personal branding and the popular business press: enterprise culture in an era of precarity

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Personal Branding and Identity Norms in the Popular Business Press: Enterprise Culture in an Age of Precarity

Steven P. VallasNortheastern University, USA

Emily R. CumminsNortheastern University, USA

AbstractThe theory of enterprise culture (du Gay, 1996) has provoked one of the more enduring strands of research on organizations and identities. Yet, after a decade and half of debate, the validity of this theory remains mired in ambiguity. In this article we revisit the theory of enterprise culture by exploring shifts in the popular business press and employee responses to them, in an effort to track the identity norms that have impinged on job seekers over time. Scrutinizing career-advice texts published between 1980 and 2010, we do indeed find partial support for the theory of enterprise culture, as the most popular renderings of work and employment have exhibited a marked yet complex turn toward entrepreneurial rhetoric. Interviews with 53 employees and job seekers suggest that a discourse of personal branding is indeed pervasive, and is often uncritically incorporated into the conceptions that job seekers bring to bear on their career horizons. Yet we also find that enterprise discourse has evolved beyond the notion of the “sovereign consumer” on which enterprise theory was initially based. Employees today are advised not merely to be responsive to the wants of customers; now, they must actively shape those wants, emulating corporate marketing techniques in an effort to establish the value of their own personal brands. Homo economicus is alive and well but has elided existing representations.

Keywordscorporate culture, cultural studies, discursive analysis, employment relationships, entrepreneurship, power and domination, sociology of work

Corresponding author:Steven P. Vallas, Northeastern University, 360 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA 02115, USA. Email: [email protected]

563741OSS0010.1177/0170840614563741Organization StudiesVallas and Cumminsresearch-article2015

Article

2 Organization Studies

… the stake in all neo-liberal analyses is the replacement every time of homo economicus as a partner of exchange with a homo economicus as entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital,

being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings.

Michel Foucault (1978/2007)

I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man!

Jay-Z (2005)

IntroductionIn recent years, sociologists of work have paid a great deal of attention to the link between organizational control and employee identity (Alvesson, 2010; Alvesson & Willmott, 2002; Smith, 2010; Thornborrow & Brown, 2009). One of the more enduring strands of such thinking has been the argument that in an era of post-Fordism, organizations have promulgated a “culture of enterprise,” which induces employees to adopt a consumer-oriented outlook toward their job duties and themselves (du Gay, 1996; du Gay & Salaman, 1992; Rose, 1990). Advocates of this perspective speak of the rise of new forms of worker identity—“enterprising selves” or “flexible subjectivities”—that are aligned with the needs of the neo-liberal economy. These arguments derive much of their power from such major figures as Foucault (1978, 1979, 2007), Bauman (2000), Beck (1992), Giddens (1991), and Sennett (1999). Yet, however impressive its intellectual lineage, the theory of enterprise culture has been subjected to seemingly devastating lines of critique. Some critics have alleged that enterprise theory has adopted an unduly deterministic view of worker subjectivity, in which “the language of the market becomes the only vocabulary” (Bolton & Houlihan, 2005, p. 686; Fournier & Grey, 1999). Others have chided the theory for its one-sided conception of workplace subcultures, some of which can block or “repress” enterprise discourse (McCabe, 2008), lending it a decidedly non-managerial cast (Fenwick, 2002). Still other critics have pointed to the discursive conflicts and complexities that enterprise culture can provoke, giving work a contested character that defies any monolithic account (Doolin 2002; Knights & McCabe, 2003; Mangan, 2009). The result, after nearly two decades of claims and counter-claims, has thus followed a familiar arc: a provocative theory is advanced, submitted to empirical critique, and then challenged or even refuted as overly generalized, leaving the field in an uncertain state. Ironically, at a point in which neo-liberalism has seemed ever more tenacious, the controversy over enterprise culture seems poised to collapse beneath its own weight.

In this article we revisit the debate over enterprise culture and employee identity, adopting a standpoint that differs from previous studies in at least three important respects. First, we seek to advance beyond the static perspective that has dominated the empirical literature (for exceptions, see Knights & McCabe, 2003; McCabe, 2008) and made it difficult to identify any shifts that enterprise discourse may have exhibited over time (Fournier & Grey, 1999, p. 120). Second, we seek to reconnect the debate to the context in which many employees are embedded—that of increasing precarity—which arguably leaves workers increasingly susceptible to market imperatives (see Collinson, 2003; Smith, 2010). Third, we extend our purview outward, encompassing culturally prevalent messages about the meaning of work and employment that are lodged within the popular culture writ large. Arguing that the power of enterprise culture cannot be assessed solely through reference to the organizational terrain, we scrutinize the popular business press in search of shifts in the normative logic that surrounds employees. The question we pose is whether, and in what respects, the theory of enterprising selves adequately captures the discursive practices and identity norms that popular culture brings to bear on employees today.

Vallas and Cummins 3

Proceeding in this way, we do find evidence of a marked entrepreneurial turn in the public meaning of work and employment in ways that enterprise theory expects. Beginning in the late 1980s and proceeding through the new millennium, a powerful discourse has emerged that has increasingly brought an entrepreneurial logic to bear on job seekers, job changers, and the pre-cariously employed. At the same time, we find that the precise nature of this discourse has evolved well beyond enterprise theory’s initial formulation. Where once it might suffice to emphasize the blurred boundary between production and consumption, or to speak of an infusion of consumer-based norms into the work organization—developments that led du Gay to speak of the rise of the “sovereign consumer”—contemporary discourse has left these traits behind. Employees are no longer merely advised to embrace the logic of the consumer market, and thus passively to anticipate consumer wants. Now, they are exhorted to utilize the tools of corporate marketing campaigns, emulating the practices of the firm as a means of shaping the market for their own skills and dispositions. This shift is reflected with special clarity in the emerging discourse of “personal branding,” which invites employees to reconceive themselves as capitalist firms in their own right, establishing their own personal “brand” as a means of creating and managing demand for their own services. Although this discourse is by no means a totalizing influence, its emphasis on empowerment—a kind of market voluntarism—lends it an especially seductive force.

The study unfolds as follows. First, the paper begins by subjecting the theory of enterprise culture to critical analysis, briefly pointing out weaknesses in previous research. Second, it presents an analysis of English language texts published in the popular business genre during the years 1980–2010, focusing on the discursive trends that have surfaced during this period. In effect, we contend that the popular business genre now functions as a latter-day equivalent of the etiquette texts Norbert Elias used in his classic analysis of the civilizing process that gripped 16th century Europe (see Elias, 1939; Bennett, 1992). The third section develops a discourse analysis of one particular strand in this literature, focusing on the metaphorical constructs, symbolic exer-cises, and behavioral scripts these texts contain. In the fourth section, the paper presents findings from 53 interviews with white collar job seekers and employment counselors, conducted to understand how workers respond to the messages contained in these texts. Finally, the paper closes by outlining the implications of our study for the theory of enterprise culture, offering some speculative comments on the future prevalence of the “personal branding” discourse and the pro-motional culture it represents.

The Enterprising Self: Neo-Liberal Subjectivity as an Emerging Norm?In recent years, analysts of the labor process have placed increasing emphasis on the significance of worker subjectivity (Grey, 1994; Knights & Willmott, 1989; Leidner, 2006). This concern is not entirely new; the early Marx was of course attentive to the lived experience of capitalist production, and later, the Chicago School of sociology viewed the work/identity link as a “fateful” one (Hughes, 1951/1971). More recently, arguments about the commercialization of the self and the growing salience of emotional labor (Bolton & Boyd, 2003; Hochschild, 1983) have provoked much discussion (Vallas, 2012, ch. 1). Underlying these strands of thinking is an assumption, often inherited from classical Marxism, concerning the primacy of production in the forging of human subjectivity. As a consequence, scholars have often viewed employee identity as an outcome of the work situation, with little attention to the independent role that identity norms might play in the reproduction of the employment relation itself.


Much of this has changed in recent years, as an infusion of new theoretical perspectives has provided an impetus to trace the complex linkages that exist among power, organizations, and employee identity (see especially Alvesson & Willmott, 2002). Key has been the widening influence accorded Foucault’s theory of governmentality (Foucault, 2007, 2010; Burchell, 1996; Lemke, 2001; McNay, 2009; Rose, 1990; Vallas & Hill, 2012). As is well known, Foucault had long been concerned with the historical linkages among power, knowledge, and human subjectivity (Foucault, 1979, 1988). Toward the latter stages of his life, however, Foucault began to approach these linkages from a new and more comprehensive vantage point, eventuating in his widely influential theory of governmentality.

Foucault’s historical studies indicated that as far back as the ancient Greeks, the notion of governance had been used very broadly: one spoke of governance not only with respect to the polis; one also governed one’s estate, one’s family, one’s appetites, and even one’s self. Foucault argues that initially, the rise of the Western nation-state led rulers to model their power on the governance of the family. Here, in what Foucault termed “pastoral” power, the sovereign sought to establish and maintain his rule using categories akin to the shepherd looking over his flock. As this model proved insufficient to cope with the rise of modernity, the sovereign was compelled to invoke more highly rationalized categories, often drawing on the nascent human sciences, thus spawning a more formidable model of socio-political rule. Thus “governmentality” transcends pastoral power, enabling the state not only to control a given terrain, but also to institutionalize a normative grid that is capable of exercising control over whole populations.

Several changes are notable with this shift. First, the family no longer provides a model of government but rather its instrument. Institutionalized relationships begin to serve as technologies of social control, with the state orchestrating norms from above. This presses the exercise of power down into the “capillary levels” of the social body. Second, a more rational form of control takes shape that must concern itself with the well-being of whole populations, using statistical measures of public health, fertility, mortality, longevity, criminality, productivity, and conditions of existence more generally. Third, as the human sciences are pressed into the service of the state, economics wields effects that are distinctive, in that it erects powerful limits on the exercise of state power, in effect cordoning off the economy from direct state control. The state remains critically important, but it rules indirectly—in Miller and Rose’s 2008 phrase, “government from a distance”—in ways that both support and utilize capitalist institutions. Fourth, Foucault stresses the growing importance of neo-liberal thinking during the latter half of the 20th century, decades before its effects became apparent. Tracing both Austrian and American versions of this doctrine, Foucault shows how “entrepreneurial” discourses began to gain currency within the social world, as the image of homo economicus grew ever more commonplace, often with the encouragement of the state itself. Foucault’s argument, in sum, is that we live in an era in which power has been “governmentalized”—that is, invisibly shaped by state-orchestrated discourses that define the coordinates of civil society in ways that correspond to the principles of neo-liberalism.

Three broad themes that emerge from this theory seem especially crucial here. The first is that governmental power relies significantly on what Foucault calls “technologies of the self”—structural apparatuses and discursive practices that conjure particular forms of subjectivity, as specific historical periods require. A second theme has been Foucault’s insistence that power has changed its apparent logic. Rather than operating negatively, through subtraction—that is, through threat of punishment or repression—power now exhibits a positive or affirmative guise: it rules by seeming to multiply the opportunities or choices that individual actors routinely enjoy. As Foucault writes, power is increasingly “organized around the management of life rather than the menace of death” (1978, p. 147). A third theme concerns Foucault’s emphasis on the importance of neo-liberal discourse, which increasingly shapes human populations in accordance with the notion of homo


economicus. The result transforms civil society, in that citizens are constituted as individuals whose identities must be defined in and through the marketplace, whose influence comes to pervade all social domains. Indeed, by molding subjectivities, governmental power does not merely produce subjects; in addition, it produces self-producing subjects—individuals who take responsibility for working on themselves, for enhancing their value, fitness, and desirability. In this way autonomy becomes not the limit but the instrument of power in an era of neo-liberal governmentality (Burchell, 1996; Fournier & Grey, 1999; Rose, 1990).

These broad themes found particular resonance in the wake of Thatcherism in Great Britain, eventually giving rise to a theory of “enterprise culture” (du Gay, 1993, 1996; du Gay & Salaman, 1992; Rose, 1990). Following Foucault, du Gay contends that the exercise of organizational power and control now operates by institutionalizing discourses and practices that gain purchase on the employee identity (see also Alvesson & Willmott, 2002). Du Gay argues that “forms of power ‘work’ by constructing and maintaining the forms of subjectivity most appropriate to a given type of social practice/governmental rationality” (1996, p. 54). Driving this trend, according to du Gay, is a blurring of the boundaries between previously distinct institutional domains such as production and consumption, bureaucracies and markets, or the economy and culture writ large. In a sense, he sees an implosion of market forces into bureaucratic organizations, thus uprooting the provisions that had once sheltered employees from market uncertainty. Surrounded by such developments, employees feel compelled to remake themselves in ways that willingly embrace the demands of the marketplace. A fundamental corollary is the displacement of the producer by the “sovereign consumer,” a disembodied presence that haunts the internal contours of the capitalist enterprise. The result requires managers and employees to re-imagine their work situations as sites for ongoing commercial transactions, while adopting new, more flexible and “responsibilized” conceptions of themselves as well.

Though du Gay’s empirical analysis centers on two firms within the retail sector, his argument is pitched in much broader terms. He argues that commodity relations and the seductive ethos of consumption have insinuated themselves into virtually all institutional domains, but especially within interactive service occupations (Leidner, 1993). As he writes of Great Britain: “from the hospital to the railway station, from the classroom to the museum, the nation finds itself translated. ‘Patients,’ ‘parents,’ passengers,’ and ‘pupils’ are reimagined as ‘customers’” (du Gay & Salaman, 1992, p. 622). Further, “the character of the customer has invaded the internal world of the service organization, providing the rationale for the cultural reconstruction of work-based subjectivity” (du Gay, 1996, p. 79). And as organizations select, train, evaluate, and discipline employees to embrace market demands, the meaning of market participation is itself redefined: no longer a harsh reality that must somehow be accommodated, it now becomes an arena in which one can and should find fulfillment and personal development. Just as consumers view the marketplace as a sphere in which they can define, enhance, and “add value” to themselves, so too are employees induced to re-imagine their productive activity in much the same self-actualizing, “continuously improving” light. “Paid work and consumption are just different playing grounds for the same activity; that is, different terrains upon which the enterprising self seeks to master, better, and fulfill itself” (du Gay, 1996, p. 65).

Du Gay makes much of the fact that many of the work reforms of the 1990s—TQM, Just- in-Time systems, lean systems, and corporate re-engineering—actively translated internal organi-zational life into the language of customers and suppliers, thus ensuring greater accountability across each firm’s departments and divisions. Yet more is involved than simply a discursive shift. In du Gay’s view, a host of structural changes have also gripped the enterprising organi-zation—for example, the advent of special project teams, peer review systems of skill and evalu-ation, decentralized budgeting systems that heighten the financial accountability of each


subunit—all of which require employees to invest themselves fully in the effort to meet customer demands (Clegg & Baumeler, 2010). In these ways organizations increasingly cultivate employees who become “enterprising subjects,” actors who are “driven by the desire to optimize the worth of his or her own existence” (du Gay, 1996, p. 181; see also Casey, 1995; Alvesson, 2010; Alvesson & Willmott, 2002). Though du Gay recognizes variation in the response to enterprise culture, he also makes clear his belief that the entrepreneurial turn represents a qualitative shift in the nature of both organizations and the subjectivities they promote. As he puts it, now “the character of the entrepreneur can no longer be seen as just one among a plurality of ethical personalities but must rather be seen as assuming an ontological priority” (1996, p. 181, emphasis in original).

In the nearly two decades that have unfolded since the appearance of this theory, critics have raised a welter of theoretical objections. Most common is the allegation of an undue determinism in the theory, which too easily embraces a “totalizing” view of enterprise, as if the latter were an irresistible force that (in du Gay’s own words) “brooks no opposition” and “invades” the interiors of both organizations and employee identities (Bolton & Houlihan, 2005; Fournier & Grey, 1999; Sturdy & Wright, 2008). The problem, in the view of Sturdy and Wright (2008), is that enterprise theory only ever presents employees as passive “recipients” of enterprise discourse, this in spite of its critique of the rhetoric of empowerment. Expressed in the terms introduced by Alvesson and Willmott (2002), enterprise theory confuses efforts at “identity regulation” with the “identity work” in which employees actually engage, leading to a distorted view of employee “self-identity” (the eventual outcome of such trends).

Equally important has been the theory’s reliance on managerial texts (which presumably reify organizational prescriptions), and the simplistic opposition the theory constructs between bureaucracy and enterprise (Fournier & Grey, 1999). As Courpasson (2000) shows, tendencies toward the formalization and standardization of organizational control—the traditional trappings of bureaucratic domination—are by no means foreign to the new forms of work organization. Thus the bureaucracy/enterprise binary on which du Gay frequently relies may obscure rather more than it reveals.

Empirical inquiries too have provoked any number of concerns. Studies of health care settings, credit unions, professional consulting firms, media industries, banks, call centers, immigrant entrepreneurs, and law firms have now extended the literature well beyond du Gay’s initial concern for the retail sector (Bolton & Houlihan, 2005; Brown & Lewis, 2011; Doolin, 2002; Essers & Benschop, 2007; Knights & McCabe, 2003; Kuhn, 2006; Mangan, 2009; McCabe, 2008; Storey, Salaman, & Platman, 2005; Sturdy & Wright, 2008). Yet, in spite of these empirical applications, no clear verdict has yet arrived. In general, these studies do repeatedly document growing pressures to shed the trappings of Fordist structures and routines – but they also identify the capacity of employees to resist, challenge, and at times even to appropriate the notion of enterprise. Thus McCabe’s 2008 study of back office clerks at a large bank finds the growing presence of a “productive” discourse (akin to enterprise). Yet Fordist discourses have remained highly influential, in effect serving to “repress” such enterprising norms. Although Doolin’s 2002 study of a New Zealand hospital found much evidence of a profit- and revenue-oriented set of practices flooding into this health care site, responses to this trend were complex. Some clinicians did embrace the turn toward enterprise, but other medical providers drew on a long-standing discourse of professional autonomy and patient care to challenge the discourse. Still other providers accepted the new discourse but in highly nuanced ways—that is, they embraced enterprise in private clinics but rejected it in public ones. A similarly complex pattern emerged in Mangan’s 2009 study of credit unions faced with commercial pressures. Here again, rival discourses were found: an older, “mutual benefit” rhetoric stood at odds with the newer but potentially powerful discourse of


enterprise.1 Finally, in Fenwick’s study, women entrepreneurs were able to use entrepreneurial practices in ways that sought to expand their financial autonomy from men (Fenwick, 2002). And in their study of Turkish and Moroccan female entrepreneurs living in the Netherlands, Essers and Benschop (2007) found anything but a passive internalization of entrepreneurial discourse. The women in their study engaged in active forms of identity work, negotiating complex and conflicting religious, ethnic, and family demands in highly creative ways.

The thrust of these studies suggests that the drift toward enterprise produces not a totalizing outcome but a conflicted one, pitting the new orthodoxy of enterprise against emergent forms of heterodoxy, with employees invoking counter-hegemonic norms that can limit the purchase of the new discourse on their working lives and identities. Yet, in surveying this literature, at least three significant limitations stand out. One stems from the relatively static nature of most empirical applications of the theory: since there has been little effort to trace the broad trajectory of enterprise culture, we have no way of assessing its eventual capacity for predominance or hegemony. Likewise, the static nature of these studies prevents us from capturing shifts in the nature of enterprise culture itself. As Fournier and Grey (1999, p. 122) wrote, the literature have failed to ask whether “… enterprise discourse [is] ‘the same’ now as it was in, say, 1987 or 1992?”

A second limitation we see in this literature stems from the tendency for analysts to take the existence of organizational boundaries for granted—that is, to tether their research to intra-organizational influences in abstraction from the wider normative environment (Goldthorpe, 1966). This seems particularly problematic, since by its very nature, enterprise theory stresses the growing permeability of the boundary between the firm and its environment—or, put differ-ently, it hinges on the proliferation of discourses that emanate from multiple sites within civil society. Arguably, assessing the trajectory of enterprise culture requires that we adopt a broader perspective that takes into account the influence of political and popular culture writ large. Doing that, we contend, requires closer attention to the discourses to which employees are exposed, whether these stem from schools, popular media, employment counselors, or labor market institutions, as employees form their conceptions of the employment relation itself. Though du Gay himself did partly incorporate such analysis into his work (e.g., by studying the rise of the “corporate re-engineering” movement), few other analysts have pursued this approach. This is perhaps why Fournier and Grey (1999, p. 120) write that enterprise theory “assumes the predominance of enterprise without providing a convincing account of how enterprise came to acquire this supposedly dominant position” (1999, p. 120; see also Sturdy & Wright, 2008).

A final and related limitation is the largely de-contextualized nature of the existing research, which has neglected the linkages between enterprise culture and the thrust of the neo-liberal economy. Most pointed has been the failure of the debate to connect the drift toward enterprise with the advent of precarious employment and the decline of the standard employment relation-ship (Kalleberg, 2011; Hatton, 2011). Conceivably, the onset of stark uncertainty within the labor market and of the need to continually demonstrate one’s employability (Smith, 2010) may leave workers and job seekers increasingly susceptible to the discourse of enterprise. This, to be sure, was a key precept reflected in Collinson’s influential analysis (2003), which did seek to link the formation of employee subjectivity to the contemporary era of precarity.

If these limitations are to be overcome, and the contributions of enterprise theory more pre-cisely pinned down, then there is particular value to be found in research that focuses on shifts in the discursive influences to which employees are exposed. In this respect, we agree with Alvesson and Willmott (2002, p. 622) when they advise scholars to concern themselves with the “discursive resources” available to workers as they confront the normative demands they face at any given time:


In the absence of counter-discourses that interpret the mechanisms of regulation as intrusive, “bullshit” or hype, however, we can anticipate not only instrumental compliance but also increased, serial identification with corporate values, albeit that such “buy-in” is conditional upon their compatibility with other sources of identity formation. (p. 622)

In line with the above considerations, we have therefore sought to cast a wider net, and asked: To what extent have images of work, employment, and careers begun to reflect an entrepreneurial turn, in which identity norms compel employees to adopt a relation toward themselves as marketable entities or assets? Have popular discourses begun to promote the kind of neo-liberal subjectivity of which Foucault, Rose, and du Gay all speak? Might the prevalence of such discourses begin to tip the balance toward a heightening of enterprise norms?

In posing the question thusly, we are embarking on a little-studied path. Students of organi-zations have only rarely concerned themselves with the images of work that circulate within television, movies, magazines, and blogs (for exceptions, see Signorielli & Kahlenberg, 2001; Massoni, 2004; Montemurro, 2003), even though many of these venues are awash in symbolic images of work.2 In this article, the sources on which we rely are more proximate to identity regulation than mere entertainment: the conceptions of work, employment, and identity that lie within the popular business press, a burgeoning genre within book publishing that represents the point at which career advice, self-help, and occupational counseling all intersect. Two lines of inquiry have guided our data collection: first, what representations of work and employment are on offer in these texts, and how have these images evolved over time? And second, how do labor market participants seem to respond to these images? What kinds of identity work do they seem willing to perform? Have the identity norms found within these texts seemed to resonate with the interviewees with whom we spoke?

MethodsOur analysis used two general sources of data bearing on the cultural norms and practices (the “technologies of self”) that have characterized the search for jobs and the pursuit of careers among young, educated people today. First, we have used digital search engines and publicly available best-seller lists to identify the most prevalent popular business books aimed at a general-interest, English-language audience published between 1980 and 2010. Second, we interviewed a total of 53 job seekers and employment counselors, most but not all of whom live in a large New England city. While digital sources of data—blogs, websites, discourses promulgated via various social media platforms such as Reddit, Twitter, or Facebook, would also prove worthwhile, they must provide the occasion for a separate analysis.

Our approach toward popular business books proceeded iteratively, in several stages. In the first stage, we used the best-seller lists and rankings provided by The New York Times and Amazon.com to identify the most salient books in the popular business and management genre during each of these three decades. In this initial stage of the study, we noted a broad normative shift in the nature of the genre and its target audience. Immersing ourselves in this literature enabled us to identify a set of six key words that reflect elements that seemed increasingly central to this discourse over time.3 In the second stage of our analysis, we entered these terms into the Google books and Google Ngram database (Michel et al., 2011), selecting English-language books that combined all or most of these keywords. We were most interested in books that met two criteria: those that were broadly focused on the general public of job seekers, rather than specialists within a single industry or market niche; and those that provided normative commentary and advice regarding the definition and pursuit of career aspirations. The result enabled us to construct a database including the titles


and authors of 137 texts, along with their publication dates, biographical material on the authors, and the number of Google “hits” each book received in 2012. We also included in the database online comments or postings at prominent websites and blogs, in which readers responded to these books. In addition, we constructed a discourse analysis of 14 of the most influential texts (as judged by Google hits) in our database. We thus have both quantitative and interpretive findings to report on this culture of personal enterprise.

Our interviews each lasted an average of 45 minutes, and were conducted in public places (libraries, coffee shops), on the phone, or via Skype. In selecting people for inclusion, we began by targeting young, educated workers (college graduates or nearly so) with experience in various technical, business, and non-profit domains, and later expanded our sample to encompass job seekers who had experienced bouts of long term unemployment (six months or more). We elicited participation in the study through several means: we posted flyers at cafes, offering small incentives; contacted participants in career transition conferences and self-help workshops; browsed through university websites that identified career-relevant student organizations in a variety of fields; and tapped into alumni networks at local universities. Finally, we contacted human resource instructors, job coaches, and job search counselors engaged in the production or transmission of business discourse in relation to job seekers and job changers today.4

Of the 53 interviewees, nearly all had college degrees; four had only a two-year degree). Most were job seekers or job changers in a wide array of white collar or professional fields, ranging from biotechnology and IT to health care, human resources, journalism, sales, technical writing, para-legal, and non-profit advocacy work. Roughly half were still under 30 years of age, but those who had been unemployed for longer periods ranged from their upper 40s into their early 60s. The majority of our interviewees (including those who were stably employed) agreed that the labor market remained unfavorable to job seekers even into the more recent, post-crisis years. Most agreed that the standard work arrangement had become increasingly uncommon, as the notion of loyalty between businesses and workers had seemed to grow obsolete. Many acknowledged having to rethink their earlier aspirations, whether by changing their plans for graduate study, holding on to an unpleasant job, or seeking work they might otherwise have refused. Some expressed abiding fear as to their financial situation from month to month. Beyond these interviews, finally, we collected observational data at seven self-help seminars and career-oriented workshops in a large New England city, the better to capture the tenor of the job search clinics and seminars to which job seekers are routinely exposed.5

Shifts in Popular Business DiscourseAs noted, we began by exploring the overall trajectory of the popular business genre. We found that until the early 1980s, titles in this genre were largely aimed at corporate executives and managers. Titles fell into three major categories: (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 (such as Lee Iacocca, Sam Walton, or Donald Trump) and (3) strategic manifestos outlining programs for organizational change (as with the paradigmatic In Search of Excellence, by Peters & Waterman, 1982). Beginning in the 1980s, however, the audience for popular business books began to expand in two directions at once: downward in the organizational and class hierarchy, and outward, encompassing new markets of young (and mid-career) job seekers and job changers. Correlative shifts in the nature of the discourse occurred as well.

As several analysts suggest (McGee, 2005; Sharone, 2014), this shift was partly driven by the appearance of Richard Bolles’ (1970) What Color is Your Parachute?, a massively influential treatise offering advice about linking one’s careers with one’s innermost passions.6 The book’s


ability to accumulate a rapidly growing audience drew attention to a previously untapped market for career self-help books.

Following Bolles’ format, during the 1990s and then the dot.com boom, a stream of advice and tool-kit publications appeared that were aimed at the great mass of young job seekers, the unem-ployed, potential job changers, employees pondering self-employment ventures, vocational coun-selors, and young people generally. Some of the most important blockbuster publications in this genre emerged in the wake of Bolles’ success, including Stephen Covey’s (1989) The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Spencer Johnson’s (1998) Who Moved My Cheese?, and Daniel Pink’s (2001) Free Agent Nation. Many such titles were so successful that they led to the publication of more specialized, niche versions aimed at young women, at teenagers, and in popular “for Dummies” and “for Complete Idiots” versions. So began an avalanche of treatises aimed less at corporate managers than at job seekers and employees seeking to enhance their positions within the labor market.

The result is a highly complex and heterogeneous genre. Some texts contain pithy homilies, paired with short chapters that give quasi-spiritual or value-rational advice. Other texts contain varying proportions of instrumental (tool-kit or “how-to”) commentary, leavened with advice about linking personal commitments and career opportunities. Still other texts base themselves (however loosely) on popularized discussions of social science research, to capture emerging trends in employment and the structure of labor markets. Despite this diversity, several themes seem to be especially prominent throughout this genre as a whole.

One such theme is the view that the “standard” work arrangement is not only obsolete, but (where it lingers) now functions as a paternalistic structure that fosters an unhealthy dependence on centralized authority. The notion here is that the end of Fordist organizational regimes is in fact to be celebrated as a potentially emancipatory event, since it enables members of the workforce to reclaim the power and autonomy that bureaucratic organizations have long repressed. “Anti-bureaucratic screed” is an apt characterization of many works in this genre. Ironically, in some of these works one even finds quasi-Marxist tropes, as where the 19th century concept of “wage slavery” is used to discredit employment within large corporations (Pink, 2001). In this view, to cling to the standard work arrangement (as does one of the principal actors in Johnson’s 1998 par-able) is to limit one’s self-fulfillment, and even to imperil one’s very survival. The combined effect is often to idealize new forms of employment—portfolio careers, freelancing, consultancy, project or contract work—all of which are portrayed as opening up new routes to freedom and fulfillment. In effect, employees are invited to embrace a critique of the very bureaucratic structures that had previously protected 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 alter one’s work orienta-tion, in keeping with the needs of contemporary economic realities. Narratives of redemption are common in this discourse, as authors recount stories in which an unfulfilling job led 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 the crisis becomes possible only when the actor embraces a new, agen-tic, entrepreneurial (and therefore more fulfilling) orientation toward life and work. This, indeed, is one source of the power this discourse achieves (cf. Brown, 2004): the authors offer their own life narratives as testimony that confirms the very truths 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, this discourse insists that such an opposition no longer obtains. Now, whether owing to the death of the Fordist manage-rial regime, the widespread availability of new technologies, or the ease with which businesses can


be started up, the market is portrayed as an arena that is highly conducive to the pursuit of personal freedom and self-fulfillment.7 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. Here one finds the mantra that success in one’s personal career can best be pursued by emulating the branding tactics for which large corporations are so well known. This notion resembles homo economicus, but in a highly specific way. It is not the logic of the customer or consumer culture that one must embrace, as du Gay (1996) expects, but rather the theory and practice of corporate marketing campaigns. More or less explicit (depending on the text) is the argument that individuals ought to take stock of their assets, regard the self as a profit-seeking entity, and establish the personal brand with which they can actively produce demand for their services. A far more active-seeming orientation has thereby emerged that prom-ises to restore significant proportions of the autonomy that enterprise culture had seemed to sap.

Our analysis suggests that the notion of “personal branding” first emerged in the early 1980s among marketing specialists, but did not become prevalent until the mid- to late 1990s, when it drew particular energy from a 1997 article published in Fast Company by Tom Peters (co-author of In Search of Excellence, the well-known treatise on organizational culture and business success; see Peters & Waterman, 1982). Peters’ career itself perfectly reflects this entrepreneurial turn, in that he abandoned the writing of organizational case studies in favor of an even more normative and even evangelical style of writing that speaks not to organizations but to individual employees (see Peters, 1994, 1999). His 1997 article prefigured much that was to follow, and continues to provoke digital commentary. In this article, Peters urges his readers to acknowledge the ubiquity of brand-name commodities in our everyday lives. But rather than critiquing this fact, he instead advises readers to succumb to the logic of branding and to agree that the secret of economic success requires that we emulate the marketing strategies of successful corporations and the product brands they control. 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 (Peters, 1997, p. 83; also cited in McGee, 2005 and Hearn, 2008):

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 going 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.

Two years after the appearance of this article, Peter Drucker (1999) reinforced much the same point in the Harvard Business Review, arguing that “Companies today aren’t managing their knowledge workers’ careers. Rather, we must each be our own Chief Executive Officer” (p. 1) and take respon-sibility for managing the profitability of our own human capital. In an economic context marked by general but highly uneven economic growth, yet widespread downsizing and outsourcing and an incipient dot.com boom, this discourse gained widespread resonance.

To track the trajectory of this discourse, we have utilized Google’s Ngram platform. Ngram graphically displays the frequency with which specific keywords appear in the corpus of some seven million English-language books published over time (Michel et al., 2011). In Figure 1, we present the results of an Ngram search showing the frequency with which two search terms—“selling yourself” and “personal branding”—were mentioned during this three-decade period. The first of these keywords is a generic term that overlaps considerably with traditional sales language.


Clearly, it has enjoyed a long-established prevalence, much as with the keyword “entrepreneur,” which describes a similar trajectory (not shown). Moreover, the prevalence of this first keyword has not changed appreciably during this period. By contrast, “personal branding” enjoyed very little currency in the 1980s, and only came into prominence toward the late 1990s, accelerating after the turn of the millennium and the dot.com boom. It has shown no sign of decline in spite of the troubled economy following the dot.com bust.

Our database of personal enterprise books also helps track the movement of this discourse. Figure 2 displays the frequency of the books published annually in the USA during the 1979–2010 period. Several points emerge from these results. At the most general level, publication rates generally increase over time, though somewhat erratically, and indicate a market that has grown substantially. We suggest that three distinct periods can be found in this trajectory. The first, nascent period began in the mid-1980s and lasted into the early to mid-1990s, during which time the market for personal branding books first began to be established. A second period seems to have begun toward the latter 1990s, when an expansion of such texts occurred. During this second period, annual production rates rose above five books and then reached double digit pro-duction levels in 1997 for the first time. The falling off of publication rates during the late 1990s

Figure 1. Trends in the Use of Two Discursive Constructs in 7 Million Digitized Books, 1980–2008.Source: Google nGram.

Figure 2. Books Published between 1979 and 2010 with “Personal Enterprise” Discourse.


arguably stemmed from the relatively strong economic recovery, which may have dampened demand for alternative approaches toward workforce participation. The third period arose in the middle of the 2000s, when the production of personal branding texts reached double digit levels in four different years (as opposed to only once during the second period). Although the point awaits systematic econometric analysis, we contend that there is a lagged effect of economic downturns, which foster a sense that the standard work arrangement is endangered, indicating a need for new employment strategies that are activated when economic recovery begins.

Anatomy of the DiscourseOf special interest to us here is not simply the frequency of these texts but rather the nature of the discourse they promote. To gain a deeper interpretation of the beliefs and practices—the technologies of self—deployed in this discourse, we sought to develop a discourse analysis with respect to 14 of the 20 most salient texts in our database. We were especially interested in the use of the metaphors these authors used to make sense of the changes bearing on people’s careers (see especially Cornelissen, Holt, & Zundel, 2011; Cornelissen & Werner, 2014; McGee, 2005, pp. 51–54), the narratives (discrete stories or biographical accounts) that were employed to undergird the writer’s authority (Brown, 2004; Grant & Hardy, 2004), and the dramaturgical practices these texts advised readers to apply as they engaged in the work of branding themselves (Hochschild, 1983). We proceeded by identifying discrete passages that epitomized each type of category, and then engaged in discussion concerning any discrepancies in our coding. We refined the definitions of these categories, eventually fastening on three codes we used to identify discursive entries. In order of increasing concreteness, these involve the metaphorical frames the texts employ to make sense of the employment relationship, the symbolic exercises they supply to encourage readers to internalize market-friendly identity norms, and the behavioral scripts readers are tasked with using as they learn to perform their newly branded selves.8

First, with respect to metaphorical frames, we do find a wide array of tropes. The most commonly-used metaphors are competitive sports (“tournaments”), travel to unfamiliar lands (the career as a spiritual journey), warfare, political revolution, and media celebrity. One recent text—Kristin Cardinale’s 2011 The 9-5 Cure—even likens dependence on bureaucratic employment to an addiction, viewing the standard work arrangement as an unhealthy dependence that requires therapeutic intervention—hence the need for the book. There can be little doubt, however, that the metaphor that has dominated this genre has been that of brand management, which uses the theory and practices of commercial marketing campaigns as a model for career and self-development. A typical example (from Brand Yourself: How to Create an Identity for a Brilliant Career written by David Andrusia and Rick Haskins, 2009) is especially revealing for its commingling of human and non-human attributes, or “skills”:

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 [chapter sections that apply the branding metaphor], we’re going to explore all of your skill sets and determine which are your most powerful skills. (2009, p. 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, Beckwith and Beckwith (2007) 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. (p. 7, emphasis in original)

But construing one’s being as a brand, much like a well-established shampoo or washing machine, does not come naturally. It takes practice, and requires the use of symbolic exercises that can train readers in the kind of identity work that they must actively perform. For this reason, these texts provide a rich array of exercises that enable readers to achieve newer and more market-centered conceptions of themselves.

Some of these exercises will be familiar to readers of any literature in the self-help genre: homespun personality tests, which enable readers to rate their personal attributes, talents, and aspirations; vocabulary lists, which invite readers to circle the adjectives that most excite or describe their passions; and “tombstone inscription” exercises, in which the reader is directed to write his or her own eulogy, or to craft language to be inscribed on one’s tombstone, thereby pondering the legacy one will leave (see McGee, 2005, pp. 148–151). Most striking, however, are those exercises that explicitly apply corporate techniques to the interpersonal domain. Three stand out, and are often used in combination: Strength–Weakness–Opportunity–and–Threat (or SWOT) analyses, here applied not to a business enterprise but to one’s identity as an economic entity; the “Personal Branding Statement” (PBS)—short, engaging representations of one’s distinctive attributes, which one guru has called one’s “personal commercial” (Chritton, 2013); and focus-group testing of one’s PBS (in which readers are encouraged to convene friends and associates to offer in-person comments and evaluations regarding their personal branding efforts). Interestingly, the text by Andrusia and Haskins (2009) provides a dozen sequentially-organized exercises—called “sessions,” much like therapy—which walk the reader through the application of SWOT analyses, PBSs, and focus group techniques.

Two points are worth making about these latter forms of symbolic exercise. First, the focus group exercise in particular can assume an implicitly therapeutic nature, for (much as in an encounter group), it requires one to submit one’s self to collective scrutiny:

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 what your strengths—and weaknesses—are, and you will be in a much better position to follow the career path of your dreams. (2009, p. 69)

A second point relates to the implicitly coercive manner in which these exercises are presented. For, despite this discourse’s emphasis on voluntarism, individual freedom, and autonomy, readers are commonly told that they have little choice but to embrace the commercial ethos and apply it to their innermost selves. Representative here is a point made by Andrusia and Haskins (2009), which pervades much of this genre:

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 it 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. (p. 75, emphasis in original)


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 insists that readers have implicitly embraced the discourse of personal branding, in spite of any resistance or trepidation they may actually have felt.

A final element of the discourse of personal branding concerns the behavioral scripts these texts contain, and which provide a kind of stencil, or silhouette, that can guide the performances in which readers are to engage. These are deemed important for the reader’s ability to perform in a sufficiently convincing manner—convincing both to others and to oneself. Here we find a broad array of dramaturgical techniques intended to enhance the performative skill of the reader. Thus in You, Inc., Beckwith and Beckwith (2007) 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. (p. 102)

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. (pp. 44–52).

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” (p. 52). Lustberg’s (2002) 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. (p. 52)

This last point—“not acting, mind you”—alludes in passing to an important tension that is evident throughout this discourse, resulting from its need to sustain what is in effect a double illusion. First, the discourse must sustain the view that the proffered identity work entails a labor of empowerment, even as readers are told to surrender themselves to market imperatives. And second, this discourse must define identity work as a labor of discovery—an unearthing of an essential self that has been obscured beneath bureaucratic routines—rather than the fabrication of a newly re-configured (new and improved?) form of subjectivity.9


The tension this double illusion fosters seems at times to linger just beneath the surface of many of these texts, which must school readers in the use of scripts that enable them to perform in ways that are sufficiently convincing—to themselves. In a passage that recalls Hochschild’s (1983) concept of “deep acting,” the following authors offer a prescription aimed at helping readers whose branding work was mired in low levels of efficacy. Relating the story of a client who had trouble constructing a convincing Personal Brand Statement, Andrusia and Haskins (2009) explain:

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! (p. 214)

In our own terms, this passage calls for a tighter connection between the symbolic exercises (the PBS) needed to construct the self-as-entrepreneur and the behavioral scripts one must practice (use of a mirror, reminders, etc.) if the self is to be realized. Implied here is the labor of interpellation, which recalls the Pascalian axiom: “Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you shall believe!”

Taken as a whole, two messages immediately emerge from analysis of these texts: first, that there is power and prosperity to be gained by branding oneself, and that doing so can confer on readers a substantial degree of control over their economic fate. A second message is the notion that embracing such an entrepreneurial posture signifies a form of defiance that challenges the traditional economic structures in which wage and salaried employees have been trapped. In a word, these powerful messages idealize precarity, in that they invite readers to see labor market uncertainty as providing the basis for their emancipation—if only they can shed the time-encrusted patterns of dependence on employers for their livelihood.

Agency, Identity Work, and the Discourse of Personal BrandingAt this point, the question that emerges is one not of structurally-imposed expectations that impinge on worker subjectivity (identity regulation) but of the actual identity work that employees perform in response to the discourse of personal branding. How, in other words, have people responded to the discourse of personal branding? How do they view the discourse and the practices it promotes? To answer these questions, we explored the ways in which interviewees use information technologies in their job search efforts, the kinds of career advice to which they had been exposed, and the meanings interviewees attached to the logic and practices of personal branding. The results were highly instructive.10

We did indeed find instances in which interviewees exhibited a refusal or rejection of personal branding discourse. A number of our interviews unearthed highly critical views of personal branding that expressed a principled objection to the extension of marketing to encompass the self. One woman with a Ph.D. in molecular biology and experience in life science research spoke for several people when she stated:

I find it extremely hard to create a brand for a person, as opposed to a service … and overall I’m quite turned off by the infusion of marketing concepts into the job search field … I just hate it. Maybe that’s just my scientific background.


A technical writer in her late 50s spoke with similar disdain of the “false face” that branding discourse required users to adopt, arguing that personal brands seem “fake” or “PR-ish.” Others spoke of personal branding as “business-speak” or “internet slang,” and responded to selected expressions of the discourse by saying that they “sound like Amway,” the direct-sales organization that often seems fueled by evangelical fervor. An unemployed engineer in his mid-40s, highly critical of branding discourse, referred to it as “spillover from the corporate world”:

I tell you what, when I was working with these big corporations I was working with sales people all the time. I know all of this type of talk about branding and marketing and sales so I know exactly what you’re talking about. In the past ten years it has entered the psyche of everybody. Of everybody in the business world. Everything is a product. I am a product to be sold with a brand. On the other hand, I am not a brand. I am not a product. I am a unique individual with skills and personality.

Interestingly, even those who voiced these kinds of critiques of personal branding sometimes described their job search efforts as seeking to “create more of a presence” online for themselves. One male technical writer in his late 20s spoke of actively “selling myself in certain ways” through his social media profiles. Moreover, even the engineer above, so critical of the content of branding, went on to concede that he recognizes it is a valuable tool to sell himself via his résumé and social media platforms.

Even more significant is the fact that the larger share of the criticisms we heard about personal branding seemed based on largely practical considerations rather than any principled concerns. Thus, an HR professional who had been unable to find a full time job for over a year told us that,

Yeah. I’ve heard all that. Building personal brands. Oh yeah … I’ve heard a lot about it. I’m well aware that I should be establishing my brand. But it’s not that easy to put into practice … I just feel like it’s a tough task if you don’t have a guide. But doing this on your own? It’s hard!

Several others pointed to a different practical issue they saw in personal branding: its tendency to restrict the range of positions for which one might apply. Personal branding can certainly be advantageous, this view held, but it tends to “pigeon-hole” the user—a term that was used by three different interviewees. In another interview, we heard this issue framed as the “Swiss army knife” problem—that is, job seekers who have many facets and pursuits cannot easily select a single function that does justice to the breadth of their productive capacities. Ironically, this interviewee conceived of this problem using a brand name product.

A second broad response to personal branding, distinct from outright resistance, embraced the discourse but in a more highly strategic or contingent form. Here, we often heard reference to uses of branding discourse as a performance that was crafted in ways that would not intrude on one’s personal or “real” self. A human resource employee in her late 20s likened her strategic use of personal branding to the use of a costume. She recalled leaving an informational meeting with a prospective employer and having “to turn my interview self off and turn my real self on. Like a hat that you wear.” An administrative assistant described her job search in ways that illustrated her strategic use of branding techniques: she used one personal branding statement for medical assistant jobs and another for legal assistant jobs (her initial field). When we asked which traits she tried to project in face-to-face situations, she explained “I try to project all the personality traits that have been valued by my previous employers.” When pursuing jobs at large medical organizations, she explained, she speaks of wanting to “make the patient feel they are a star in their performance. It’s catchy.” A journalist who had experienced a long bout with unemployment


told us that he had sought to advance his career by “entering into campaign mode,” which required an entirely different way of presenting himself to others.

By far the most common responses we encountered, however, were those indicating an inter-nalization or embrace of the logic and discourse of personal branding. Perhaps the most revealing sign of such consent emerged when interviewees spontaneously used the discourse of personal branding without any mention of it by the interviewer. A case in point is an executive legal assistant in her early 50s who had been jobless for 16 months. When we asked her how she used social media in her job search, she explained that she tries to be “very mindful of what my online presence is, my personal brand.” She spoke of trying to construct her “own personal logo,” much as corporate marketing campaigns do. (She cited the example of Tony the Tiger, an animated icon that has been used to market the cereal Frosted Flakes.) Similarly, a finance professional out of work for nearly a year told us the most important component of her job search process is maintaining her “professional brand” through networking and ensuring that her “digital presence” reflects these branding efforts.

At other times, the incorporation of personal branding discourse emerged only when we probed into interviewees’ knowledge of this discourse. Here we often encountered a deep-running familiar-ity with and use of branding discourse. Asked about her initial exposure to the literature on personal branding, one unemployed woman who has been working as a consultant told us:

That’s what gave me the whole idea [her own consulting practice]. I started out when I didn’t have a job and I said, “the only way I’m going to get a job is if I brand myself as an expert.” I sat down and put down my strategy for how I was going to create an online brand for myself. It was a very conscious decision to create a personal brand. That’s exactly what I was doing.

Concerned with her success at creating her online brand, she found herself repeatedly checking her “Klout” score (an online tool that calculates one’s social media presence, much like a stock market index). “That’s why I was constantly looking at my Klout score, because it was an indica-tor to me of how successful I was at creating my personal brand.”

Other interviewees made even more enthusiastic use of personal branding, immersing them-selves in the discourse so deeply as to become avatars of its message. Indeed, we interviewed several job seekers who at one time or another led networking groups that actively trained others in the work of personal branding. One example involved a specialist in educational technology, who said of personal branding:

It’s a great thing. And you have to be able to do that, and be able to speak to it, and be able to do it all the time. You have to be able to tell everybody that that [your personal branding statement] is you … It has to come from your hip. If it doesn’t, everybody can see right through it.

To ensure that your personal branding statement is an organic part of you, she repeated:

You have to practice it all the time. You have to practice it to everybody, even when you’re at the grocery store. If it’s someone you know, you turn around and you tell them your branding statement. You tell them. Because, a lot of people will say “I didn’t know you did that! I didn’t know that that was you!” And “Oh my gosh! So and so works at such and such.” And it can lead you right into that [job opportunity]. So I think it’s very important that you do that, that you do it all the time. You have to be able to develop a dialogue with it. A branding statement has to start a dialogue … I’ve helped a lot of other people brand themselves.

One interviewee showed even greater enthusiasm for personal branding, and explained that her train-ing in the discourse extended beyond the groups and clinics she ran, reaching into her family life:


I got my daughter on LinkedIn when she was 15, so she could begin her personal branding … If you go to her LinkedIn page, you’d have to say, “My God, for 17 years old, look at her personal branding!” So yes, I’ve been an advocate and a teacher of personal branding … I’ve been helping young people do that as a matter of course for the last decade …You have to give the value proposition of you.

Additional indications of the seduction of personal discourse emerged in a more subtle form. Our interview schedule included three short passages that were designed to represent the discourse of personal branding by instantiating its metaphorical framework, the symbolic exercises it uses, and the behavioral scripts or exercises it recommends to neophytes, as discussed above. After listening to these passages, even resistant interviewees often responded by acknowledging a moral obligation to work harder at branding themselves than they’d thus far managed to do. An illustrative response occurred in the case of an unemployed man in his 40s who had much experience as a facilities manager. When we read a passage to him, he confessed that he himself should be working much harder to get his own branding statement down:

I think I’m going to do it … I consider it like work, and something I probably might want to avoid. But no one’s going to knocking on my door and give me a job. I have to put the work in …

He explained that he’d like to achieve “a nice, clean, and succinct elevator speech, one that’s believable, that sells you.” He continued:

But it takes a lot of work. I’m not quite there myself yet. If you asked me to give you one now, I’d hem and haw. I think that exercises, narrowing it down, and then making people believe it, that’s the key, that’s the real key. I’m getting there, but I’m not quite there yet.

A high level marketing professional currently searching for work echoed this sentiment, telling us, “I’ve done it on and off … that’s probably one thing if I were to revisit now, I would put more thought into my branding.”

These statements reveal a sense of obligation to refine one’s branding efforts. They portray personal branding as a form of identity work that is incumbent on anyone who wants to succeed. Thus, the man quoted above concluded his comments by observing how helpful the interview had been to him as he ponders how to go about pursuing his career. Similarly, an attorney in his 50s who is seeking a position in a legal department in lieu of his own practice told us that the interview had “crystallized a lot of things for me,” and confessed that “branding myself is what I need to do.” In these cases we were struck by the seductive effects of personal branding discourse and by the readiness of interviewees to embrace the logic it contained.

Thus, although we do find instances of resistance to the discourse of personal branding, rejection as a matter of principle is relatively rare. More common is a rejection based on practical concerns (the lack of adequate training in personal branding, or awareness of the “Swiss Army knife” problem). We also find numerous instances in which branding discourse was used strategically, as a form of stagecraft that might deliver results, yet without impinging on one’s innermost beliefs. Most common of all, however, was an active embrace of branding discourse, coupled with an acknowledgment that one ought to engage in a determined effort to refine one’s brand as a condition of one’s success and personal fulfillment.

Although our findings here are largely suggestive, all of our data are consistent with the general reasoning sketched by Alvesson and Willmott (2002), who view the outcome of identity work as a function of the discursive resources to which employees and job seekers have access. In the present


context, we do indeed find that interviewees who reject branding discourse are disproportionately found in occupations that are steeped in an academic discourse—for example, life scientists or students invested in the humanities—or are strongly embedded in youth networks, giving them a rival form of affiliation that protects them against the need to commercialize themselves. Those who are most deeply invested in the discourse of personal branding, by contrast, have little access to academic ideals or to youth culture; instead, they have been immersed in the labor market for lengthy periods of time. For them, rejecting the discourse of personal branding seems to comprise a luxury they can simply not (or no longer) afford.11

Implied here is the point that responses to branding discourse are not static, but that they evolve over time, apace with labor market experience over time, aging and maturation, and job insecurity. And indeed, we unearthed numerous instances in which job seekers reported significant changes in their views of personal branding. Tellingly, the most common trajectory was one in which job seekers moved away from a posture of resistance or skepticism, toward one of either strategic utilization or else active consent. This trajectory was especially well illustrated by one unemployed, 54-year-old woman with experience as a paralegal employee. When asked how she used social media in her job search efforts, she spontaneously invoked the discourse of branding in highly negative terms: she recalled her initial feeling that she didn’t “have or need a brand,” and found herself “sweating bullets” at the prospect of having to promote herself in such a way. But as her jobless status continued, and she found herself “close to desperation,” she grew more exposed to job search groups and online seminars stressing personal branding (“it’s everywhere”). She took the advice she encountered in these seminars and conducted informal focus groups with former co-workers. She interpreted the results as revealing what her brand really was. She grew aware of her reluctance to engage in self-promotion, so she began to practice her elevator pitch in face-to-face settings until she felt a sense of mastery over it. Now she uses the discourse of branding spontaneously, and speaks of her ongoing effort to “incorporate everything I can, everything that’s useful, in the hopes of bettering and developing me, my brand.” Now she wishes she had access to a mentor or a coach who could help her refine her branding work. Our data suggest that this trajectory—from resistance to incorporation—is the single most common pattern, and that it is indeed fostered by labor market uncertainty.

ConclusionPrevious efforts to judge the applicability of enterprise theory empirically have been hobbled by their static and narrow coordinates, and by their failure to link employment discourse to the wider context of precarity that many workers now confront. The contribution of the present study, then, stems from its effort to re-open the enterprise debate, using data that can capture a broad swath of employment discourse over time, the logic that such discourse implies, and the ways that workers respond to its central messages. Approached in this way, we do indeed find evidence that conforms to at least some of the claims that enterprise theorists have made. A whole genre of popular business texts has proliferated over time, widening its audience beyond managers to include a range of job seekers, career changers, and students, all of whom have been encouraged to adopt an idealized view of labor market uncertainty. The popular business texts we have studied surely do speak to the increasing prevalence of entrepreneurial conceptions of work, the market, and the forms of personhood that success and personal fulfill-ment now require. This is, as enterprise theory claims, a way of being that is premised on individualization and marketization—that is, on the marketing of oneself as a distinctive bundle of skills and assets whose value must be relentlessly augmented and promoted if one is to succeed in life.


Yet at the same time, our analysis also suggests ways in which enterprise theory has misspecified the thrust of these discursive developments. Key here is the emergence of a discourse of personal branding, which in several respects seems to have outstripped the conception that theorists previously invoked. Most important here, we suggest, is the theory’s emphasis on consumption and on the needs of the “sovereign consumer,” which the theory views as leaching into the sphere of production. Viewed at an abstract level, this claim may certainly seem defensible. But with reference to the texts we studied and the interviews we conducted, enterprising selves seem to have acquired a significantly different inflection. Enterprise culture, it seems, has evolved beyond a concern with the need merely to respond to market fluctuations. In effect, the discourse of personal branding promises to open up the corporate marketing tool-kit for popular use, invoking the techniques of marketing campaigns and branding statements, focus groups, and SWOT analyses, enjoining employees to use these as means with which to shape the market for their wares, thereby producing demand for their personal and professional attributes. Doing so still requires individuals to be sensitive or responsive to the needs of their potential customers, much as du Gay stressed. But employees are now advised to gather information about their own customers (“know your audience”), and to use this information to tailor their identity work for maximum effect. Put simply, employees must not only support the needs of the firm as it responds to consumer capitalism; now they must be the firm in their own right, emulating corporate practices as a means of producing consumer demand for their own services. Where according to du Gay, enterprise discourse and its notion of the sovereign consumer cast the employee in a dependent position, and compelled employees to respond passively to the demands of consumer markets, the discourse of personal branding now implores employees to seek out methods that expand their ability to control their economic environments. Indeed, by seeming to give the enterprising self a modicum of control over its target audience, the discourse of personal brand-ing may have acquired an even greater potency than previous forms of business rhetoric enjoyed, lending power an affirmative, self-fulfilling guise, much as Foucault suggests. Implied here may indeed be a movement from the “enterprising” self (as du Gay envisioned it) to the “incorpo-rated” self—incorporated in a double sense, involving on the one hand an internalization of market-based logics, and on the other a shaping of one’s subjectivity in the image of the capital-ist firm itself (i.e., the ubiquitous notion of “Me, Inc.”). What results is a form of subjectivity that “shrivels into a completely abstract source point of individual choices” (Brockling, 2012, p. 11, emphasis added), even as branding discourse prompts the self to experience this shift as an expansion of its fully human possibilities.

But the potency of this discourse lies not only in its seductive message; rather, our findings begin to suggest that an institutionalized network has begun to congeal in ways that are difficult for prospective employees to escape. Thus books hawking the discourse of personal branding have co-evolved with consulting and coaching services, job clinics (attendance at which is sometimes required for the receipt of unemployment assistance), and of course a whole ecology of social media platforms, all of which reinforce the need to promote oneself within the public sphere (Hearn, 2008; Pooley, 2010). Although the point needs much further research, the proliferation of such interpellating influences begins to deepen the purchase that market principles have gained on human subjectivity, with effects that may impede the emergence or durability of oppositional discourses and social movements (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005; Lair, Sullivan, & Cheney, 2005).

To say this is not to embrace a “totalizing” view of enterprise and promotional culture. For as neo-liberal forms of subjectivity gain strength, new tensions may arise within organizations and economic institutions, opening up unmanaged spaces in ways that are awkward or impossible for firms to control. First, the individualization that personal branding discourse produces may well cut against the grain of organizational initiatives pursued under the banner of teamwork and the


heightened levels of commitment that organizations have come to demand of their employees (Kunda, 1992). As the discourse of personal branding takes root, it conceivably begins to invite an incipient awareness of the divergent interests that exist between firm and employee. Precisely how personal brands articulate with corporate brands, in other words, is by no means clear (Gershon, 2014). This point may eventually mean that with the rise of personal branding, we must reject du Gay’s claim that

within the discourse of enterprise there is no longer room for any contradiction or conflict between the motives and desires of the employee as an individual and the goals and objectives of the organization for which he or she works. (1996, p. 139)

Second, as the discourse of enterprise and self-promotion acquires the status of a new ortho-doxy, it may raise employee hopes and aspirations regarding career opportunities that are likely to go unmet. What, in other words, does the career of personal branding itself look like when employees apply it over time? Arguably, many job seekers will embrace it, base their career aspirations on its logic, and find little to show for their efforts. What happens, in other words, when prophesy fails? Relevant here is the fact that one subject in our study declared that she had in fact “unbranded” herself, largely because the discourse had seemed to narrow her employment prospects. Under such conditions, do people begin to regard business rhetoric as so much “business-speak,” fueling a drift toward heightened cynicism? Or do they instead blame themselves for offering a deficient “product,” viewing themselves as “damaged goods,” as one unemployed woman in our study called herself?

This study raises a number of additional questions. One point that emerged in our data concerns the role of age, and of the effects of social media over time. Though much more research is needed to develop the point, we found that young job seekers were more likely to hold critical views of branding discourse, viewing it as “off-putting,” or like “that commercial that you tune out.” By contrast, older job seekers seemed more willing to embrace the discourse, especially as they encountered labor market uncertainty over time. We suggest that this pattern—which sharply contrasts with variations that du Gay reported (1996, p. 151)—may prove to be short-lived. For even if younger employees bring a more skeptical eye toward the discourse of personal branding, they are at the same time undergoing intensive exposure to technologies—both in the engineering and the Foucauldian sense—that provide ongoing training in the practices of self-promotion. Though much of the discussion about the relation between social media and social movements has fastened on the mobilizing potential that the new technologies provide, their conservatizing effects—their implicit inducement to increase one’s public presence, to expand one’s friends and followers, and to distinguish oneself online—cannot safely be ignored.12

If the normative influences we have identified are as potent as we believe, then a host of additional questions must be addressed, leading far beyond the boundaries of the current article. Though this study has focused on white collar and professional employees (almost all of whom were white), the question must be posed as to whether personal branding is equally likely to gain purchase on working class and minority subjectivities. Foucault’s original argument regarding the deployment of sexuality suggested that middle class audiences were the first to embrace the norm of the “Malthusian couple,” which then propagated downward throughout the nation-state. A similar pattern might arguably unfold with respect to neo-liberal forms of subjectivity—unless collective bonds estab-lished among given classes and ethnic groups prove capable of modifying, appropriating, or even challenging the individualizing features of the personal branding discourse. Interestingly, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has recently begun to offer a “Personal Branding Resume Engine,” aimed at enhancing the job prospects of returning veterans (a group that has suffered high levels of labor market uncertainty).13 This effort (and many others like it) will bear particular scrutiny.


One further question that will need to be addressed concerns the export of branding discourse. As the discourse of personal branding gains traction globally, what variations are likely to emerge across national lines? In what ways and to what extent do local labor market institutions shape the response to the discourse (Sharone, 2014)? Is the discourse of personal branding likely to meet with greater resistance in national contexts with a strong tradition of institutional opposition, as in Spain or France? Or will the economic hardship and financial austerity that have persisted there well into the post-crisis years, coupled with the retreat of the state from social support, serve to reinforce the frightening message that job seekers must increasingly fend for themselves? These questions await the verdict of careful empirical research—and the flow of historical events.

AcknowledgementsWe wish to thank the participants in the study as well as the many colleagues who provided comments on previous drafts, including Ofer Sharone, Eileen Otis, Stephen Barley, David Courpasson, Patrizia Zanoni, Rick Delbridge, Frank Dobbin, Andrea Hill, Daniel Kleinman, Jeff Sallaz, and David Swartz as well as two anonymous reviewers. All lapses in cognition can be laid at our door.

Authors’ NoteEarly versions of this paper were presented as a keynote address at the annual Organization Studies Workshop in Rhodes; the Harvard/MIT Economic Sociology Seminar; the Work 2012 Conference at Turku University, and the Work, Technology, and Organization seminar at Stanford University.

FundingThis research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes 1. Interestingly, du Gay himself found a similar pattern of contested discourses, as retail employees dif-

ferentially responded to the incursions of enterprise, largely along the lines of age (du Gay 1996, ch. 7). 2. Arguably, some of the most popular or critically acclaimed television shows in the USA, whether dramas

or comedies, seem to foreground workplace life, often portraying the subcultures of advertising, political work, health care, drug dealers, and routine office work. Even when we consume cultural objects, it seems, we often consume images of work. For an analysis of the ideological content within social media and reality television shows such as “The Apprentice,” see Hearn (2008).

3. The keywords used are entrepreneurship, selling, marketing, self, self-marketing, and personal branding. 4. As we learned that university courses are increasingly offered on personal branding, we reached out to

several instructors of such courses and included them in our interviewing. 5. These workshops and seminars included topics on networking, résumé writing, self-branding for profes-

sionals, and more open-ended “meetups” at local bars intended to provide job seekers or career changers with a space to interact with other local professionals.

6. The book was rejected by almost all business publishers, and only accepted by a publisher best known for producing bicycle manuals. The cool reception it received shows how novel and uncertain was the prospect of expanding the boundaries of the popular business press.

7. Brockling (2012, p. 13) makes this point when he writes that increasingly, “the culture of entrepreneur-ship and the culture of therapy have also found each other in ever-present coaching.”

8. For important discussions of how metaphorical frames operate to shape perceptions of structural changes, see Cornelissen et al. (2011) and Cornelissen and Werner (2014). On the discursive strategies used to establish the authority of official accounts, see Brown (2004).

9. Interestingly, some literature discussing the personality effects of the most frequently prescribed anti-depressants makes precisely the same point—that the drug does not alter you, but rather bring out the “real” you that had previously been obscured.


10. The following analysis relies heavily on Collinson’s (2003) theorization of the identity/precarity relationship, which identified three types of selfhood—resistant, dramaturgical, and conformist identities—as salient responses to economic insecurity.

11. Interestingly, one of the branding instructors we interviewed made a similar observation, comparing undergraduate business majors to students in an MBA program. The former feel compelled to demon-strate that they fit in or conform to the culture of their peers; the latter have shed that logic, and now recognize the need to bring out their distinctive market value.

12. A similar pattern has emerged with respect to the academic marketplace, as institutions increasingly track the citation counts and the H-indices their scholars exhibit—a phenomenon that recalls one inter-viewee’s effort to increase her Klout score over time.

13. See the Personal Branding Resume Engine at https://www.resumeengine.org (accessed 28 September 2014).

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Author biographiesSteven P. Vallas is a sociologist of work and organizations at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. The bulk of his research has focused on social inequalities within work organizations, ranging from highly traditional manufacturing settings to high tech industries and biotechnology laboratories. He has studied the nature of team systems in manufacturing settings, the informal politics underlying technological change, the social processes through which racial and ethnic boundaries are maintained at work, the meaning of work-place “flexibility,” the commercialization of higher education, and the social meanings of “diversity” at work, among other themes. His articles have appeared in such journals as the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, Sociological Theory, Theory and Society, Social Problems, Sociological Forum, among other venues. His most recent book is Work: A Critique (Polity, 2012).

Emily R. Cummins is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at Northeastern University. Her research to date focuses on the intersections of gender, work, and neoliberalism in non-profit settings as well as social movements challenging austerity measures and lack of infrastructure in Detroit, Michigan.

personal branding and the popular business press: enterprise culture in an era of precarity

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