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.
]]> http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/844/feed 1 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/815 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/815#comments Mon, 26 Apr 2010 08:00:12 +0000 Scott Taylor http://nowaytomakealiving.net/?p=815 Researching women and work can be really puzzling. There is a series of things I genuinely don’t understand: how it feels to earn your living in a workplace where you are the only woman or in a small minority; what it’s like frequently finding yourself the only person of your sex in workplace contexts; the emotions generated by spending lots of time in ‘between men’ cultures, where conversations tend to focus on masculine activities or are conducted according to masculine norms. In doing academic work I’ve tried to gain a better understanding of women and work, by making sex, gender, sexuality, and gendered inequality part of students’ lives and understandings through my teaching, along with doing some research into why women leave prestigious professions like law to go into more satisfying work[1]. More recently, whenever possible, I’ve been making small changes and differences in my own workplace and working practice (but not through positive discrimination, dear me no, that would be illegal in the UK). But it doesn’t seem to make much difference, academic work… imagine that… or anything I do in my own working context, business schools… wonder why…

I think I started to understand women and work a little better when in 2004 I went to visit the Women’s Library in east London with my partner – it’s in a lovely building in Old Castle St, E1 (a converted wash-house, I’ve just found out) in a backstreet within sight and sound of the City, but definitely not on the main drag. A location that seems unpleasantly appropriate, given the cultural hostility to women in the UK financial industries – reading Linda McDowell’s Capital Culture is one of the most disturbing introductions to gendered discrimination or inequality in that milieu. All business school students should read it… anyway, I like that the library is within reach of everyone working in the Gherkin and the other various glass and steel phallic symbols around there.

Being in the library is a lovely sensory experience – quiet, calm, pleasant. (I’m thinking here ‘the way libraries used to be’ but that makes me sound old and grumpy.) In any event, a very nice place for thinking. The impression from reading pieces on this website is that academics interested in the experience of work never switch off their brains — Dawn Lyon in a B&B quizzing an innocent hotel inspector about his work, Lynne Pettinger getting lost and starting to think about work and sound,Tim Strangleman walking around galleries thinking about organizational death. The experience I had in the library that day was similar.

The exhibition was a corker — called Office Politics: Women in the Workplace 1860–2004, it was a brilliantly put together mixture of furniture (with desks designed specifically to ensure women’s modesty and protect men’s marriages – as an antidote, this is good fun: http://www.linux.otherspace.co.uk/officepolitics/), antique office machinery, clothes, self-help books, all sorts of stuff to position women in relation to work, organization, men. So much stuff I didn’t know about. And also, a little paper timeline with key events marked over the 150 year period. One event and date stood out for me – 1961, Barclays removes the marriage bar.

You’ve probably heard of the marriage bar, but I hadn’t. Turns out there used to be a formal rule in lots of organizations that women had to leave on getting married. No question, no debate, no exceptions — marry and you have to go. And the year when the board of Barclays decided this wasn’t really a good idea — 1961 – just 2 years before my mum got married, not long before I was born. Well within living memory. In some organizations you could come back as a temporary employee without any benefits or security (‘Thank you sir!’), but for most the bar was a barrier that couldn’t be jumped or worked around. The Foreign Office was especially reluctant to remove it, waiting until the Sex Discrimination Act in the early 1970s sort of outlawed its implementation. Hmm.

So, marry and go do some domestic and reproductive labour, or stay single and you can stay in your job. With a colleague from Exeter, Emma Jeanes, I started to do some digging in the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex, an archive that’s been called a ‘structure of feeling’ rather than a systematic dataset. One diary lodged there, written between 1938 and 1944, tells a wonderful story of a woman working in the civil service. She fell in love with a married man, became pregnant, and told her boss – who promptly asked for her resignation under the marriage bar rules. This woman, who must have been very sparky, refused, on the reasonable basis that she wasn’t married but pregnant, and there was no rule about pregnant women having to leave. Rational argument for a bureaucratic setting! She kept her job, gave birth to twins, and continued to work for the Civil Service, by all accounts doing a very good job (in both spheres of life, work and family – her children are currently editing her diaries for publication, when they can find time — they’re both senior academics, at Imperial College and Oxford). Another diarist, who stayed single and therefore kept her job, was brave enough to call herself a ‘Feminist’ (with a capital F) in her workplace in 1940s Glasgow. (Weirdly, this diarist lived at the top of the hill my mother was born at the bottom of – strange feeling to read her diary, as she describes sitting on the bus going past my granny’s house.) I really like this woman, from reading her diary, because she prods her colleagues all the time about their views on women and work – making trouble, causing conflict, challenging, then writing it all up. She would have made a good academic or researcher. Her brother did, from what she says – he worked at Glasgow University, first in the engineering faculty, then as an industrial psychologist of all things. Whereas his sister seems to have spent her working life as a clerk, writing wonderful diaries and being a Feminist. 

We’re not entirely sure where this research is heading, but it does feel like it’s taking us into interesting areas empirically and theoretically. We’re finding that women writing about their experience of work responded to the marriage bar in very different ways. Some argued for it, telling workmates that it was unethical for a woman to ‘take a man’s job’ when she didn’t need to earn independently; others were strongly opposed, wanting to maintain financial and social independence from husbands. The women report very different responses from their male colleagues, from extremely conservative to relatively radical. Above all, reading the diaries has given us a healthy respect for the variety of human experience and response to regulation. In short, as ever, we’re finding that a societal and organizational desire to impose a norm, to create a divide according to biological sex, was continually contested, circumvented, and undermined.

We’re on the lookout now for people who actually had to leave work because they got married. So if you know of any friends or relatives with this experience who would be willing to tell their stories, please contact either me or Emma Jeanes.

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[1] Taylor, S. (2010) ‘Gendering in the holistic milieu: A critical realist analysis of homeopathic work’, Gender, Work & Organization, 17(4).
]]> http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/815/feed 0 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/663 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/663#comments Thu, 04 Mar 2010 15:25:28 +0000 Lynne Pettinger http://nowaytomakealiving.net/?p=663 My Dad has a story about how he came to get a job. It was the mid-60s, and he was going to leave school with a miscellany of o-levels. The teacher called him in and said,

“well Pettinger, what’s it to be”.

“dunno sir”

Mr Heckthorpe starts reading from the list of possible careers, starting at A.

“Accountant?”

“ Yeah, that’ll do.”

Mr Heckthorpe gets the yellow pages to start calling all the accountants in Bradford, alphabetically. This is long before professionalisation made accountancy a graduate-only occupation. At ‘C’ (for Claridge Turner), he finds an opening, and my Dad starts his training. (It’s not quite the youth employment officer who thinks Billy Casper’s only right for manual labour in Kes.)

Dad reckons he considered holding on till Mr Heckthorpe reached bricklaying… and the Pettinger world would have been quite different.

In the recent discussions of careers advice (renamed careers guidance… advice is a dangerous thing to proffer too readily), it’s very easy to find funny stories about its failures, as Philip Hensher does. But it is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do well: matching people, with all their presumptions about work, their knowledge and abilities, to a spectacularly wide range of occupations. To know what jobs exist, yet alone have an inkling of what they demand, what pleasures they offer, what you need to do to get them, would be an enormous undertaking.

Now, as a sociologist of work, I’ve being asked to contribute to a career development module to improve the ‘employability’ of students – because the main benefit of education is, apparently, to provide an oven-ready workforce. No mind that my research expertise is in customer service work (please, no rubbish jokes about the likely destinations of sociology graduates: our students learn to think independently and question commonsense understandings of how the world works, which some employers value). There are two things I want to tell them:

1. the jobs they’ll end up in ten years are probably not ones they think are possible now: there’s more complexity to the labour market than they can imagine.
2. that asking people to talk about their careers produces stories about luck and happenstance as much as decision making and direction (see e.g. Arthur, Inkson and Pringle, 1999).

But luck and happenstance demand decision-making in turn, and even good possibilities throw up conundrums that need worrying out. When a friend asked for advice about what direction to take in a career he’s well established in, I stuttered a tepid, milksop answer, one that stressed feeling and intuition. I had no expertise to offer in the moment, no wise-sociologist suggestion to assess the possibilities of each role, to consider how each would be formative of future possibilities. This means I encouraged him to make decisions based on values which Boltanski and Chiapello (2007) associate with the ‘new spirit of capitalism’: emotional responses to a quest for autonomy, creativity and self-fulfilment, which those engaging in the flexible network of the ‘projective city’ ought to aspire to. Not certainty, a ladder, security and a plan for a future as a company man.

And I wonder whether it is right of me to reproduce these new spirit values as the ones that matter most. For my friend, already a winner in the global labour market, it works well. For my students, the selling of autonomy and flexibility as virtues maybe more problematic: they certainly understand that work should be fulfilling, suit their personalities and such like, but I don’t know that sort of work is so easy to find and hold. And if a lad like my Dad is about to leave school in Bradford with a few GCSEs, I’m pretty certain he’ll find it harder to get work that has meaning to him, and certainly impossible to leverage the sort of mobility Dad found when he stepped onto the bottom rung of a well-placed ladder.

References

1. Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. (2007) The New Spirit of Capitalism. Verso, London, trans Gregory Elliot.
2. Arthur M. B., Inkson K., and Pringle J.K. (1999) The New Careers: Individual Action and Economic Change. Sage: London.
]]> http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/663/feed 6 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/578 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/578#comments Wed, 06 Jan 2010 13:42:20 +0000 Lynne Pettinger http://nowaytomakealiving.net/?p=578 Dawn and I recently watched Mesrine: Killer Instinct and Mesrine: Public Enemy Number 1, a semi-fictionalised account of the life of Jacques Mesrine, France’s most famous bank robber. Apart from a brief period working in an architect’s practice, Mesrine (played by Vincent Cassel) made a living from illegal activities. A professional criminal has to do more than rob one bank, kill one thug. He must commit to the life, wear the bullet scars and break out of the prisons that try to contain him. Dick Hobbs says a professional criminal isn’t one who works full time as a criminal, but one who accesses a criminal knowledge base and infrastructure to faciliate their work (2006: 421). Mesrine does all this. In Killer Instinct, Guido (Gérard Depardieu) is the gangster boss who trains Mesrine and inculcates him into the professional code. This code is illustrated most notably when Mesrine returns to the Canadian jail he escaped from, to spring the other inhabitants. It’s all very exciting.



But during Public Enemy Number 1, despite several more robberies, shootings, a kidnapping and prison escapes, I did start to shift in my seat, yawning. It turns out the mid-life career of a professional bank robber is only little more exciting than the mid-life career of the professional bank clerk. The routinisation of Mesrine’s criminal life serves as warning against crime, not because of the danger, but because of the tedium.

References

1. Hobbs, D. (2006) ‘The Nature and Representation of Organised Crime in the United Kingdom’ in Fijnaut, C. and Paoli, L. Organised Crime in Europe: concepts, patterns and control policies in the European Union and beyond. Springer.
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