Organizations and their consumers: Bridging work and consumption

Abstract

The last twenty years or so have seen a far-reaching reconfiguration of the characters that dominate the world of organizations. For much of its life, the study of organizations was dominated by two central characters, the manager and the worker, whose relationship with all its tensions, conflicts, and accommodations unfolded with within a broader environment of markets, governments, shareholders, social institutions, technological forces and so forth. In recent years, however, there has been a substantial movement to change the two-actor show into a three-actor show, the organizational dyad into a triad. The newcomer to the stage has been the consumer, a character whose whims, habits, desires and practices are no longer seen as 'impacting on' the activities of managers and workers from the outside but increasingly as defining them. At times the referee in the management-labour contest, the consumer is often called upon to take sides, declare winners and losers, and even define the rules of the game (e.g.

The Construction of Meaning for the Emotional Labor

“…In this perspective, consumption is considered not only the acquisition or use of goods, services or experiences but a phenomenon that is produced through the work of several areas of the organization, such as salespeople and consumers (Gabriel, 2018). These new forms of work, organized around consumption, are studied by some researchers in Organizational Studies scholarships (Andrade, 2015;Fontenelle, 2015;Gabriel, Korczynski, & Rieder, 2015;McCann, 2014;Pettinger, 2015;Van Marrewijk & Broos, 2012) that present the changes caused in the processes of management and work with the rise of the consumer. Among these changes, organizations began to demand subjective aspects of workers, as well as their emotions, as a way to attribute quality and constantly satisfy the consumer (Hochschild, 2012).…”

Brazilian new middle class stratagem: dialectics of consumption and renewal of the overexploitation of labor

“…In the last years, three special editions were published by international journals in the area of OS, dedicated to consumption: consumption and politics in Ephemera (2013); organizations and their consumers in Organization (2015); and consumption and work in Ephemera (2016). We agree about the relevance of including consumption in contemporary debates in the field of OS, however not for the same reasons pointed by Gabriel, Korczynski and Rieder (2015), which are similar to those of Fontenelle (2015), Chertkovskaya and Loacker (2016), and Bauer and Gegenhuber (2015). We understand that the debate on consumption has always been important, even though neglected, since consumption and consumers are produced (considering production in a wide sense) in the ambit of the essential and contradictory relationships involving production, consumption and work.…”

Unequal Consumers: Consumerist healthcare technologies and their creation of new inequalities

“…Consumerism has recently become a relevant topic for management and organization scholars as it raises questions about how organizing occurs and who is involved in those processes (Gabriel, Korczynski, & Rieder, 2015). Consumerism can be defined as a process whereby exchanges between people become ruled by a market ideology, resulting in users becoming consumers who actively make individualized choices about the services or products they 'demand' (Baudrillard, 1998;Bauman, 2007).…”