Learning to Labor Revisited:
Marketing the Worker’s Soul in an Age of Neoliberalism
Steven Vallas and
Emily Cummins
Northeastern University
Keynote talk at the Organization Studies Workshop
Rhodes, Greece
May 23, 2012
1. Introduction
Let me begin these remarks with a brief confession. From several standpoints, I have no
business giving a keynote address before a group of this sort. Yes, there are several
people in this audience whose work is arguably more impactful than my own, but that
self-effacing message (while certainly true) is not what I have in mind. I am an odd
choice, quite simply, since I have never considered myself an organizations guy. I may
have been issued a green card, allowing me temporary access to this intellectual terrain,
but I’m sure that I’ve misplaced it. Indulge me, nonetheless, as I take the position that my
liminal status in the study of work organizations allows me to offer insights that may be
of some value to life-long citizens in this field. Alvin Gouldner (whom I invoke as a
mentor from afar), once called himself an “outlaw Marxist.” Perhaps you will view me as
an outlaw student of organizational life.
And my outsider status leads me to make three interconnected arguments in this
talk. First, though I have elsewhere expressed my displeasure with neo-institutional
approaches toward organizations, that perspective does have the advantage of stressing
the importance of cultural and ideological influences on the internal structure and
operations of work organizations. What is missing, of course, is that very few critical
students of organizations have followed this lead.1 We have abdicated the playing field,
so to speak, allowing discussion of broadly dominant normative influences to become the
stock in trade of the mainstream organizational sociologists whom business schools love
to hire. My point is that we need to grasp the ways in which wider cultural trends and
normative conditions impact work organizations, as the institutionalists insist --but that
we need to do so in ways that place the exercise of power –including soft power, or
hegemony-- at the center of our analysis. In a sense, and this may seem paradoxical, I
want to argue that to understand how organizational elites reproduces their privilege, we
cannot fixate on organizational terrain, or even organizational fields. We need to adopt a
broader perspective that traces the linkage of power and authority to broader influences
1
This is a broad and far ranging literature, beginning with DiMaggio and Powell (1983) and Powell and
DiMaggio (1991), which has exploded exponentially. For my complaints about this literature, see Vallas
and Hill (2012).
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within the political culture and what Althusser once called (however problematically) the
“ideological state apparatuses.”
My second point flows directly from the first, and concerns the utter failure of
organizational scholars to develop any sustained concern for the cultural meanings and
symbolic representations that popular media attach to work in the contemporary context.
I will address this point in a few moments, presenting a provisional report from a study of
the popular business press I am developing. For the moment, let me say only that when I
am confronted with people who argue that work is no longer a salient part of every day
life, and that consumption claims the larger part of people’s identities today, I ask them to
scrutinize the content of the most popular American TV shows. In truth, we are awash in
the circulation not only of images of desirable lifestyles, and idealized images of bodies,
but also of symbolic representations of work, most notably in workplace dramas that
symbolize our conceptions of authority, of dignity, and of the ways in which workers,
managers, salespeople, food servers, police, physicians, lawyers, drug dealers, teachers,
ad agency workers, drug dealers, and political operatives all negotiate their relations to
their supervisors and to one another. Even when we consume, we consume images of
work that command scholarly attention from any number of vantage points. I argue that
the images of work that are established in the popular media (and elsewhere) are very
likely to be consequential for workplace life and workers’ identities, in that they
influence the boundaries of common sense about workplace life today. As I say, I will
return to this point shortly.
A third complaint I want to register is related to the first two: that students of
organizations have for two long embraced an overly simplistic conception of the relation
between work and subjectivity. This simplistic or one-dimensional conception of the
work/subjectivity relationship is largely derived from Marx, and later from the Chicago
School. A familiar argument, it adheres to the primacy of production thesis, which views
worker subjectivity as an outcome of the material conditions of employment as such.
There is of course certain truth to this point, as Melvin Kohn established many decades
ago, and as my own research has occasionally illustrated. Thus, senior workers who are
embedded for decades in status hierarchies will often internalize this logic, embracing
conceptions of themselves that tend to reproduce such hierarchies over time. But here, I
want to trouble this notion. I want to argue that worker subjectivity is increasingly
constructed away from or outside of work organizations, through popular media, the
business press, and institutionally generated patterns that establish what I want to call
“hegemonic subjectivity.” These patterns can be seen in the hordes of youth who
feverishly undertake unpaid internships, voluntary activities, community work, and who
embrace various leadership posts, all in an effort to construct resume-worthy identities
for the consumption of future employers. Here, the outlines of my argument today begin
to come into view.
I want to examine the notion of the flexible citizen, and of neo-liberal subjectivity
more generally. I will contend that newly hegemonic ways of being have emerged in the
last several decades, and that these ways of being have fostered new identity norms that
are infused with an entrepreneurial logic. These identity norms are subtle, to be sure, and
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soft (in the sense of soft power). Yet I will argue that they provide organizations with
readymade sources of labor whose emotional and cognitive attributes are powerfully
aligned with the needs of the flexible firm. To understand the exercise of power within
the firm, then, requires that we address shifts, reaching back over the last three decades,
in the social construction of the worker subjectivity. Here I will use as my major example
an analysis of the popular business press during the 1980-2010 years, and especially the
self-help career advice genre, which has increasingly encouraged workers to view
themselves –their ‘selves’-- as brands whose distinctive value needs to be marketed in the
manner of soft-drinks, toilet tissue, and cigarettes. I view this as a prime example of the
infusion of neo-liberal logic into the worker’s interiority.
So: three interrelated arguments that lead me at least down one empirical path.
We need to situate organizations in the wider political culture. We need to attend to the
conceptions of work and authority that emanate from the popular media. And we need to
scrutinize the subjectivity-shaping influences that impinge on the modern worker’s self.
For doing so will not only enrich our understanding of the conditions that underpin power
and inequality within work organizations, but also put us in a better position to
understand the forces that bear on the emergence (or the absence) of social movements
demanding change in our economic institutions. In a sense, my argument fits the theme of
our sessions, but oddly so (I warned you): To understand the spatial dynamics of
organizations, we must understand the interior spaces that are shaped quite in advance of
the worker’s entry into the workplace as such. That is the goal I have set out in my
project. That is why, with apologies to Paul Willis, I have invoked the “learning to labor”
rubric in the title of my talk. I return to Willis’s them at the end of my remarks.
A word about the theoretical lineage of the argument I want to develop. I teach
contemporary social theory, and have what some of my colleagues believe is an unwise
and unhealthy appreciation for the work of Michel Foucault. Let me assure you that I
have no intention of adding to the spread of half-baked, fashion-driven celebrations of
Foucault’s work in this or any other field. I will cede that market to my British
colleagues. But I am increasingly persuaded that there is much of value in Foucault’s
theory of governmentality. Alone among social scientists, Foucault realized that human
capital theory is not merely a specialized economic doctrine of dubious empirical
validity. He realized that human capital theory perfectly captures the spirit of our times,
in which the ascent of neo-liberalism invites people to view themselves as bundles of
marketable assets that must be deployed in the marketplace (homo economicus), and
moreover, that neo-liberalism increasingly obliges actors to continually enhance the value
of their individual assets (a development that some have called “responsibilization”).
More, Foucault usefully suggests that neoliberalism engenders a perniciously seductive
worldview –one that construes the marketplace as constituting an imaginary realm of
freedom, autonomy, and empowerment. These arguments, I believe, equip us to grasp the
historical significance of contemporary managerial discourses, that which Paul du Gay
(1992; 1996) has called “enterprise culture.”
These arguments should not be viewed uncritically. I am aware of parallel
arguments to be gleaned from the work of Bourdieu (1999), Goffman (1959), and
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Hochschild (2012), and I draw on these figures in the project I have underway. But I do
believe we are in the grip of cultural, political, and economic developments that invite
what Zygmunt Baumann (2000) and Ulrich Beck (1992; 2007) have dubbed an
“individualization” trend, and that this trend has consequences for the study of work
organizations, the employment relationship, the contours of civil society, and social
movements as well. The forms of discourse with which I am concerned have a great
deal to do with the ways in which employees, young people generally, the un- and
underemployed all perceive precarious employment and the labor market and their
relation to it.
A last bit of throat clearing: I ask that you keep in mind the fact that this is part of
a larger project, whose elements are only now being assembled. That will be painfully
clear in a moment.
2. The Argument
Perhaps the best place to begin is with Norbert Elias, one part of whose major argument
in The Civilizing Process (1939) relied on etiquette books as windows into the cultural
shifts he discovered at the beginnings of modernity. For reasons that were rooted in
shifting structure of state power, and the norms that emerged among social groups at the
apex of the absolutist state, Elias found that the cultural sensibilities –the use of eating
utensils, bodily norms, and the relation between public and private behavior—all began
to shift. And one of the windows into this cultural shift that Elias found especially
revealing were the etiquette books that began to appear in the 16th century. Erasmus’s On
Civility in Children is widely viewed as originating this genre, which sought to educate
the children of the privileged classes concerning their eating, drinking, talking, and
personal hygiene. Erasmus’s genre was relentlessly generalized across the social
spectrum, and in the words of one social historian, opened up "new fields of social
management in which culture is figured forth as both the object and the instrument of
government: the term refers to the morals, manners, and ways of life of subordinate social
strata" (Bennett 1992, 26).
I want to argue that we are living through an analogous moment, and that –
borrowing insights from Elias— we can use behavioral manifestoes as sources of data
regarding the desirable behavior to be expected –institutionalized—in an era of postFordism and neo-liberal economic activity. Today’s Erasmus must be sought on the
shelves (physical and digital) of the popular business press, and it is there that my
graduate students and I have looked. Although many have bemoaned the decline of the
reading class, I feel this is unwarranted. People need to learn what it means to create a
working life, and those in or aspiring to join the middle class do so through appeal to
written, published and commercial texts. The shelves (both real and virtual) of the
popular business press are an ideal place to look. And when we do, we find significant
shifts in the images of work and the employment relationship.
Using best-seller lists and various digital search engines, we have reached a
number of conclusions. First, and at the broadest level, we find that up until the the early
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to mid-1980s, trade and mass market books devoted to business and careers tended to
cater to corporate managers seeking to unleash the powers of creativity within the
modern firm. Representative works in this genre fell into three rough types: (1) practical
guides on managing (e.g. The One Minute Manager; What They Don’t Teach you at
Harvard Business School); (2) biographies of heroic managers (Iacocca; Sam Walton;
Trump); and (3) strategic manifestos outlining programs for organizational change (as
with the paradigmatic In Search of Excellence). Beginning in the late 1980s, however, the
audience for popular business press began to shift, and the discourse changed
dramatically.
We believe that this shift began with the Richard Bolles’s What Color is Your
Parachute? (1970), a massively influential treatise on how to navigate one’s way to
fulfilling employment. This book, which was originally self-published (and was only
commercially produced by a bicycle manual publishing house) began to gain a following
in the 1970s. In so doing, it demonstrated the existence of a large market for career selfhelp books. This trend inaugurated a major shift in the nature of the business press,
expanding the genre outward well beyond the managerial ranks, now including the great
mass of employees, young career seekers, potential job changers, the unemployed,
vocational counselors, and young people generally. Some of the most important
blockbuster publications that followed in Bolles’s footsteps as this genre gathered steam
are such books as Stephen Covey’s 1989 The Seven Secrets of Highly Effective People
Spencer Johnson’s 1998 Who Moved My Cheese?, Daniel Pink’s 2001 Free Agent
Nation. Many of the most popular books in this genre were soon issued in versions for
young women, for teenagers, and for other specialized niches in this emerging market. So
began an avalanche of treatises aimed less at corporate managers than at employees
seeking to reshape their positions within the labor market. We contend that this
development indicates an important shift, in that now the struggle for control over
economic activity has extended well beyond the realm of the firm, now seizing on the self
as the object of contention.2
This genre is certainly internally heterogeneous. Some texts contain only
homilies, with short chapters that give quasi-spiritual advice, while other texts are more
sophisticated, and even cite social science literature as evidence attesting to their claims.
Moreover, this discourse is a highly dynamic one –a moving target, if you will –and
indeed, one of our goals has been to study the evolution of this managerial discourse—
several themes seem to characterize this genre. One such theme is a view of the
“standard” work arrangement as a form of paternalistic dependence that stifles all
creative impulses and blocks one’s fullest development. The notion here is that the age
of stable employment has not only ended –certainly, an arguable point— but that this
structural development is a highly desirable one, in that it makes possible the
emancipation of employees, since the marketplace provides abundant opportunity for
employees to reclaim the power and autonomy that bureaucracy had denied them. “Antibureaucratic screed” is an apt characterization of many works in this genre, some of
which invoke vaguely Marxist tropes in their critique of bureaucratic employment. The
2
In this respect we follow in the footsteps of Goffman (1959), Hochschild (1983;2012), Nikolas Rose
(1989), Paul du Gay (1992), and of course Foucault (1978; 1979).
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19th century concept of “wage slavery” is invoked, but now to evangelize capitalism
rather than to challenge it. To cling to the standard work arrangement, then (as does one
of the rodents in Spencer Johnson’s parable about organizational change) is to sentence
oneself to economic irrelevance and personal stagnation. The combined effect is to
circulate a pseudo-workerist discourse that induces employees to embrace a critique of
the very bureaucratic structures that had previously sheltered them from precarity.
A second theme in these texts is their emphasis on the active pursuit of personal
self-fulfillment as a life project, a pursuit that is constructed as the surest path toward an
empowered, meaningful and prosperous life. Related here is the genre’s emphasis on the
need to revolutionize one’s way of life, the better to align oneself with contemporary
economic realities. Not surprisingly then, narratives of redemption are common in this
discourse. Authors recount stories in which an unfulfilling career leads inevitably to a
personal crisis of some sort –a heart attack, a nervous breakdown, or a failed marriage,
and sometimes to all three. The resolution of this crisis only becomes possible when the
author embraces a new and agentic, entrepreneurial orientation toward life and work.
This, indeed, is one source of the power this discourse achieves: the authors present their
own life narratives as evidence confirming the very truth they wish to propound.
A third theme essentially unites the first two. Whereas previous thinking about
organizations had often viewed market needs and personal interests as fundamentally
opposed to one another, the key innovation this discourse provides is the notion that such
an opposition no longer obtains. Now, whether owing to the death of the Fordist model of
work organization, the widespread availability of technologies, falling barriers to the
formation of new business start ups, and the currency that entrepreneurial thinking has
achieved, the market makes possible the pursuit of one’s personal freedom and selffulfillment. This is a vital argument, in that here, the marketing of one’s own assets –the
term “human capital” is used with great frequency—is conjured as an essential source of
human agency and empowerment. The notion here is that the self is an asset whose value
must be maximized, now using all of the branding tactics for which large corporations are
infamous. Again, where older versions of managerial rhetoric aimed at the organization,
now the new discourse seems to advise individuals to internalize corporate practices, and
to regard the self as a profit-seeking entity in its own right. Here we see Foucault’s
argument about the relevance of homo economicus in the flesh.
Cummins and I have begun to track the emergence of this emphasis on the need to
“brand” the worker’s self, which initially appeared in the middle and late 1990s, and has
exploded in the years since the dot.com collapse. One of the progenitors of this emphasis
has been Tom Peters, the massively influential managerial writer who co-authored In
Search of Excellence the well-known treatise on organizational culture (Peters and
Waterman 1982). We believe that Peters’s career perfectly tracks the turn in business
rhetoric. After writing In Search of Excellence, which developed a series of case studies
of exemplary corporations, Peters began to abandon organizational analysis as such,
instead writing far more normative and even evangelical works that spoke not to
organizations, but to individual employees. This shift becomes quite marked in Peters’s
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later books (1994, 1999), and is trumpeted in a revealing article that appeared in Fast
Company (Peters 1997). Here, Peters comments on the ubiquity of brand-name
commodities in our everyday lives. But rather than critiquing this fact, he instead advises
us to succumb to the logic of branding, and acknowledge that the secret of economic
success is for individuals to emulate the marketing strategies of successful corporations
and the product brands they maintain. This is the origin of the concept of “me, Inc.,”
which advised individuals to conceive of themselves as the CEOs of their own capitalist
enterprises.
Regardless of age, regardless of position, regardless of the position we
happen to be in, all of us need to understand the importance of branding. We are
CEOs of our own companies: Me, Inc. To be in this business today, our most
important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.
Start right now: As of this moment you’re doing to think of yourself
differently! You’re not an ‘employee’ of General Motors, you’re not a staffer at
General Mills… Forget the Generals! You don’t ‘belong to’ any company for life,
and your chief affiliation isn’t to any particular ‘function’. You’re not defined by
your job title and you’re not confined by your job description. Starting today you
are a brand. (cited in McGee 2005: 134).
This article, which continues to exert influence, provokes ongoing commentary on the
Fast Company website to this day. Two years later, in a prominent article in the Harvard
Business Review, management guru Peter Drucker (1999:1) reinforced this same theme,
arguing that “Companies today aren’t managing their knowledge workers’ careers.
Rather, we must each be our own Chief Executive Officer,” and take responsibility for
managing the profitability of our own human capital. The momentum of this discourse,
we believe, soon became unstoppable.
To track the trajectory of this discourse, we have used a number of digital search
techniques and best-seller lists to identify the nature and salience of popular business
books aimed at a general-interest audience. For example, we used lists of best selling
business books made available through Amazon-com and the New York Times. We used
the database in Google books, searching for texts that appear when we enter
combinations of such keywords as entrepreneurialism, branding, the self, marketing, and
career success. We also used Google’s Ngram platform, which shows the frequency with
which specific keywords appear in the corpus of English language books published over
time. The period in which we are interested is the three-decade period that stretches from
1980 to 2010. We also made an effort to identify the nature of the on-line discussions of
these texts –the “chatter” they provoke—to see how this discourse is received. The
results, however preliminary, are revealing.
Figure 1 uses Ngram to show the frequency with which three keywords –
entrepreneurship, “selling yourself,” and “branding yourself”— were mentioned during
this three-decade period. Interestingly, while the first two keywords are by no means
recent inventions, they clearly enjoy a surge in currency during the late 1980s that
accelerates through the 1990s and thereafter. The concept of “selling yourself,” for
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example, which had been the object of books written as early as the late 1970s, usually by
sales managers, took off during the late 1990s. What seems dramatically new, however,
is the application of corporate “branding” tactics to the individual employee as such.
What Figure 1(c) suggests, in fact, is that mentions of the “brand yourself” keyword went
from a null point in the early 1980s, exploded in frequency during the buoyant 19900s,
and has only increased exponentially since then.
A further way of tracking the movement of this discourse is by using Google
books. Here, we looked for general interest, business-oriented books that combined much
the same keywords –entrepreneurship, self, self-entrepreneurship, selling, marketing,
yourself. Searching through the Google results yielded a total of 137 texts. Figure 2
displays the number of these texts published annually during the 1979-2010 period.
Several points emerge from the results. At the most general level, the data suggest that
there has indeed been a general, though not monotonic, upswing over time in the
appearance of these books. Their publication rates generally increase over time, and
indicate a market that has grown substantially over time. Further, we suggest that three
distinct periods can be observed in these data. The earliest, nascent period began in the
mid-1980s and lasted into the early to mid-1990s, at which point the production of these
texts seemed to trail off for several years. Then, toward the latter 1990s, the production of
entrepreneurial texts entered a second period, during which the genre seemed to be more
fully institutionalized, and the market for these texts more fully established. During this
second period, production rates rose above five books each year, and hit double digits for
the first time (in 1997). The third period arose in the middle of the 2000s, when the
production of these texts reached into double digits in four different years (as opposed to
only once during the second period), and routinely reached above five titles for most of
this period. Although much more systematic analysis is need to substantiate the point, we
contend that there is a lagged effect of economic downturns, which seem to generate
increasing demand for worker-as-entrepreneur texts during post-recession years, when
relatively buoyant economic times lend a measure of plausibility to enterprise discourse
as a means of coping with economic uncertainty.
But it is the nature, and not simply the incidence or frequency of these texts that
commands our attention. An initial sense for the nature of the personal enterprise
discourse can be gleaned from some of the titles of these texts:
·
·
·
·
·
·
You, Inc.: The Art of Selling Yourself (Beckwith and Beckwith, 2006)
Escape from Cubicle Nation: From Corporate Prisoner to Thriving
Entrepreneur (Slim, 2010)
Branding Yourself: How to Look, Sound, and Behave Your Way to
Success (Spillane, 2000)
Self Marketing Power: Branding Yourself as a Business of One (Beals,
2008)
Career Renegade: How to Make a Great Living Doing What you Love
(Fields, 2009)
The 4 Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New
Rich (Ferris, 2009)
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·
·
Career Distinction: Stand out by Building Your Brand (Arruda and
Dixson, 2007)
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Branding Yourself (Carew, 2005)
Two messages immediately emerge here: that there is power to be gained by “branding”
one’s self, and that doing so enables one to regain substantial power over one’s economic
fate . Indeed, readers are invited to assume a posture of defiance that seems to challenge
the traditional economic structures in which wage and salaried employees have been
trapped. These are powerful messages. They invite readers to view labor market
uncertainty as containing the seeds of one’s emancipation, if only one can shed the timeencrusted patterns of dependence on others for one’s livelihood. There is an Orwellian
nature to this discourse, we contend, which in essence declares that Uncertainty is
Freedom, and that Branding Shall Set Your Free.
3. Anatomy of the Discourse
To gain a deeper interpretation of this discourse, we have begun coding these texts using
a three-fold conceptual schema. Partly influenced by Bourdieu’s theoretical triptych of
field, capital, and habitus, we have identified passages in these texts that relate to the
metaphors each uses to portray the overall context in which economic actors are found;
the rituals these texts employ (i.e., the exercises they provide to the reader seeking to reconstruct his or her self); and the practices they suggest as readers seek to learn the new
ways of being these texts propound. Put in colloquial terms, we view these texts as
providing readers with the elements of a “personal make-over kit.” In more formal terms,
they invite the readers to engage in a kind of interpellation that refashions the contours of
the self, re-aligning it with the needs of the new flexible economy, the better to ensure the
employee’s success.
Our application of this conceptual schema is ongoing, yet several points can be set
out even at this preliminary stage. First, a rich array of metaphors is used to represent the
economic playing field in which actors must assert themselves (see McGee 2005: 51-54).
Typical are such tropes as competitive sports, travel (e.g., the career as a spiritual
journey), warfare, show business, and political revolution. One recent text –Cardinale’s
(2011) The 9-5 Cure—even likens the bureaucratic form of employment to an addiction,
viewing the standard work arrangement as an unhealthy dependence that requires
therapeutic recruitment (hence, the need for the book). The overarching metaphor that
unites this entire genre, of course, is the notion that the very marketing strategies that
have been used for commercial products –the work of brand management—can and must
be applied to the reader’s own self. A typical example (from Brand Yourself: How to
Create an Identity for a Brilliant Career) is especially revealing for its comingling of
human and non-human attributes:
Most products derive the basis for their brand statement from their “skills,” or
what they do best. For instance, Head and Shoulders shampoo’s main “skill” is
fighting dandruff. Obviously it has other properties, such as cleaning the hair and
making it manageable. But Head and Shoulders’ primary attribute, the reason why
people purchase it, is its ability to fight dandruff. During the next few sessions
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[ritual exercises in self-branding], we’re going to explore all of your skill sets and
determine which are your most powerful (Andrusia and Haskins, 2009:35-36,
emphasis added).
That this is not a matter of mere packaging, however, is made at various points in the
literature. In You, Inc.: The Art of Selling Yourself, the authors insist that a full
immersion of the self is necessary if personal brand management is to succeed.
Yes, you sell your skills in this life. You sell what you know and can do. If
by using your skills you are able to help enough people, you will become secure
and may become rich.
Beyond that, however, the most critical thing you sell is literally yourself,
your being. People “buy” optimists because they enjoy their company. They
“buy” people with integrity because people with integrity do what they say they
will. Like Maytag washing machines, people with integrity can be relied upon
(Beckwith and Beckwith, 2007: 7, emphasis in original).
Construing one’s inner being as a commodity, much like a brand-name shampoo or
washing machine, does not come naturally. For this reason, virtually every text in this
genre begins by acknowledging the need for the reader to embrace the value of branding
within one’s personal life. These texts provide a wide array of ritual exercises that
promise to equip the reader with the skills needed to reconstruct his or her self. Typical
are homespun personality tests (which enable readers to score their personal attributes,
talents, and aspirations), vocabulary lists (which invite readers to circle the adjectives that
most excite or describe them), and Strength-Weakness-Opportunity- and Threat (SWOT)
analyses (which are presented as diagnostic tools). Another ritual that is commonly found
in this genre is the “tombstone inscription” exercise, in which the reader is directed to
construct his or her own eulogy, or to indicate what will be inscribed on one’s tombstone,
the better to provoke the reader to reconsider the legacy one’s life will produce (McGee
2005: 148-51). Perhaps the most revealing rituals of all, however, are the exercises that
carefully lead readers through the work of crafting a Personal Branding Statements (PBS)
–short, engaging descriptions of one’s skills and creative dispositions, meant to signal his
or her distinctive features and the value they create. Interestingly, the text by Andrusia
and Haskins (2009: 69) provides a dozen exercises (“sessions,” much like therapy) in
which the reader must submit his or her PBS to in-person focus-group testing, much as
marketing departments commonly do. The implicitly coercive, quasi-therapeutic nature
of this ritual is evident in the following point (which is repeatedly evident throughout this
text):
So…do your focus group members agree with your skills and the proofs
provided? Are they of the same mind regarding your order of relative skill
strengths? Most important of all, are there other skills they would attribute to you
that you yourself have missed?... By going through this process, which may be
painful at times, you will arrive at the other end with a thorough knowledge of
wshat your strengths –and weaknesses—are, and you will be in a much better
position to follow the career path of your dreams.
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0
An especially important feature of these rituals is the manner in which they represent the
changes they inspire. That is, these rituals typically construe their intended results not so
much as the imposition of change from outside, but rather as acts through which readers
can discover, or unearth, the “essential” self that has been lying dormant all this time, its
talents hidden by the demands of bureaucratic organizations. This, we believe, is the key
function of these rituals: that of sustaining the illusion of the self-directed, autonomous,
and empowered self, even as it surrenders to the business discourse that reconstitutes it.
All this requires work, it would seem, far beyond the ritual exercises these texts
provide. It requires constant practice. Here, these popular business texts take particular
care to suggest highly detailed practices and forms of conduct the reader is advised to
apply, the better to master the performative skills that successful self-branding demands.
Thus in You, Inc., Beckwith and Beckwith (2006: 102) advise the reader to adopt a
particular practice when interacting with family members, clients, and colleagues alike:
When you listen to someone, pause a full second before replying. It signals that
you have listened. If you start speaking immediately, you create a perception that
you have been waiting for the person to stop so you could get to the important
part: your words, your thoughts.
This practice is said to present oneself as a thoughtful, responsive partner in social
interaction, the better to appear authentically concerned with the well-being of the other.
Lustberg (2002) takes this further, and invites the reader to scrutinize the facial gestures
s/he unknowingly performs, now using a mirror as a prop. In a section titled “Practice,”
the author distinguishes between the “closed” and “open” face (the latter is viewed as
signaling a willingness to engage the thoughts and feelings of the other):
1. Try using your mirror. Frown at yourself and count to five aloud. See how
menacing and awful you appear to an audience when you close your face.
2. Now neutralize your face. Don’t move anything but your lips and don’t move
them very much. Count to five aloud again and see how easy it will be to put
an audience to sleep or make them wish they were somewhere else.
3. Next open your face. Move your brows up. Count aloud to five again. Notice
the change (2002: 44, 52, bold text in the original)
The “open” face is intended to communicate warmth, acceptance, and a visceral concern
for the interests of the other. As such, it constitutes one of “the strongest tools anyone can
use to convince someone else. To be liked. To win.” Lustberg’s text also uses phonetic
diagrams and photographs to train the reader to use his or her voice, facial gestures, and
bodily movements.
Get the brows up. Gesture –illustrate with a hand—on the emphasis words. Make
it meaningful by making it important. The pitch and rate should follow.
Say those sentences again [with the desired practices]. It makes a huge
difference, doesn’t it? When you put it all together, it makes communication
nothing less than a performing art. Not acting, mind you, but presenting yourself
in a dynamic, interesting, attention-grabbing way.
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When the mind, face, body and voice are working together for the benefit
of the audience, the end result is almost always likeability, and likability wins
(Lustberg 2002: 52, bold text in the original).
Mastering these practices, then, enables one to carry off the performances that underpin
the distinctive brand one needs to project if one is to succeed in the labor market.
Viewed as a whole, then, this discourse provides a powerful symbolic system that uses an
array of metaphors that invite readers to re-imagine their social worlds as little more than
a “brand community” (Arrudat and Dixson 2007: 64), and to view social interactions
within that community as a series of market transactions that must be managed to
maximum effect. The discourse provides an endless supply of rituals that serve both as
diagnostic tools and as behavioral grids that enable the reader to reconstitute his or her
self, now in keeping with the needs of the new economy. And it provides a series of
prescribed practices, the better to ensure that one’s performances can carry off the act. As
McGee (2005: 174) observes: “Maintaining the fiction of the autonomous self, a
laborious fiction that is ultimately unsustainable, has become hard work.”
4. Discussion
Three questions emerge at this point in our analysis. One concerns the question of human
agency. The second fastens on the historic novelty of this discourse. And the third relates
to the effects or consequences that flow from the proliferation of this discourse. We
address these points in turn.
Agency.—In concerning ourselves with the nature of the discourse, we have yet
to address the ways in which readers (and those otherwise exposed to this discourse)
respond to its symbolic representations. Can we assume that readers are passive
recipients of the messages these texts contain? Are they mere cultural dopes, who
passively surrender themselves to the discourse they are told to embrace? This is a
complex question, and one that we have sought to address empirically, through analysis
of the on-line chatter these texts have provoked on various blogs and discussion websites.
Through such analysis, we hope to identify the key lessons that readers imbibe, and the
critical lenses they bring to bear on these texts (and one another’s commentary). Though
our analysis here is preliminary, we can say that we have found few manifestations of
critical distance between these readers and the texts.3 The reason, we suspect, is twofold,
and combines conditions that are both external and internal to the discourse hand. With
respect to external conditions, we believe that at least some of the power of this discourse
stems from its ability to capitalize on the long-standing power of liberal-bourgeois culture
in the United States. This culture, which has celebrated the value of individualism for
centuries, has powerfully masked the structural conditions that produce individuals, of
course, in ways that make collective solutions that much more difficult to grasp. Taken to
its extreme, this cultural legacy engenders a broad historical process that Beck and
Bauman have both dubbed “individualization,” which invites actors to view their
3
A large proportion of the comments readers post are filled with generalized adulation. Some comments
pick out specific lessons or tips (fastening on particular practices the authors suggest). A significant
proportion of these comments stems from teachers, scientists, managers, and even students, who speak to
the value they find in the discourse and the uses they have found for it during the course of their everyday
lives.
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personal lives as life “projects” (as if the Enlightenment notion of human perfection had
now been de-collectivized, and fastened on the perfection of isolated individual).4 In this
context, the decline of organizational patronage and the rise of economic precarity have
left individuals ever-more susceptible to marketing campaigns that promise to provide the
requisite levels of product enhancement, equipping powerless individuals to distinguish
themselves in an increasingly uncertain and fiercely competitive marketplace.
Beyond these external facts lie the internal features of the discourse itself. For all
its emphasis on voluntarism, individual freedom and autonomy, what is perhaps most
striking about this discourse is the starkly coercive or imperative logic on which its
argument depends. Certainly, readers encounter arguments that imply that they have little
choice but to embrace the commercial ethos and apply it to their innermost selves.
Andrusia and Haskins (2009) make a point that is a commonplace in this literature:
A product’s brand position is how people think about a product or service. Your
brand position will be how people think about you! As we’ve stated before, if you
don’t decide how you want your brand to be positioned, others will do if for you:
the industry you are in, your boss, your friends, and to a large extent, your
enemies. Needless to say, it is better to position yourself rather than have others
do it for you –which you obviously understand, or you wouldn’t be reading this
book.
This passage is doubly coercive: First, because it suggests that readers have little choice:
they must either brand themselves, or be branded by their competitors. And second,
because it declares that even those who might harbor ambivalence or uncertainty about
the discourse have already implicitly agreed to it, whether they realize it yet or not.
An even more paradigmatic expression of this imperative logic can be found in
Timothy Ferriss The Four-Hour Work (2007), whose opening contains a Question and
Answer assignment aimed at those who might be reluctant to embrace entrepreneurial
practices in toto. As can be seen from the following, abbreviated version given below,
this assignment begins (in items 1 through 4) by asking readers to compile a relatively
even-handed assessment of the risks and benefits that might accompany their exit from
bureaucratic employment. But it ends (in items 5 through 7) with a far more a directive
effort (better: a siren-like call) aimed at inducing the reader to embrace the discourse of
personal enterprise in its entirety:
1. Define your nightmare, the absolute worst that could happen if you did what
you are considering [break free of employee status]. What doubt, fears, and
“what ifs” pop up as you consider the big changes you can –or need—to
make? Envision them in painstaking detail.
2. What steps could you take to repair the damage or get things back on the
upswing, even if temporarily?
4 “What used to be considered a job to be performed by human reason seen as the collective endowment
and property of the human species has been fragmented (‘individualized’), assigned to individual guts and
stamina, and left to individuals’ management and individually administered resources” (Bauman, 2000:
29).
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3. What are the outcomes or benefits, both temporary and permanent, of more
probable scenarios?
4. If you were fired from your job today, what would you do to get things under
financial control?
5. What are you putting off out of fear?
6. What is it costing you –financially, emotionally, and physically— to postpone
action?... If you don’t pursue those things that excite you, where will you be in
one year, five years, and ten years? How will you feel having allowed
circumstance to impose itself upon you and having allowed ten more years of
your finite life to pass doing what you know will not fulfill you?
7. What are you waiting for?
The author provides his own answer to the last question, in effect accusing non-compliant
readers of economic cowardice (“You’re afraid, just like the rest of the world”), and by
prodding readers to “develop the most important habit of those who excel and enjoy
doing so: action” (Ferriss, 2007: 46-47, emphasis added).
Authors in this genre have developed a host of tactics with which to address the
difficulties that readers are wont to encounter as they seek to internalize the discourse. A
good example is provided by Andrusia and Haskins (2009), who tell the story of a client
who had trouble constructing a convincing Personal Brand Statement.
We knew what the problem was at once. Your PBS is not a pretty accessory,
some auxiliary part of your life. If you don’t make your branding statement part
of you, it is not going to work. It should be considered a living breathing
document that is meant to be with you constantly –your professional lungs, if you
like. Pin it to your mirror and read is as an affirmation every morning. Tuck it into
your purse or wallet and pull it out to read several times during the day.
Ultimately, you should become so familiar with your statement that you
can rattle it off anytime, anywhere. Make it part of your conscious and
subconscious mind; make it part of you! Do this, and we promise success through
branding will be yours.
In a context marked by the multiplication of of economic anxieties, a weakening of civil
society and its social ties, and by the sharpening of labor market competition, such
implicitly coercive discourse can, we suggest, provide some sense of reassurance for
individual actors seeking to navigate increasingly troubled waters. Those directly
exposed to this discourse --and perhaps those indirectly exposed, via media coverage,
vocational counselors, and other institutional apparatuses—may “learn to labor” in ways
that more closely resemble the experience of Willis’s Ear’oles rather than of the Lads.
Historic Novelty.—Reinhard Bendix (1956) long ago fastened on the importance
of individualism as a key lever of social change during the late 18th century, as the
propertied classes sought to break free of the paternalistic bonds that had obliged them to
provide for the members of the subordinate classes. The literature that arose at that time
(with Samuel Smiles as the most well-known progenitor) celebrated the freedom and
mobility that individuals increasingly enjoyed within the labor markets during the age of
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industrial capitalism. The effect of this shift moved responsibility for subsistence more
fully downward in the social structure, from the privileged classes to the members of the
working class qua individuals. This theme found its way across the Atlantic, most
famously in the Horatio Alger stories, in which penniless workers found ways to rise
dramatically upward, by dint of hard work and individual determination. In what sense,
then, is the discourse of enterprise, free agency, and the marketing of one’s self
qualitatively distinct?
We believe the answer to this question is partly suggested in the work of
Foucauldian scholars who emphasize the rise of “responsibilization” (du Gay 1996;
Alvesson and Wilmott 2002; Fenwick 2002). The notion here is (which is related to the
arguments of Bauman, as noted above) is that the new discourse represents a profound
deepening of the obligations imposed on individual actors. It is no longer simply a matter
of competing in the labor market and providing for one’s self and family. Now,
employees are ethically obliged to maximize the value of their individual talents, to
internalizing the logic corporate authority, and to adopt a relation to their selves that
mirrors that between the firm and its employees. The point is especially well put by
McGee, who speaks of a broad historic movement from the era of the “self-made man”
(which captures the Smiles-Alger representations) to that of the “belabored self.” The
latter construct presupposes that employees will engage in the ongoing work of selfenhancement, ingesting precisely the kind of self-help books this discourse invites them
to consume. It is for this reason, we believe, that unpaid internships, voluntary work, and
resume-building activities generally have so rapidly proliferated. In effect, the self-made
worker must redouble her effort to “make” herself; it this sense, the discourse essentially
represents a “make-over culture,” in which the process of “self-making” is a neverending obligation.
Effects.—A third and final question here concerns the consequences that flow
from the proliferation of this discourse. We see these as twofold. First, the fact that so
prevalent and entrepreneurial discourse has spread through the circuits of business-related
thinking means that a new form of “flexible subjectivity” has begun to become
hegemonic within the corporate sector of the economy. To be sure, heterodox ways of
being yet exist, and may even emerge in response to the new identity norms. Yet the
orthodox ways of being are likely to impose stricter, more demanding sets of obligations
on employees, who are increasingly expected to cope with economic uncertainty, shifting
job expectations, and new forms of employment –and to do so willingly. There is
evidence that this is already happening; see, for example Smith (2010), who critically
reviews the literature on the emerging demands brought to bear on workers entering the
labor market, finding that the would-be workers are increasingly expected to signal their
“employability,” by engaging in activities that demonstrate their willingness to
internalize the new, entrepreneurial norms. The danger is that as individual employees are
pressured to internalize key principles of corporate organization, and significant sectors
of the workforce is brought to regard the self as a brand to be managed, the social bases
of an oppositional consciousness grow increasingly narrow.
A second, related point is that the discourse of personal enterprise provides a
unifying ideological ensemble that links the members of a new class of freelancers,
managerial employees, contractors, small business owners, knowledge workers, and
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consultants (Osnowitz, 2009), whose ready availability helps large corporations to
institutionalize non-standard forms of employment. Although some analysts (Kalleberg
2011) have viewed this development as leading toward a polarized workforce, which may
be partly true, we suspect that the contours of this process are such as to engender a large
penumbra of would-be professionals who are eager to find a place at the table, and thus
constrained to embrace the new identity norms. By idealizing precarious employment,
construing it as opening up paths that eventually lead to economic freedom and
autonomy, the discourse of personal enterprise produces a “hoop dreams” effect in which
occupational aspirations far outstrip real opportunities, providing a powerful motive
force, enabling employers to engage the productive powers of their workforce more fully
than would otherwise be the case.
These are sobering considerations, to be sure, but ones that rest on a highly
speculative foundation. And indeed, many questions arise at this juncture that await
empirical research. Perhaps the most important question here is whether and where
alternative cultural forms and identities might be found–unmanaged spaces, immanent
within the current neo-liberal regime— that might provide the basis for dissent, or for deindividualized approaches toward economic life. How might external structural
developments, or tensions internal to entrepreneurial discourse, begin to reduce the
potency of this discourse? Which class fractions, occupational sectors, and demographic
groups seem most (and least) susceptible to its siren song? Does the spread of social
entrepreneurialism represent a dissenting form of this discourse, or an example of its
metasasis into non-profit realms that had been free from its influence? Does long term
unemployment among youth render the discourse of enterprise less plausible –or instead,
more plausible. Does the currency of entrepreneurial discourse block the emergence on
U.S. shorts of movements like those of the self-styled “precariat,” which exploded across
dozens of European cities during the first decade of this century (Vallas 2012, ch. 3).
These questions await the verdict of both careful empirical research, and the flow of
historical events.
5. Conclusion
I began this talk with three themes in mind. I suggested that understanding the exercise of
power within organizations will require that we borrow an insight from institutionalist
thinking, and broader our purview to include normative influences established far beyond
the organization’s walls. I drew attention to the dearth of studies that examine popular
representations of work and authority, as are found in the workplaces found in television,
magazines, movies, and the popular business press. (In a sense, a corollary here is that we
ought not to use management theory as an explanans, but as an explanandum.) Finally, I
argued in favor of a fuller and more sophisticated conception of the relation between
work and the self. For decades now, analysts have assumed that work provides the
crucible of subjective experience. There is of course a certain, partial truth to this point.
Yet if taken too far, this assumption boxes us in. It deprives us of the ability to grasp
broader influences that can gain purchase on employees’ selves, and in this way enable
employers to appropriate aspects of the personal domain, aligning these in ways that
correspond more fully with corporate needs. This is of course an old theme, and one that
harkens back to Whyte’s Organization Man. The difference, it says here, is that
contemporary managerial discourse has grown more subtle and pernicious. It no longer
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works by repressing or containing the employee’s individuality. Instead, it works
precisely by seeming to release the employee’s distinctive talents –in short, by adopting a
more affirmative guise than in the past. If so, then we have an urgent warrant indeed to
scrutinize the cultural contexts that shape employee subjectivity, to determine where the
limits of enterprise discourse might be found.
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Figure 1: N Gram graphs showing the prevalence of enterprise discourse in the corpus of
English-language books, 1980-2008.
______________________________________________________________________
a. Key phrase: Entrepreneurship
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b. Key Phrase: Brand Yourself
c. Key Phrase: Selling Yourself
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Fig. 2.
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