Brands at Work: The Search for Meaning in Mundane Work

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. 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.'

Serving Time: Volunteer Work, Liminality and the Uses of Meaningfulness at Music Festivals

“…This sense of communitas, by producing satisfaction and a sense of togetherness, may be commodified and used to motivate labour. This substitution of concrete benefits by meaningfulness has been noted in recent management literature (e.g., Brannan et al, ; Bunderson and Thompson, ; Endrissat et al, ), and is a feature of contemporary work more generally. Indeed, festival work exemplifies this trend and highlights its dependence on liminality.…”

“…Contemporary work is increasingly marked by discourses of meaningfulness, self‐expression and personal fulfilment (e.g., Bailey et al, ; Brannan et al, ; Fleming, ). Combining work and personal satisfaction with a critique of bureaucratic ‘traditional’ work, contemporary organizations imbue labour with a new meaningfulness, inciting both praise and cynicism (Endrissat et al, ; Fleming and Spicer, ).…”

“…When power wants to make people forget, music is ritual...when it wants them to believe, music is enactment, representation; when it wants to silence them, it is reproduced, normalized. Attali 2009, p. 20 © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd and Society for the Advancement of Management Studies Contemporary work is increasingly marked by discourses of meaningfulness, selfexpression and personal fulfilment (e.g., Brannan et al, 2015;Fleming, 2009). Combining work and personal satisfaction with a critique of bureaucratic 'traditional' work, contemporary organizations imbue labour with a new meaningfulness, inciting both praise and cynicism (Endrissat et al, 2015;Fleming and Spicer, 2007).…”

The Five Paradoxes of Meaningful Work: Introduction to the special Issue ‘Meaningful Work: Prospects for the 21st Century’

“…In consequence, meaningfulness is raised beyond a sense that it is an immediate response to what is happening in the here-and-now, but rather is enmeshed in a wider temporal landscape (Bailey and Madden, 2017). Juxtaposing these findings with those of Brannan et al (2015) whose study of the manipulative use of employer branding alerts us to the potential use of the promise of a future career and thus an improved future self that involves individuals in an endless quest of becoming. A desired future self is thereby used as an aspirational rhetorical device and disciplinary mechanism.…”

Investigating Key Antecedents and Outcomes of Employee‐based Brand Equity

“…Brand knowledge captures the cognitive representation of the brand in employees' minds owing to accumulated prior knowledge and thus is also a key determinant of EBBE (Baumgarth and Schmidt, ). Accumulated prior knowledge of brand values has a strong influence on orchestrating and directing organizational members towards organization's strategic objectives (Brannan et al, ). In turn, such brand‐related cognitive schemata can contribute to higher levels of EBBE.…”