of the tradition, when they are understandable,
have been dismissed as naïve wish fulfillment dressed in pseudoscientific language.
However, Hill and Stone do provide some specific suggestions for developing a PMA.
All of them involve putting positive messages into the mind. First, the reader is told to
read inspirational materials, including self-help books and the Bible. Their final chapter,
titled “The Amazing Power of a Bibliography,” includes a list of 64 suggested books. Sec-
ond, the reader is supposed to memorize and repeat positive phrases or “self-motivators,”
such as “Day by day in every way I’m getting better and better” and “You can do it if you
believe you can.” Third, the reader is supposed to set and write down specific goals, such
as “My major definite aim is to be a millionaire by 1960.” These practices were still being
used at Combined Insurance during Leidner’s study and are being used at the Enterprise
Company today.
PREMISE CONTROL AND PMA AT THE ENTERPRISE COMPANY

The Enterprise Company has a strong corporate culture with rituals, ceremonies, heroes,
slogans, and symbols (Scott 1998), and premise control is the dominant form of worker
control. Enterprise managers refer to the goal of transforming salespersons’ selves as
“emotional training.” While “technical training” involves learning sales scripts and rou-
tines, emotional training involves changing the way student dealers think and feel. An
important part of emotional training, which is considered more important than technical
training, is developing a positive mental attitude. Although the concept of PMA is not so
central at Enterprise as at Combined Insurance, it is part of the standard vocabulary of
sales managers and salespersons, and is taught at sales school and described in the sales
manual. Stone and Hill’s book is not one of the three motivational books issued to all
rookie dealers, but it is promoted by the company and made available to dealers at cost.

The skill of keeping a PMA is often illustrated in an exercise in which dealers attempt
to reframe negative situations they may encounter in the book field. Managers describe to
their trainees particular scenarios they may face—rain, dog bites, slamming doors—and
discuss not just how they should react to them, but how they can see them in a positive
light. A broken car, for instance, means you will get some exercise. Rain means sympa-
thetic people will let you into their homes. A natural disaster that destroys your sales ter-
ritory means that people will need new books. Whenever something bad happens in the
book field, dealers are supposed to come up with three of these positive reframings.
The lack of on-the-job supervision explains why premise control makes sense for
Enterprise management, but student dealers actually use these practices because of the
difficult conditions, physically and socially, of door-to-door sales work. Because of these
conditions, around a third of dealers each summer quit the job before finishing their 12
weeks of selling. Physically, the job requires carrying a heavy book bag for over 13 hours
a day, six days a week, in all weather. Dealers are supposed to be showing books from
7:59 a.m. to at least 9:30 p.m. During this time, they are to be either talking to a prospect
or moving—running actually—to the next door. Breaks, except for two short meal
breaks, are discouraged. The job is even more difficult socially since it requires initiating
an awkward interaction—asking a stranger for entrance into his or her house to demon-
strate a product—and facing constant rejection. The seven dealers I observed in the
book field knocked on an average of over 90 doors per day. At approximately one third of
these doors there was no answer. An additional third refused to let the dealer give any
kind of demonstration. The dealers averaged 32 demonstrations (30 is the company’s
minimum expectation), but of these, 24.4 were “door demos,” which means the prospect
would not let the dealer into the house. These demonstrations often lasted less than 30
seconds before the prospect shut the door. The dealers averaged just 7.6 sit-down dem-
onstrations, where the prospect agreed to sit down, in the house or on the porch, for a
full demonstration. Fewer than half of these prospects (3) bought anything from the
dealer. Companywide, dealers averaged just over two sales a day. So an Enterprise
dealer’s day is filled with rejection along every step of the sales process. Although this
rejection is not usually rude, the cumulative effect of it can be emotionally draining.
Despite these objective difficulties, a majority of dealers who finish the summer come
to define the most difficult part of the job in terms of themselves. Answering the open-
ended question “What was the hardest part about your summer?” on the end-of-summer
survey, fully 63 percent of the respondents gave an answer that framed the hardest part in
terms of their own ability to control their thinking or actions. These answers included
keeping “on-schedule” or continuing to work when they did not want to (24 percent),
remaining positive or keeping a PMA (13 percent), and staying “motivated” (13 percent).
These responses suggest that student dealers have, to some extent, adopted PMA’s nonfal-
sifiable explanation for failure that places responsibility on the individual. Enterprise
dealers describe themselves as constantly struggling against temptations to get “off-
schedule,” in other words, taking extra breaks, or quitting the job.
Although these dealers often talk about fighting negative emotions in the book field, it
would be a mistake to think of Enterprise’s concept of PMA simply as emotion. Indeed,

the Enterprise version of PMA as described in the company’s sales manual, Selling 101,
makes an important distinction between feelings and attitude:
As William James said, “It seems like feeling should precede action when in reality
action precedes feeling.” So if you want to feel a certain way, your actions will dictate
your feelings. Positive mental attitude means that you do not let your feelings dictate
your actions. . . . You see, it is not the circumstances that happen to you in life; it is the
ATTITUDE toward those circumstances that determines the kind of person you are
going to be.
Student dealers are taught that they will have negative emotions in the book field, but they
should not allow these feelings to control their actions. Instead, if they undertake the right
actions, they can create positive feelings. Attitude, then, is not emotion, but is a set of cog-
nitive strategies for reframing situations so that they are viewed positively, not negatively.
Positive attitude leads to proper action that then results in positive emotions. Since deal-
ers are constantly struggling against these negative emotions and against themselves, they
are generally open to the strategies Enterprise managers suggest for achieving success
through a PMA. So while premise control sometimes takes a top-down form, as when
managers instruct and motivate workers, it just as often involved salespersons sharing
with each other their struggles in the book field and techniques for dealing with them.
Dealers discuss and use these techniques in a clearly self-conscious way. Motivational
techniques are a constant topic of conversation among dealers, who are always looking for
new ways to stay motivated in the book field. Dealers are not supposed to criticize any
motivational techniques since this is “negative,” but they do discuss them with humor and
often take an ironic stance toward them, as did the high-tech workers described by Kunda
(1992). Dealers realize how ridiculous they seem to outsiders and jokingly compare
themselves to members of religious cults and to mental patients.
A TOOL KIT OF MOTIVATIONAL PRACTICES

The Enterprise Company equips its salespersons with a variety of techniques for dealing
with the physical, social, and emotional difficulties of their jobs. During their struggle to
continue working, dealers may search for something—anything—that can help them get
to the next door. It may be something they learned in sales school or read in a motiva-
tional book or that was suggested by another dealer. Some techniques work for some deal-
ers and not others. Something that works one day may not work the next. A technique
that made no sense when described in sales school may eventually be just the thing to get
through the day. If something works, dealers continue to use that technique. If something
stops working, they try something else from the collection of strategies they have learned,
all of which can be derived from the claim of PMA that the mind should be filled with
thoughts that are positive. Because the use of PMA at Enterprise is characterized by
variety, Swidler’s tool-kit metaphor is especially appropriate. The Enterprise tool kit
consists of two types of tools: motivational practices and motivational foci. Motivational
practices, such as repeating positive phrases, help dealers focus on positive thoughts to
the exclusion of negative ones. Motivational foci are the content of the thoughts

themselves—the positive things dealers are supposed to be thinking about. This section
will discuss the three motivational practices that are central to PMA. The subsequent
section will discuss three key motivational foci that dealers attempt to keep in mind by
using the motivational practices.
Positive Phrases
One of the most popular motivational practices is repeating positive phrases aloud.
Enterprise managers recommend that dealers continually repeat positive phrases, or
affirmations, between doors because “it’s impossible to think a negative thought when
saying a positive phrase.” According to the end-of-the-summer survey, 34.8 percent of
dealers repeated positive phrases to themselves at least half the time, with an additional
33.7 percent indicating they repeated positive phrases between 25–50 percent of the time.
Dealers report two different benefits the phrases have on their thinking. First, the positive
phrases help them focus on whatever they are saying. According to one dealer:
It was so weird at first, like ‘This is going to be the greatest day,’ ‘I love people, I love my
job.’ At first I’d say it and I’m like ‘Oh, my God, what am I doing,’ but the more you say
it, the more you actually start believing it. So that helped me out tons. Also, the weeks
that were just terrible were when I wasn’t positive, when I never even said them.
(white female, first-year dealer)
Second, saying prescribed positive phrases keeps nonprescribed thoughts from creeping
into their minds. Student dealers in one focus group discussed the importance of “bab-
bling,” talking continually, regardless of the specific content, to keep negative thoughts
from gaining a foothold:
Dealer 1 (white female, second-year dealer): [Babbling is] never letting yourself stop
talking, because when you stop talking, you start thinking and when you start think-
ing, it gets out of hand.
Dealer 2 (white female, first-year dealer): Thinking is bad.
Dealer 3 (white female, second-year dealer): It doesn’t have to be necessarily super-
positive. It can just be like “Man this is a beautiful day” or “That was the coolest mom.”
“I have awesome, awesome families in my territory.” “People are so education
conscious.”
The dealer’s claim that “thinking is bad” seems bizarre since the job is quite taxing men-
tally. It makes sense, although, to dealers who are attempting to distinguish between pos-
itive and negative thoughts. For dealers repeating positive phrases, “thinking” represents
a temptation to focus instead on negative aspects of the job.
Positive phrases can also be used to drive out negative thoughts that have already
begun, as this dealer reported:
Positive phrases have made a really big effect on me. I just say them constantly. Like
whenever I’d get a negative thought in my head out in the book field, I’d just force
myself to say [a positive phrase]. Say it over and over, I scream it or whatever. That
really helps quite a bit. (white male, first-year dealer)
Managers and dealers stress the importance of repeating the phrases constantly since any
letup can allow dealers’ thoughts to stray. According to one dealer:

I found that when I was really good about positive phrases, they really worked. If
I didn’t do it 100 percent of the way, then that was it, they dwindled out. . . . Because
the thing is: if I was saying something [positive] out loud, it’s so true, you can’t think
anything negative. You just can’t; it’s impossible. But you have to be so focused and so
dedicated to doing that 100 percent of the time. (white female, third-year dealer)
Many of these phrases are reminders that the dealer is having or will have great success
in the book field. These include phrases such as “Everyone’s getting them,” “Who’s
next,” and “Get your checkbook ready—here I come.” Others express the salesperson’s
love of the job, for example, “It’s a great day to be a bookie” and “I love people and I love
my job.” Another category of phrases prepares dealers to recover from rejection, for
example, “Meet a neg, shake a leg” and “I don’t care if I sell one unit today—I’m just
going to have a blast.” A phrase can also redefine a potentially negative facet of the job,
like the heat, in a positive way, for example, “I love the sun, for it warms my soul.” Like
all motivational techniques, positive phrases do not work for every dealer. Some admit-
ted that it is possible to say a positive phrase and think a negative thought. According to
one dealer:
I tried them. I tried them over and over. When I didn’t want to sell, I’d try positive
phrases. They sounded fake because I was thinking one thing and I was saying another
thing. So they didn’t really work that well. (white male, first-year dealer)
Positive Material
The term “positive material” describes the motivational books and tapes that dealers are
advised to use to fill their heads with positive thoughts and keep out negative ones.
Dealers are supposed to read positive material every day. Rookie dealers are provided
with three books in their sales kits: Now Is Your Time to Win (Dean 1982), Life Is
Tremendous (Jones 1968), and The Greatest Salesman in the World (Mandino 1968).
Additional motivational books, including such classics as How to Win Friends and Influ-
ence People (Carnegie 1936), Think & Grow Rich (Hill 1960), and of course, Success
through a Positive Mental Attitude (Hill and Stone 1960), can be purchased from Enter-
prise at cost. Several of these are included in student managers’ sales kits each year.
According to the survey, 39.6 percent of dealers reported reading positive material at
least five days a week, with an additional 26.4 percent answering three to four days a
week. The remaining 34 percent reported reading positive material less than three days
a week.
Many dealers’ favorite motivational book was The Greatest Salesman in the World.
Like most motivational books, The Greatest Salesman presents a list of principles that
lead to success. Unlike most other books, though, The Greatest Salesman works its
principles into a plot, which involves the birth of Christ, the Apostle Paul, a Middle
Eastern salesman named Hafid, and 10 scrolls that explain how to be the greatest sales-
man in the world. These scrolls, whose themes include “Today I begin a new life,” “I
will greet this day with love in my heart,” and “I am nature’s greatest miracle,” describe
mind-sets that dealers are supposed to take with them as they knock on doors. As this
excerpt illustrates, Weber’s capitalist ethic continues to be found in self-help literature:

Today I will multiply my value a hundredfold.

I will not commit the terrible crime of aiming too low.
I will do the work that a failure will not do.
I will always let my reach exceed my grasp.
I will never be content with my performance in the market.
I will always raise my goals as soon as they are attained.
I will always strive to make the next hour better than this one. (Pp. 91–2)
Dealers read these books to motivate themselves and also use them as the raw material for
other motivational techniques. For instance, dealers may incorporate lines from the
books into positive phrases, as this dealer reported:
Greatest Salesman in the World had a lot of good principles in it. Now Is Your Time and
Life Is Tremendous. I read those and I also read my Bible every night. So between all
that stuff I would pick a key idea or a simple sentence and just try and repeat that to
myself or write it down on top of my pre-approach pad every time I got to a new page.
And that kept me going. Just something simple I could relate to. (white female, first-
year dealer)
This dealer’s use of the books was not unusual. None of the dealers I spoke to commented
on any of the underlying theories in the books or noticed any of the logical problems
observed by the genre’s critics. Dealers typically do not read the books to discover a sus-
tained argument, but to find some nugget of motivation they can use. The books are also
filled with stories that help put the dealers’ book field problems in perspective. According
to one dealer:
Some of the stories, like in Now’s Your Time to Win. . . . You think about, like the guy’s
car blowing up and some of the stuff he went through. And if you get frustrated about
the situation you’re in and you’ve got it right there on paper in your selling bag. You
think about all the stuff they went through, you have to kind of laugh about how frus-
trated you are. I’m like, man, no one’s home. OK, his car blew up, which was a little bit
more serious. For me it wasn’t the motivation, it was more just putting everything in
perspective. (white female, first-year dealer)
Most tapes available from Enterprise are recordings of talks given by sales managers, top
dealers, and other speakers at company events. One popular tape of a motivational
speaker is included in the sales kit. Other tapes are available from the company for $1.50
apiece; some of these are distributed at no cost at sales-school sessions. Many of these
tapes contain “advanced sales” advice, both technical and emotional. One of the most
popular tapes consists mainly of two former top dealers telling funny stories about selling
books. Although it offers little technical advice about selling, dealers like it because it
shows how much fun selling books can be.
Written Goals
Another motivational practice, again suggested by Stone and Hill, is to write down
specific goals. During sales training, Enterprise managers have student dealers make
specific goals that are personally meaningful and put them into writing. Writing
down the goals accomplishes three things. First, it makes the dealers determine what

their goals are. These goals can be very detailed and specific, as this salesperson
reports:
I set goals every single night. I try to hit those goals every day and I think about my
goals and how bad it feels at the end of the day if you haven’t hit your goals. . . . I set
demo goals every day for 30 demos a day, and then also set customer goals and unit
goals. And I set a unit goal every night that would be better than my day before and a
customer goal that would be a little better than my day before. And then I would break
it down, 2 hours and 15 minutes at a time. (white male, second-year dealer)
Second, writing goals usually involves sharing them with someone else, such as the man-
ager or teammates. Sharing goals allows other people to remind the dealer of her goals
and hold her accountable for meeting them, as this dealer reported:
I just sat down and made a list of things I wanted to accomplish before I came home.
I had that taped to a pre-approach notebook. And any time that I would get frus-
trated, I would look at it. And my student manager knew every single one of my goals
and every night he would ask me. . . . It’s like a daily reminder—there’s no thinking
about it. If you make it visible and you let other people know about it, you feel like you
have a little more responsibility to actually achieve it. (white female, first-year dealer)
Third, the written goals allow the dealer’s present self, during training, to communicate
to a future self, during the summer (see Schweingruber and Berns 2005). This is significant
because Enterprise managers frame these two selves differently. Managers tell dealers that
their thoughts during training are clear and rational. In training, dealers have not begun
to experience the negative aspects of the job and, importantly, they still have regular con-
tact with their managers and teammates, who help sustain proper thinking. One sales
manager had his dealers fill out a “persistence card,” which was to begin with the lines:
Dear X, I wrote this when my head is clear. This is what I want to get out of this
summer.
Letters like these are addressed either to the sales manager or the dealer himself and are
used in various ways. Each dealer’s persistence card was mailed to her during the fourth
week of the summer. Another manager had his dealers write a letter to themselves that was
to be opened only when they were about to quit. Letters to the sales manager provide
information to her about a dealer’s reasons for selling, which she can then use to help
coach the dealer. Sales managers also send letters to their dealers during the summer to
remind them about their reasons for selling.
A TOOL KIT OF MOTIVATIONAL FOCI

Motivational practices, such as positive phrases, positive material, and lists of goals, illus-
trate one way that PMA is personalized. One technique may work for one dealer, but
not others. Motivational foci illustrate an even more significant type of personalization.
Motivational foci are the positive thoughts themselves—goals, values, or people that
dealers can think about in the field to keep their minds off negative aspects of the job.
Motivational practices are used to keep the proper motivational foci in mind. Enterprise
provides a tool kit of these foci, but many will have no salience for particular dealers.

During training, Enterprise managers learn about student dealers’ experiences and goals
so they can suggest motivational foci that will be meaningful for those dealers. Although
these foci are personalized, managers can choose from a standardized menu to run past
their dealers. Thus, motivational foci are also a tool kit for managers. Enterprise manag-
ers and dealers call these motivational foci “emotional purposes” because dealers are sup-
posed to feel strongly about them. A major part of emotional training is developing these
emotional purposes (see Schweingruber and Berns 2005).
Social movement scholars use the term “frame expansion” (Snow et al. 1986) to
describe how a social movement organization increases the types of goals it is pursuing to
appeal to more potential participants. The development of emotional purposes during
emotional training is a similar process. Enterprise managers attempt to find something
positive that dealers will be able to focus on during the summer. Is the student religious?
If yes, maybe he can focus on God. If not, focusing on God makes no sense. The student
needs tuition money? Then this can become her focus. The student’s parents are support-
ive? The dealer can dedicate the summer to them. The student’s parents believe Enterprise
is a scam? Then the dealer can concentrate on proving them wrong—but in doing so,
increases his parents’ respect for him and improves their relationship. This section
describes three of these motivational foci.
Service-mindedness
One of the most popular emotional incentives is service-mindedness. Dealers who adopt
service-mindedness as an emotional purpose focus on providing service to the people
who answer the door. One reason for adopting service as an emotional incentive is the
belief that sales prospects can ascertain dealers’ true intentions at the door. The prospect
can tell which dealers are out to help themselves and which ones are interested in provid-
ing an educational service. Since prospects do not want to “be sold,” service-mindedness
redefines selling as service. This belief in the efficacy of service-mindedness to increase
sales conforms to the general PMA belief that success can be created by thinking certain
thoughts, regardless of objective circumstances. For example, during a focus group, two
dealers discussed the importance of thinking proper thoughts:
Dealer 1 (white female, third-year dealer): Whether you perceive it or not, it really
does show through the door. Whatever your attitude, whatever secret feelings you’re
harboring. I know. I put on a fake smile. Some days I just feel like—uggg—and I’d put
on a fake smile. . . .
Dealer 2 (white female, first-year dealer): Mrs. Jones [Enterprise slang for a sales
prospect] knows.
Dealer 1: Yeah, my sit-downs went down. I don’t know how they know but they know.
Like psychic connection here. So if I get on the ball and I truly pick myself up with
positive phrases or whatever, you automatically see it. The sit-downs go up, the sales
go up. If I’m not throwing a pity party, things work out better. . . . But do you know
the thing I found out about that? Nothing changed. Mrs. Jones did not change. The
territory didn’t change. The only thing that changed was your attitude. And that was
the biggest thing. It just makes all the difference.

Dealer 2: “Your attitude makes more of a difference than their attitude”—that quote.
Dealer 1: Absolutely. Their situation? People who have gone bankrupt have bought
books because I had a great attitude and I communicated the need.
These dealers claimed that even a prospect’s bankruptcy, a seemingly formidable obstacle
for a salesperson, can be overcome with a proper positive service-minded attitude. Note
also the references to positive phrases that dealers use to focus on service-mindedness.
One dealer refers to repeating them between doors and the other quotes a phrase to make
her point. Dealers tailor their motivational practices to help them keep their minds on
their motivational foci. For instance, dealers focusing on service-mindedness might use
phrases like “The kids out here need me to work” and “I’m so excited about helping fam-
ilies and helping children.” Many dealers keep their minds on customers by repeating
aloud the names of customers, which reminds them of “neat families” who bought books,
or of upcoming prospects. Another positive phrase about service-mindedness is printed
on a large piece of red poster board and included in dealers’ sales kits for hanging in deal-
ers’ bedrooms or cars. It reads:
This is the best day I’ve ever had! I can, I will, and I’m going to help 30 people today
live a richer, fuller, more meaningful life because I stopped by and showed them my
books.
This phrase illustrates the belief that dealers can perform a service even if no book is sold.
PMA itself can become their product. Since the dealer is the most positive person that
prospects will meet all summer, prospects will be able to tell there is something special
about them and may learn to be more positive themselves.
An alternative definition of service could be offered that would involve, for instance,
accepting the prospect’s definition of the situation and not attempting to sell to those who
are bankrupt. Enterprise’s official definition excludes the prospects’ claims of what will
best serve them. Since most prospects initially reject the idea of buying educational
books, salespersons must maintain the company’s definition of service if they are going to
persist with their sales demonstrations. However, many salespersons feel uneasy with this
aspect of the job. One student who quit the job during the summer reported:
I didn’t like the aspect of “bulling” my way into a door. If someone asks me to buy
something and I say no, I expect to be left alone. I don’t like to do something to some-
one I wouldn’t want done to me, and I feel that’s what the second part of the approach
was.
Just as all motivational practices do not work for all dealers, neither do all motivational
foci.
Dedications
A number of emotional purposes involve focusing on people other than the dealer him-
self. Focusing selfishly on oneself is considered negative, especially since it usually
involves thoughts about the pains and disappointments of the book field. Many of the
people focused on are part of the dealer’s life in the book field, including prospects (the
focus of service-mindedness) and teammates. However, another popular motivational
focus is on friends and family back home (dealers spend the summer outside of their

home states). One way that distant loved ones are made real is by symbolically dedicating
all or part of the summer to them. The most organized system of dedications is the
“Mom’s Week” or “Dad’s Week” that many sales manager organizations sponsor. During
these weeks, dealers sell “for Dad” or “for Mom” instead of for themselves. Dealers
attempt to think about all of the sacrifices that Mom and Dad have made for them, as this
dealer reported:
I dedicated a week to my dad. I would tell myself, “Dad worked so hard for me all these
years. He went to work so many days that he didn’t want to work just because he knew
he had to provide for me. That’s love and I need to show him how good of a job he
did.” (white female, second-year dealer)
To help keep Mom or Dad in mind, dealers tailor their motivational practices to the ded-
ication. They may work their parents into positive phrases, post a picture of them in their
car, and even call them in the morning to tell them they are selling for them that day.
Making written lists can also become part of dedications, as this dealer reported:
I sat down and wrote down all the sacrifices my dad had made and all the things he has
done for me and all the reasons I thought he was a great dad. That was the easiest week
to work, that week. That was my easiest week of the summer. (white male, first-year
dealer)
Like other motivational foci, dedications do not work for all dealers. A major problem
with dedications is that they may make dealers homesick, as this one reported:
Dedication to someone, that did not work for me at all. It just makes you think about
home. You just start missing everybody. Maybe that’s an excuse, but when I was think-
ing about my family at all, even as a motivational source, it wasn’t very effective . . . I
just wanted to go home. (white male, second-year dealer)
God
A third emotional purpose, which illustrates again the personalized nature of PMA, is
God. Although Enterprise’s student-sales program began with door-to-door Bible sales,
the program is now open to college students of any or no religious background. For
students who are religious, though, God can become a reason for selling books. In fact,
God is such a good reason for selling that some dealers who are not religious sometimes
speak as though God is an unfair advantage. Christian dealers report that God gives some
“greater purpose” to their sales routines, as these dealers claimed:
Dealer 1 (white male, second-year dealer): I think when you think about what you’re
doing out there, you’ve got to have something beyond yourself that you’re doing it
for. . . . You just have to have somebody with you.
Dealer 2 (white female, first-year dealer): You work 80 hours a week but that doesn’t
count the paperwork when you get home and everything you do in the morning to get
ready for the day. So your life is books and you have to have some kind of greater pur-
pose to go out there door-to-door.
These dealers may believe that God wants them to sell books for Enterprise, that God can
use the job to “sculpt” dealers, and that God can guide them in the book field. According
to another dealer:

God wanted me to do this job. That’s why He had everything happen, everything
fall into place. . . . It’s like, why am I out here? Because God wants me to, so get
going. . . . You don’t fight God. (white female, first-year dealer)
The God-focus is a larger part of some sales managers’ tool kits than others. A few sales
managers have built organizations within Enterprise that have a very religious focus.
Christian dealers in these organizations recruit like-minded students from their cam-
puses, who may see Enterprise itself as a “Christian company.” Other sales managers’
organizations do not have this religious focus.
DISCUSSION
How do the results of this study bear on the issue raised at the beginning of the article:
sociologists’ long-standing concern with the encroachment of capitalism on the selves of
workers? This study supports Leidner’s claim that positive mental attitude can be used by
management as an effective form of worker control. In 1997, relying almost entirely on
this type of premise control, Enterprise successfully recruited nearly 3,000 salespersons
who subsequently worked 1.7 million hours, gave 4.6 million sales presentations, and
sold over $30 million worth of books to some 280,000 customers over the course of the
summer. However, there also appears to be significant shortcomings to this type of
premise control. Edwards (1979) argues that bureaucratic control is designed to ensure a
minimal level of performance by its workforce, not peak performances. PMA-based
premise control at Enterprise is designed to produce peak performances from dealers by
having them squeeze as many hours, demonstrations, and sales into the day as possible.
However, it fails to motivate many dealers to meet the company’s minimal standards.
During 1997, 32.6 percent of dealers sold fewer than six weeks (half of the standard
summer) and 42.8 percent sold fewer than eight weeks. Of those who did stay in the field,
most fell short of the exacting standards put forward by company managers. Of the seven
dealers I followed, only one, Julie, avoided any serious “off-schedule” problems. Julie
knocked on her first door at 7:55 a.m. and her last at 9:44 p.m., gave 49 demonstrations,
and spent a minimal amount of break time despite temperatures in the 90s. The other
dealers committed such taboos as returning to “headquarters” during the day, taking long
breaks (up to 3.5 hours) without knocking on doors, spending 90 minutes with a prospect
(the official limit is 20 minutes), and taking a half-hour nap on someone’s front lawn.
Beth, the dealer who had the most successful day, making eight sales and collecting over
$700 in down payments, told me that she spent part of a typical day at a bookstore, mall,
or movie and sometimes “fudged” the statistics she submitted to her managers. Beth’s
approach of varying her commitment to the job to suit her own purposes was not
unusual, but it contrasted sharply with official Enterprise Thinking taught in sales school.
In addition to being off-schedule, most dealers I observed also fell well short of the expec-
tation that they would memorize the official sales script and use it word for word. Man-
agers and dealers were both aware of the large gap between the strict work routines taught
in sales schools and promoted throughout the summer and the actual behavior of dealers.
The inability of Enterprise to successfully motivate many of its salespersons suggests that

claims that premise control is inherently tyrannical or requires employees to forfeit their
souls be treated with some skepticism. At Enterprise, using PMA as a form of worker con-
trol appears to work only to the extent that (1) salespersons perceive an alignment
between their own interests and the interests of the company to sell as many educational
books as possible and make as much money as possible; and (2) workers find the practices
of PMA useful for advancing these interests.
Leidner (1993) claims that Combined Insurance’s salespersons used standardized
work routines suggested by their managers because “management and agents shared
an interest in controlling the behavior of prospective customers in order to sell as much
insurance as possible” (p. 147). A similar situation exists at the Enterprise Company.
Although student dealers are technically independent contractors who may set their own
prices, they are effectively paid on a commission system which pays them approximately
40 percent of their total sales. Some dealers, though, rejected this alignment of interests
because they accepted prospects’ definition of the situation as when, for instance, they
took a prospect’s objection that they could not afford the books at face value rather than
countering it with a memorized response. Others rejected the alignment because they had
alternative ways to earn money over the summer. The sales school survey asked whether
students had another job opportunity if they did not finish the summer with Enterprise.
As Table 1 shows, dealers who had no other opportunity had more sales (one unit of sales
equals approximately $10 of sales and $4 of profit) and worked more weeks. Students who
had other options had less reason to become heavily invested in the Enterprise ideology
and, instead of avoiding thinking about the negative aspects of the job, may have com-
pared them to its benefits. This type of cost-benefit analysis is usually considered very
“rational.” Enterprise managers, however, associate clear and rational thinking with
accepting the company’s official premises. According to the company’s recruiting man-
ual, the job offers college students what they are looking for—money and experience—
and the main reason they reject it is “fear.” As one manager told us, “it doesn’t make sense”
not to sell books. Although Enterprise’s version of rationality may fall short of a dispas-
sionate cost-benefit analysis, adopting it may actually be valuable for college students
who have committed to it, especially if they do not have another job opportunity. Con-
stantly comparing the job’s positives and negatives would interfere with dealers’ efforts to
get through the day and skillfully engage in interactions with prospects. Similarly, Shelley
TABLE 1. Do You Have Another Job Opportunity Available If You Do Not Finish Your Summer
with Enterprise?
N Percent Mean units sold† Mean weeks on job††

Yes 165 50.6 756.3 7.1
Maybe 104 31.9 756.1 7.0
No 57 17.5 1037.1 9.0
Total 326 100.0 805.0 7.4
†
“No” group differs from combined “Yes” and “Maybe” groups, p < .05.
††
“No” group differs from “Yes” group and from “Maybe” group, p < .01.

Taylor’s (1989) research on “positive illusions” suggests that victims of trauma who have
“overly optimistic assessments of their situations and the beliefs that they control them”
(p. ix) fare better than those with more realistic assessments.
Does PMA Work?

There would be no reason to adopt the positive thinking approach so central to the com-
pany’s program of premise control if salespersons did not believe it helped them deal with
problems they encountered in the book field. While observers of premise control worry
about its tyrannical potential, critics of positive thinking tend to view it as nonsense.
However, this study suggests that the techniques of positive mental attitude may “work.”
In suggesting that PMA “works,” I mean not that Stone and Hill’s theory describes some-
thing universally true about human behavior, but simply that some salespersons are able
to use tools in the PMA tool kit to accomplish some of their goals. I offer two types of
evidence.
The first type of evidence is the testimony of dealers themselves, who described the
success they had with the motivational practices and foci associated with PMA at Enter-
prise. In addition to claiming success through a PMA on the job, as described above,
many dealers believed they had learned something valuable that could be used in other
areas of their lives:
Dealer 1 (white female, second-year dealer): I think being able to be self-motivated is
so important. Not just in this job, but everywhere. Like taking that back to school with
you and actually being able to be motivated now to go to class every day. And not just
to go to class, but do well in class.
Dealer 2 (white female, second-year dealer): I think you’re right. You see people every-
day who are off-schedule in life. And this job, maybe it’s superstructured as far as
schedule goes. But it’s so good at teaching us how to be on-schedule for life. Because
it doesn’t have to be this intense as a summer of selling books, but it teaches us how,
like you said, to self-motivate.
For some, PMA presented a new way of looking at life:
Every day I loved the job, except for maybe one or two. I had a great time. Just being
able to go through every day with such a positive attitude. Whether you need to force
it upon yourself or not, you just learn it. You learn to just love every day. It’s weird the
way you change the way you look at life. (white male, first-year dealer)
For these dealers, the personal transformation Enterprise managers attempted to facili-
tate was perceived as a positive change that would carry over to other aspects of life.
A second type of evidence suggesting that PMA can “work” for dealers comes from
the end-of-the summer survey. This survey suggests that (1) having a PMA is associated
with having a successful summer and (2) the use of two motivational practices is associ-
ated with maintaining a PMA. Table 2 is a correlation table that includes five variables
from a survey given to dealers after they finished their first summer with Enterprise.
One question asked, “While you were working, what percentage of the time were you
successful in keeping a positive mental attitude?” Dealers could choose from four ranges
of percentages. Only 11 percent of dealers indicated they kept a PMA 76–100 percent of

TABLE 2. Positive Mental Attitude Correlation Table
Positive material PMA Positive summer Units sold

Positive phrases 0.38* 0.51* 0.41* 0.46*
Positive material 0.32* 0.39* 0.14
Positive mental attitude 0.56* 0.50*
Positive summer 0.38*
*p < .01.
Note: N = 91.
the time. The other answers broke down as follows: 43, 36, and 10 percent of dealers
answered “51–75,” “26–50,”and “0–25 percent,” respectively. Dealers were also asked
“Overall, how positive or negative was your experience selling for Enterprise this sum-
mer?” The variable that was most strongly associated with their answer to this question
was the percentage of time they kept a PMA (r = .56, p < .01) (see Table 2). Having a PMA
was also associated with a more objective measure of a successful summer, total sales
(r = .50, p < .01). Dealers who were more successful in having a PMA sold more books.
From this cross-sectional data, it is impossible to tell the causal direction between these
variables. No doubt dealers who sell more books have an easier time maintaining a PMA.
However, dealers’ own descriptions of their work routines suggest that having a PMA also
leads to better sales performance and better feelings about the summer. (Another compli-
cation in interpreting these data is the distinction between having a positive summer and
reporting having a positive summer. Since dealers are trained to reframe negative experi-
ences as positive ones, those who report they have adopted a PMA may be more likely to
describe the summer in positive terms.)
The dealers were also asked what percentage of the time they performed two pre-
scribed techniques for developing and maintaining a PMA, reading positive material, and
repeating positive phrases between doors. Both techniques were associated with having a
PMA (positive phrases, r = .51, p < .01; positive material, r = .32, p < .01) and with report-
ing the summer was a positive experience (positive phrases, r = .41, p < .01; positive mate-
rial, r = .39, p < .01). Again, these correlations do not indicate what causal relationship, if
any, exists between these variables. However, since the intention of the motivational prac-
tices is to create a PMA, these correlations suggest they may be successful in doing that.
Individual Responsibility for Success or Failure

One major consequence of unobtrusive control at Enterprise is that most or all of the
responsibility for achieving success is placed on individuals. Enterprise student dealers
are taught that they are responsible for their own success. If they are failing to achieve a
certain level of sales, it is assumed that they have not committed to Enterprise Thinking
and/or are not carrying out prescribed work routines. This formula for success at Enter-
prise is neatly captured in the title of a recruiting conference session: “Attitude + Work
Habits = A Great Summer.” There is no room in this equation for blaming anyone but
yourself for your not-so-great summer.

There is some tension in the company between this belief in individual responsibility
and the practical requirements of training and managing student dealers. Enterprise
managers do believe there are other factors that go into having an impressive summer
because they have created an impressive training program for preparing student dealers,
emotionally and technically, for the book field. The training of student managers to
recruit, train, and manage rookies reflects the belief that good management will result in
a lower attrition rate. In fact, some of the management training suggests that it is the stu-
dent managers who are responsible if members of their crew quit. Many Enterprise man-
agers believe that a contributing factor to the company’s high attrition rate is a widening
gap between the values of the company and that of the typical college student. Some man-
agers believe this is the company’s fault for failing to change with the times.
However, a belief that the company can do better in training dealers is not incompat-
ible with a belief that it is entirely a dealer’s responsibility for succeeding or not. Managers
attempt to provide dealers with tools for succeeding in the book field and also to convince
them that they will succeed, no matter what, if they follow the company’s suggestions.
This focus on individual responsibility probably has a mixed motivational effect on the
dealers who accept it. Some dealers accept that their problems in the book field are the
result of their own shortcomings and view this discovery of their weaknesses as a form of
personal growth. Some of them want to come back for a second summer so they can work
on these weaknesses. According to one dealer:
I feel like I had a whole lot more potential than my stats displayed. I really am looking
forward to coming back and kicking this job in the butt. (white male, first-year dealer)
For other dealers, though, their lack of success in the book field was experienced as a pain-
ful feeling of personal failure. According to one dealer:
I didn’t do well. I was in that lower half. I was in the lower category. You start thinking,
why can’t I do this? I never thought it was because of the company. I just thought I was
a personal failure. I thought I sucked. One day your confidence can be on top of the
world. And the next day you feel like—the low. It’s just like your body is just going
through these highs and lows. Your stomach sometimes almost hurts from it—going
up and down, up and down. (white female, first-year dealer)
This dealer was eventually able to deal with these feelings and did finish the summer. For
many, though, these feelings lead to quitting, which may only exacerbate a dealer’s nega-
tive evaluation of herself. Joann, one of the Midwestern University dealers who left early,
told me she remembered hearing a sales school speaker who said, “You can say you want
to quit but if you quit you have to look in the mirror and see a failure.” According to Joann:
I really, really thought I was a failure. . . . For a while the Enterprise program really
ruined me. I really felt bad. It wasn’t that I was concerned about people around me
thinking I was a failure. I felt like failure to myself.
Dealers who quit are advised to go back to company headquarters so they can be “un-
sold” on the idea that they are a personal failure, an example of Goffman’s (1952) “cooling
out the mark.” They meet with their sales manager or another company official and are
encouraged to find the positive in their summer and feel good about themselves. Not all
dealers who leave early experience these feelings of low self-worth. Some of them reject

the company’s assignment of blame or even believe that it discredits the entire training
program.
The focus on individual responsibility has two additional implications. First, the
belief that positive thinking can overcome any obstacle may result in less effort being
placed on removing some of those obstacles. Several sales managers complained to me
that the company failed to provide them with information about their assigned sales ter-
ritory, such as how many books had been sold there in previous summers and basic
demographic information. This poor marketing research follows from the company’s
positive thinking approach to sales territory. The belief that poor sales performance is
because of poor sales territory is often given as an example as negative thinking.
A second implication of the focus on individual responsibility is that some salesper-
sons project these beliefs onto the United States economic system. These dealers believe
that upward mobility is simple for those who are willing to work hard. Two “proofs” are
offered in support of this view. The first is Enterprise itself, which allows hard workers to
earn thousands of dollars during the summer. Dealers point out that if someone really
wanted to earn money, they could sell books. The second proof is the failure of money to
motivate Enterprise dealers (see Schweingruber and Berns 2003). One manager, a recent
college graduate, told me that most people do not have money because they do not want
it enough:
Money is not a good motivator. There are 270 million people in the U.S. and there is
way over $270 million [sic]. Everyone could make a million if they wanted to work
hard enough. Most people don’t want to work that hard.
When I heard him make this claim at a spring training meeting, I assumed he meant $270
trillion dollars, which would break down to a million dollars for every person. Then I
heard this same claim made by a company official on an advanced sales tape. In fact, nei-
ther math nor the actual stratification of wealth in the United States is important for those
making this argument, which is based largely on the personal experience of selling books
door-to-door. It is not clear to me how many student dealers made this connection
between individual responsibility for success and the U.S. stratification system. However,
dealers who completed both waves of the survey tended to report holding more conserva-
tive political beliefs after finishing the summer than at sales school (p < .05). There was
also an association between conservative political beliefs and feeling the summer was a
positive experience (r = .40, p < .01). In addition, the company counts a number of
nationally and regionally known conservative politicians among its alumni.
CONCLUSION
This article described how positive mental attitude, a positive thinking motivational phi-
losophy, is used by door-to-door salespersons during the course of their work. While pre-
vious work has conceptualized PMA primarily as a form of worker control, this article
demonstrated that workers use PMA because it helps them cope with negative working
conditions and achieve success in their jobs. In addition, many dealers believe that learn-
ing PMA is part of an important personal transformation. I conceptualized PMA as a tool

kit that contains a variety of motivational tools. These include motivational foci, which
comprise the content of positive thoughts, and motivational practices, which help dealers
maintain the proper foci. Since motivational foci are derived from a dealer’s own values
and goals, there is a good deal of personalization and creativity in using PMA. This sort of
flexibility suggests the limitations of conceptualizing PMA as a form of standardization,
but it should not completely alleviate concerns by critics who worry about the encroach-
ing of corporations on the psyches of their employees. Indeed, this case study suggests
that the ability to personalize premise control techniques may make them even more
effective. However, this study also shows that these workers are by no means “cultural
dopes” (Garfinkel 1967). They adopt the principles and techniques in Enterprise’s
premise control system only to the extent they find them useful for dealing with the day-
to-day concerns of their work. They discuss them self-consciously and often take an
ironic stance toward them. This study provides insight on premise control by focusing on
a company that relies almost entirely on this type of control. However, Enterprise is prob-
ably a rarity in this regard. What this study cannot tell us is how premise control and, in
particular, the use of the positive thinking tradition, works when combined with other
control techniques and how workers experience this.
In addition to contributing to the scholarship on organization control, this study pro-
vides one of only a few scholarly accounts of how people use the techniques and products
of the self-help industry. Its findings also raise a number of additional questions about the
self-help industry and how people make use of its products. First, how do self-help prod-
ucts function in more traditional companies that make greater use of direct supervision
and bureaucratic control? The Enterprise Company and Combined Insurance both rely
on premise controls because of the limitations of other types of worker control and the
perceived alignment of workers’ and managers’ interests in controlling the behavior of
sales prospects. Salespersons use PMA techniques to cope with the particular difficulties
of these jobs. These findings would suggest that office workers who are exposed to self-
help products by their employers might react to them quite differently. Workers may also
use motivational techniques differently if they are learned outside of their workplaces.
One interesting aspect of the self-help industry is that some products are purchased by
companies to motivate their employees and some are purchased by individuals to become
more motivated on their own. Perhaps these individuals may view these techniques as a
way to escape their workplace or to limit its control of their lives. Perhaps some individu-
als who learn these techniques from their companies may also use them in a subversive
way.
Second, how do self-help philosophies like positive mental attitude function outside
of workplaces? PMA and similar ideas form the basis for self-improvement programs
aimed at families and other relationships, personal finances, and other areas of life. This
type of motivational program may be used very differently than those aimed at work. Pre-
sumably, the personal transformation will be more clearly aimed at meeting the needs of
the individual, not his or her employer.
Third, what are the characteristics of people who reject self-help products or find that
they do not work and what are the consequences for them? In this study I interviewed

student dealers who left Enterprise and found that many of them experienced feelings of
personal failure. However, I did not look at long-term consequences of their Enterprise
experience. Presumably, many people buy motivational books or attend seminars but
then fail to become sufficiently “motivated” or come up short on achieving their goals. Do
these people conclude that self-help programs do not work or do they conclude the fault
lies in their personal shortcomings? Are the only true believers in PMA the success stories?
One of the reasons it is important to better understand how self-help and motiva-
tional philosophies like positive mental attitude work, or do not work, is because individ-
uals use them to make sense of and negotiate not just work environments but also the
larger U. S. stratification system. The positive thinking tradition makes a fundamentally
antisociological claim that individuals can, without exception, bypass the constraints of
social structure through changing the way they think. It is not difficult to understand the
appeal of this thinking for those who are successful since it explains how their success was
earned. But the role of this type of “motivation” in negotiating social structure is probably
more complicated. In jobs that require interactional skills, such as sales work, learning
how to transform the self, or at least the ability to present the self to others, may be a sig-
nificant advantage. As service work becomes more important in the economy, society
may require more “motivated” selves. In other jobs, though, this type of motivation may
offer fewer benefits for workers and may function only as a form of worker control. Also,
since “motivation” and “self-help” themselves can be quite expensive, access to whatever
advantages they bring is itself dependent upon one’s existing resources. Thus, the self-
help industry provides a window for looking at such core sociological issues as the con-
nection between self and society, the nexus of structure and agency, and the link between
personal troubles and social issues.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Nancy Berns was my coresearcher on this project and provided valuable feedback on this
article. I am also thankful to Cindy Anderson, Robin Leidner, John Lie, Kathleen Lowney,
Clark McPhail, Aaron Porter, Anastasia Tuckness, and participants at the 2000 meeting of
the Midwest Sociological Society for commenting on earlier versions of this article.
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Blackwell Publishing Ltd.Oxford, UK and Malden, USATSQThe Sociological Quarterly0038-02532006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

20064714168WORK CULTURESSuccess through a Positive Mental Attitude?David Schweingruber

The Sociological Quarterly ISSN 0038-0253

SUCCESS THROUGH A POSITIVE MENTAL

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42 The Sociological Quarterly 47 (2006) 41–68 © 2006 Midwest Sociological Society

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44 The Sociological Quarterly 47 (2006) 41–68 © 2006 Midwest Sociological Society

The Sociological Quarterly 47 (2006) 41–68 © 2006 Midwest Sociological Society 45

46 The Sociological Quarterly 47 (2006) 41–68 © 2006 Midwest Sociological Society

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WHAT IS POSITIVE MENTAL ATTITUDE?

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PREMISE CONTROL AND PMA AT THE ENTERPRISE COMPANY

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50 The Sociological Quarterly 47 (2006) 41–68 © 2006 Midwest Sociological Society

A TOOL KIT OF MOTIVATIONAL PRACTICES

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52 The Sociological Quarterly 47 (2006) 41–68 © 2006 Midwest Sociological Society

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Today I will multiply my value a hundredfold.

54 The Sociological Quarterly 47 (2006) 41–68 © 2006 Midwest Sociological Society

A TOOL KIT OF MOTIVATIONAL FOCI

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56 The Sociological Quarterly 47 (2006) 41–68 © 2006 Midwest Sociological Society

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58 The Sociological Quarterly 47 (2006) 41–68 © 2006 Midwest Sociological Society

The Sociological Quarterly 47 (2006) 41–68 © 2006 Midwest Sociological Society 59

N Percent Mean units sold† Mean weeks on job††

60 The Sociological Quarterly 47 (2006) 41–68 © 2006 Midwest Sociological Society

Does PMA Work?

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TABLE 2. Positive Mental Attitude Correlation Table

Positive material PMA Positive summer Units sold

Individual Responsibility for Success or Failure

62 The Sociological Quarterly 47 (2006) 41–68 © 2006 Midwest Sociological Society

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64 The Sociological Quarterly 47 (2006) 41–68 © 2006 Midwest Sociological Society

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66 The Sociological Quarterly 47 (2006) 41–68 © 2006 Midwest Sociological Society

——. 1989. Charismatic Capitalism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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68 The Sociological Quarterly 47 (2006) 41–68 © 2006 Midwest Sociological Society

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