The Steel Crocodile, by D. G. Compton. I haven't read this, and the best summary or teaser for this I can find are excerpts from a review by Algis Budrys (in Galaxy June 1970):
"Abigail is another of Compton's extremely well-characterized women. He is I think without serious exception the very best delineator of female characters in the SF field, perhaps the best we have ever had..."
"Matthew is one of the world's leading sociologists, and an extremely popular and well-paid consultant to private industry, which, as is already the case, is shown here to be using all the paraphernalia of social science and super-science in order to increase the efficiency of its product development and the subsequent marketing of its products. ...The society he depicts is a future society we may very well believe in - one in which it is an accepted matter of course that all students are revolutionaries, and one in which ideological disagreement is often expressed as assassination. Meanwhile, the wheels of the marketing establishment continue to turn, because even revolutionaries aspire to the affluent life depicted in the media. Only Compton, thus far has moved towards a depiction of what intellectual life will be like under these conditions... "