Brannan, MJ, Parsons, E and Priola, V (2015) Brands at Work: Understanding Organizational Control Through the Illusory Power of Employee Branding. Organization Studies, 36 (1). pp. 29-53. ISSN 0170-8406

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Abstract

Brand scholarship traditionally resides within the marketing literature and focuses on organizations’ external relationships with customers. However, increasing critical attention in organization studies has focused on the brand in order to understand its impact on the internal dynamics of employment relations in contemporary organizations. Drawing on an ethnography of frontline service work in an IT consultancy call centre, we explore the brand as an internal organizational resource sustaining the process of employee meaning-making activities. Documenting the ‘work of the brand’, we outline what the brand offers both employees and employers and, in doing so, we theorize the brand at work as a connecting mechanism between processes of identity formation/re-formation and regulation. While employees are encouraged to internalize particular brand meanings (in this case prestige, success and quality), we found that they often willingly buy into these intended brand meanings as a palliative to ‘cope’ with mundane work. In this way brand meanings are central to producing a self-disciplining form of employee subjectivity.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: brand, call centres, employee branding, ethnography, identity, organizational control
Divisions: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > Keele Management School
Depositing User: Symplectic
Date Deposited: 28 Sep 2016 15:15
Last Modified: 05 Mar 2020 13:29
URI: https://eprints.keele.ac.uk/id/eprint/2210

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