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. Keywordsbrand, call centres, employee branding, ethnography, identity, organizational control 'All I want in life is a little bit of love to take the pain away.'Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space 'In ev'ry job that must be done, there is an element of fun.You find the fun and snap! The job's a game. And ev'ry task you undertake becomes a piece of cake. A lark! A spree! It's very clear to see that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.'

The extent of recent misconduct in retail financial services questions assumptions that mis-selling is perpetrated by rogue traders dealing in sub-prime markets. Yet we know little about the organizational dimensions of mis-selling and specifically how new employees are introduced to and subsequently enact mis-selling behaviour when not explicitly encouraged to do so. This article seeks to understand the mechanics of mis-selling through an ethnographic account of the opening of a new retail financial services call centre, and analysis of the ritual nature of the sales interaction. The study documents the training, induction and initial work of direct sales agents to better understand the complexity, social relations and organization of mis-selling, together with the way in which regulation and management regimes shape sales practice and consequent employee behaviour. The critical analysis of sales rituals allows us to explain how mis-selling becomes embedded in organizational practice and contributes to our understanding of the everydayness of mis-selling in contrast to approaches that focus either on individual decision-making or on cultural explanations.

This article explores the labour process of a team of call-centre workers based in a multi-client call centre in the West Midlands. Founded on the basis of a 13-month ethnographic study into workplace resistance in callcentre environments, this article provides insights into control in call centres, focusing on sexuality, internal team dynamics and discipline. It is argued that control is exerted through management and information technology but it is crucially exerted laterally in the team and sexuality is an important medium of such control. This article focuses specifically on how worker sexuality is deployed to regulate the tension between contradictory imperatives faced by workers. The article then considers the emotional content of the call-centre labour process, arguing that the apparent resolution of potentially contradictory logic, in fact, depends upon the development by call-centre workers, encouraged by more senior employees, of informal, pseudo-sexualized client relations at the point of production. Crucially however the fieldwork reveals that the demands placed upon customer service representatives are subtly gendered.

This paper examines how employer branding is used and embedded through the organizational HR practices; specifically recruitment, selection and integration. The paper adds to the growing literature on employer branding by specifically focusing upon concrete HR practices, which are often left unexplored in contemporary accounts of branding practices. Our research question is to explore the specific role that these practices play in the enactment of employer branding and assess their implications. Moreover, in order to better understand the wider significance of employer branding, scholarship needs to explore these processes in contexts where brand recognition is less prevalent. Drawing on a large multi-national organization (CollinaTrade) involved in the provision of products and services in the construction industry, the organization's minimalist focus on consumer brands makes them a useful case study for evaluating the work of employer branding outside consumer facing industries. This paper points to the significance of viewing employer branding as a management tool in terms of cultural reinforcement and symbolic representations at work and the way in which this work through HR practices. Our data shows that the logic of employer branding in contexts where the brand is less significant, is essentially contradictory, requiring both individualism and uniformity which may have a greater impact on workplace identities than previously thought.

Meta-analysis has proved increasingly popular in management and organisation studies as a way of combining existing empirical quantitative research to generate a statistical estimate of how strongly variables are associated. Whilst a number of studies identify technical, procedural and practical limitations of meta-analyses, none have yet tackled the meta-theoretical flaws in this approach. We deploy critical realist meta-theory to argue that the individual quantitative studies, upon which meta-analysis relies, lack explanatory power because they are rooted in quasi-empiricist meta-theory. This problem, we argue, is carried over in meta-analyses. We then propose a 'Critical Realist Synthesis' as a potential alternative to the use of meta-analysis in organisation studies and social science more widely.