For Boltanski and Chi­apello (2007), capitalism’s exist­ence and evol­u­tion requires that its work­force under­stand and accede to its demands. For a cap­it­al­ist sys­tem to oper­ate there must be a ‘spirit’ that achieves the incul­ca­tion of norms (e.g. a norm of a work ethic). They argue that the norms through which the work­force are incor­por­ated change in response to cri­ti­cisms of the earlier modes of cap­it­al­ism. The 3rd spirit of cap­it­al­ism, the cur­rent hyper-individualised neo­lib­eral mar­ket eco­nomy is, they say, forged by the cri­tiques of 1968 and after. Par­tic­u­larly rel­ev­ant to this post is how the ‘artistic’ cri­tique, which sug­ges­ted that work was ali­en­at­ing when it was without scope for autonomy or cre­ativ­ity, came to be adop­ted into mana­gerial know­ledge and prac­tices. The mana­gerial solu­tion to the artistic cri­tique is to bring work­ers into the tent by giv­ing them voice and autonomy through Kaizen, Qual­ity Circles, per­form­ance related pay and the like. Con­tem­por­ary work­ing prac­tices out­side the fact­ory require a par­tic­u­lar form of incul­ca­tion into the new­est Spirit of Cap­it­al­ism, and one of the places this is vis­ible is the ongo­ing devel­op­ment of per­sonal brand­ing: the indi­vidual is engin­eered as a good worker bey­ond the con­fines of a work­place, as a port­fo­lio worker, a freel­an­cer, an entre­pren­eur of the self (du Gay, 1996).

Celia Lury defines the brand as “the object or medium for the exchange of inform­a­tion between ‘pro­du­cers’ and ‘con­sumers’” (2004: 74). Retail work­ers are con­figured as exten­sions of their employer’s brand val­ues, through the aes­thetic labour they do and the sorts of cus­tomer ser­vice they are expec­ted to offer (Pet­tinger, 2004). Brands pro­duced by mar­ket­ing spe­cial­ists through ana­lysis of the con­sumer mar­ket are presen­ted back to the cus­tomer not merely through logos, the arrange­ment of the shop and such like, but also through the bod­ies of employ­ees, whose con­sump­tion prac­tices reflect the brand’s ideal­ised consumer.

Branded work­ers embody the exchange of inform­a­tion Lury talks about; they are sim­ul­tan­eously pro­du­cer and object; their work­ing lives are always of the brand. The per­sonal brand­ing industry goes bey­ond this, objec­ti­fy­ing the worker as brand and so col­lapsing the per­son to the object — as in the cur­rent elec­tion when we’re no longer vot­ing for a party, or a local MP, but for Brown, Clegg or Cameron.

Some people might quite like being the brand. Mike Allen, author of Wash­ing­ton insider deal­ing, agenda set­ting  gos­sip sheet Play­book exem­pli­fies a man who seems to delight in being reduced to a brand; cagey about his his­tory and appar­ently liv­ing without a private life, Allen is always on and always mak­ing news. It’s an alarm­ing vis­ion for other journ­al­ists if this is what they are to aspire to: not sleep­ing, being in touch, at work all the time. Work becomes all-consuming.

What does this mean for the con­sumer? The con­sumer is not neut­ral recip­i­ent of the brand, but qual­i­fies the mar­ket too through their attach­ment to objects (Ilmonen, 2004; Pet­tinger, 2008). Retail con­sumers don’t pass­ively accept brand stor­ies. Mike Allen’s con­sumers are people like him, politicos who need to be in the know, even ahead of the game for their own work. They’re always on too, they can’t be behind the times. But most of us con­sume journ­al­ism more cas­u­ally (one of the nowayto­makealiv­ing team prefers to read the week’s news­pa­pers in reverse chro­no­lo­gical order; the other couldn’t do this, but does do a month’s worth of New States­mans at a time).  How do we exper­i­ence branded journalism?

I’m a Guard­ian reader, of course. My par­ents get the Tele­graph though, and when I’m vis­it­ing them I look at it with grit­ted teeth. Whilst I think I’d very hap­pily go to the pub with some of the people who write for the Guard­ian, I sus­pect I’d never give the time of day to a Tele­graph journ­al­ist. In my naive under­stand­ing of how recruit­ment hap­pens, I reckon the Guard­ian must hand­pick its staff accord­ing to whether they’re good guys. But then it turns out that the author of how to cope with a Tory gov­ern­ment is also writ­ing for the Telegraph’s banker’s wives’ shop­ping guide Stella. So how do I make sense of this? For me the Guard­ian reader, the Wil­li­ams’ per­sonal brand is con­di­tioned by her loc­a­tion in the Guard­ian and is sub­ver­ted when it appears in the Tele­graph. Brand advisors say that trust is the key reason to have a brand, but my read­erly trust is eas­ily attacked by the nature of the indi­vidu­al­ised freel­ance media industry that means my Guard­ian journ­al­ists pub­lish else­where. The branded worker is vul­ner­able to con­sumer rejec­tion as well as to a mode of organ­ising work as though it was the only thing that mattered in life.

Ref­er­ences

  1. Boltanski, L. and Chi­apello, E. (2007) The New Spirit of Cap­it­al­ism. Verso, Lon­don, trans Gregory Elliot.
  2. Du Gay, P. (1996) Con­sump­tion and Iden­tity at Work. Lon­don: Sage.
  3. Lury, C. (2004) Brands: the logos of the global eco­nomy. Abing­don: Routledge.
  4. Ilmonen, K. (2004) ‘The use of and com­mit­ment to goods’, Journal of Con­sumer Cul­ture, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp.27–50.
  5. Pet­tinger, L. (2008) ‘Devel­op­ing aes­thetic labour: the import­ance of con­sump­tion’. Inter­na­tional Journal of Work, Organ­isa­tion and Emo­tions. 2 (4): 324–343.
  6. Pet­tinger, L. (2004) ‘Branded stores, branded work­ers: ser­vice work and aes­thetic labour in fash­ion retail.’ Con­sump­tion, Mar­kets and Cul­ture 7(2): 165–84.