The issue of employer branding has always had an intrinsic interdisciplinary content, since it builds a bridge for cross-fertilization between different disciplines (strategic marketing, strategic management, and human resources management). This paper presents employer branding as an approach based on effective strategic organizational resources and a precise employer branding management process. In this paper, the target is to define a possible frame in order to interpret employer branding techniques as control and regulation mechanisms. Control in organizations has long been a topic of interest for researchers and practitioners, alike who generally recognize that control mechanisms are needed to ensure that organizations may achieve their goals. It has been carried out a field work on the Italian Aeronautical Meta district, that generates annual revenues equal to EUR 8.7 billion and employees 36,300 people, of whom approximately 10% are employed in the space sector. Through this field work, the intention aim is to understand if and how employer branding may create, enforce, and set up internal and shared meaning and values. In particular, stemming from the empirical research's evidences, this paper tries to conceptualize employer branding as a factor to persuade and influence the way that organizational actors enact in a socially constructed context. In this effort, the aim is to understand how managers may affect meanings, values, goals, and opinions through an effective action on employer branding that can play a crucial role in affecting sense-making processes, meanings, interpretations of the symbolic environment. The paper therefore opens up to new horizons, since it embraces a new application for employer branding, considering it as a modern control system and proposing an innovative approach in managerial control, founded on organizational identity as a key concept in an organizational citizenship's perspective.Keywords: employer branding, organizational control, strategic control
IntroductionValentina Della Corte, Gianluigi Mangia, Clelia Cascella, Giuseppina Zamparelli, Andrea Tomo University of Naples "Federico II", Naples, Italy This paper tries to analyze employer branding management as a tool of control, both in strategic and organizational terms. The theme of employer branding has always had an intrinsic interdisciplinary content, since it builds a bridge between the studies of strategic marketing and management and that of human resources management and organizational behaviour. In an era, when brand per se seems to have lost its power and meaning, serious and concrete branding strategies that are just the top of an iceberg of firm's investments on high quality services/products and talented human resources, on the contrary, show to be even possible source of strategic competitive advantage (Della Corte, Mangia, 2010;Della Corte, Mangia, Micera, & Zamparelli, 2011).Employer branding is therefore an approach that based on effective strategic organizational resources and a precise employer bra...