Scientism in Action

This chapter explores how marketing organizations use scientific imagery to shape how their clients think about them. It argues that marketing organizations engage in scientism. They pretend they are doing science. They do this by including general references to science and specific references to individual scientific fields such as data science. Exploring this ethnographically, the chapter argues that marketing organizations use scientism to grant their work a sense of what the author calls computationality. They want their clients to think that computers do all the work.