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.'