Abstract
This essay presents an argument for critical organization studies scholars to more seriously address the phenomenon of corporate branding as a central, constitutive feature of organizing in contemporary capitalism. While brands and branding have historically been the domain of marketing and consumer studies researchers, I argue that a focus on the intersection of branding and organizing enables critical researchers to more effectively address the ways in which neoliberal capitalism and post-Fordist organizational forms mediate processes of meaning construction and human identity formation. Taking up Böhm and Land’s claim that neoliberal capitalism is characterized by a ‘new hidden abode of production’, I adopt Dean’s conception of ‘communicative capitalism’ to explore how branding processes are ‘hidden in plain sight’ as a key, constitutive element of this ‘new hidden abode’. As such, branding can be explored as a particular case of ‘organizing beyond organization’. The essay develops three elements of the branding and organizing relationship as medium and outcome of communicative capitalism: (1) floating signifiers and nodal points, (2) communicative labor, and (3) communication and affect.
In a recent essay, Böhm and Land (2012) argue for the concept of a ‘new hidden abode’ of production to characterize the capitalist accumulation process under neoliberalism. Building on Marx’s (1967) original analysis of factory work as the ‘hidden abode’ in which the exploitive extraction of surplus value occurs, Böhm and Land question the privileging of the labor process at the point of production as the only source of value in neoliberal capitalism. Consistent with recent work in Autonomist Marxist theory (e.g. Gill and Pratt, 2008; Hardt and Negri, 1999; Lazzarato, 2004), the concept of the ‘new hidden abode’ expands analyses of value creation beyond the workplace to include everyday processes of communication, meaning, and identity management through which circuits of social and cultural reproduction occur. While their essay is primarily an effort to mediate and fruitfully explore the tensions between Labor Process Theory’s focus on value creation at the point of production and Autonomist Marxist theorists’ conception of the ‘social factory’ as the new source of capital accumulation, it points to an emergent rethinking in critical organization and management studies of the locus of ‘organizing’ and its implications for what count as legitimate objects of study. Moreover, it suggests a broader theorizing of the relationships among work, power, organizing, and subjectivity than has typically been the purview of critical organization scholars.
The intent of this essay, then, is to build on these nascent developments in critical organization studies by focusing on brands and branding processes as key, constitutive elements in the process of organizing and the concomitant creation of value beyond the workplace. In other words, branding exemplifies emergent processes of ‘organizing beyond organization’ or, as Böhm and Land indicate, following Cooper and Burrell (1988), a shift from the organization of production to the ‘production of organization’. However, while Böhm and Land’s notion of the ‘new hidden abode’ of production usefully expands theorizing regarding the contradictions and antagonisms of the capital accumulation process under neoliberalism, it fails to adequately unpack the dynamics of this value production process. An exploration of the intersection of branding and organizing, then, will help to put some flesh on the theoretical bones that Böhm and Land helpfully construct.
First, I want to extend Böhm and Land’s argument and make the case that while neoliberalism may be characterized by a ‘new hidden abode of production’, that abode is in fact ‘hidden in plain sight’, largely through the ubiquity of branding processes in everyday life. As I will show, this has important implications for how we think about the dialectics of control and resistance in the neoliberal production of organization. Second, the indeterminacy of labor that is a key antagonism of the capitalist labor process (i.e. the disjuncture between the potential for labor—labor power—and the creation of surplus value through actual labor) has its parallels in neoliberalism with the indeterminacy of meaning; that is, the disjuncture between social–cultural production and reproduction processes and their appropriation by organizations in the creation of value. This places the production, maintenance, and transformation of meaning as a key terrain of struggle in neoliberal capitalism (a dynamic struggle in which branding plays a key role). Third, this indeterminacy of meaning can be framed within the broader political economy of what can be termed ‘communicative capitalism’ (Dean, 2009, 2010, 2014); that is, a conjuncture of economic, political, and discursive formations that organizes work, identity, and democracy in specific ways under neoliberalism. Again, I will explore how branding is both medium and outcome of communicative capitalism.
In the next section, then, I lay out a more detailed case for branding as a legitimate domain of study for critical organization scholars. In the subsequent section, I will address the intersection of organizing and branding in the broader political economic context of ‘communicative capitalism’. Finally, I will articulate an initial, provisional research agenda moving forward.
Why branding?
While the branding of consumer products has been around for almost 200 years, the emergence of neoliberalism as a way of organizing economics, politics, meaning, and identity has positioned branding at the epicenter of everyday organizing processes. Traditionally, however, the study of brands and branding processes has been the purview of marketing and consumer studies. While the dominant research paradigm in these fields has been instrumental or ‘administrative’ in orientation (Lazarsfeld, 1941), over the last 25 years a distinctly critical tradition has emerged that parallels the Critical Management Studies (CMS) community of scholars in organization studies. This research draws heavily on critical and cultural theoretical frameworks, including neo-Marxism, Frankfurt School–affiliated critical theory, post-structuralism, and post-colonialism, and largely focuses on problematizing ‘the market’ in its role as the medium between production and consumption (e.g. Arnould and Thompson, 2005; Desmond, 2003; Firat, 2014; Jack, 2008; Prothero and Fitchett, 2000; Saren et al., 2007; Tadajewski, 2010a; Tadajewski and Maclaran, 2009). In this sense, critical marketing studies is ‘axiologically predicated on the issue of power relations’ (Tadajewski, 2010b: 791), adopting an ‘anti-managerial’ perspective to explore the intersection of social, political, and economic factors in the construction of consumption practices and consumer identities. A subset of this critical scholarship, Consumer Culture Theory (CCT), examines consumption as an agentic process in which the focus is on ‘the dynamic relationships between consumer actions, the marketplace, and cultural meanings’ (Arnould and Thompson, 2005: 868). In this body of research, emphasis is placed on consumption as a productive activity through which consumers ‘actively rework and transform symbolic meanings encoded in advertisements, brands, retail settings, or material goods’ as a way to ‘further identity and lifestyle goals’ (Arnould and Thompson, 2005: 871).
From a critical marketing perspective, then, the brand is viewed as a point of contestation around which marketing strategies and consumer reception practices revolve (e.g. Holt, 2002). Common themes in critical marketing studies include (1) the often-deleterious consequences of marketing and branding on the development of a more just society and (2) the possibilities for resisting marketing and branding processes (Arnould, 2007; Klein, 2001). In each case, however, focus of analysis lies largely outside the organizational or corporate form; that is, there is relatively little attention paid to the ‘hidden abode of production’ in which the process of value creation occurs. When organization or corporate life is addressed, the focus tends to be on marketing and brand managers. For example, Svensson’s (2007) social phenomenological study attempts to ‘de-reify’ marketing work by examining the everyday sense-making and discursive practices of marketing managers as they construct what counts as ‘marketing work’.
This focus on power relations and meaning construction processes ‘outside’ the organization means that there has been relatively little rapprochement between critical marketing and critical organization scholarship. Indeed, until recently critical organizational scholars have paid little attention to branding processes at all (for recent exceptions, see Alvesson, 2013; Ashcraft et al., 2012; Brannan et al., 2011; Karreman and Rylander, 2008; Lair et al., 2005; Land and Taylor, 2010; Rennstam, 2013; Willmott, 2010). This is surprising, especially given the increasing influence of branding in the last 30 years not only over consumption processes but over organizing processes as well. As Kornberger (2010) argues, ‘brands are increasingly becoming the internal organizing principle of business’ (p. 22). In some respects, brands come first and everyday organizing and work processes follow.
There is considerable precedent, then, for critical engagement with the ways in which brands, organizing, meaning, and identity management intersect in the process of capitalist value creation. Organizational scholars thus have the opportunity to explore branding—as a discursive practice—in terms of its organizing properties in the spheres of economics, politics, aesthetics, and sense-making and identity. Below, I unpack further the relationship between branding and these spheres.
First, economically speaking, leveraging brand equity has become one of the principal modes through which organizations translate potential into actual economic value (Willmott, 2010). Indeed, the increased centrality of brand equity as the yardstick for corporate viability has enabled the production of value to escape the walls of the corporation and enter everyday life through ‘immaterial labor’ (Land and Taylor, 2010; Lazzarato, 1996), especially given the close articulation of value and the strategic management of the symbolic. In such circumstances, any free, autonomous act of communication has the potential to become free labor that is brandable and transformable into economic value. Witness, for example, the recent US phenomenon of ‘Alex from Target’—a teenage grocery bagger at a Target store in Texas—who became a social media ‘meme’ with over 700,000 Twitter followers after his photo was posted online by a teenage female admirer. After an appearance on the Ellen DeGeneres Show, ‘Alex from Target’ now has an agent and goes ‘on tour’ (to do exactly what is unclear). Alex is no longer merely a teenage boy but a brand with economic value. Such a focus on the intersection of branding and economics speaks to the need to explore the ways in which ‘the economic’ is a discursively constructed effort to shape meanings in ways that produce surplus value and, concomitantly, to question the bifurcation (epistemically and ontologically) of discourse and economics (Hanan and Hayward, 2014; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985).
Second, politically speaking, brands increasingly insert themselves directly into the organization of stakeholder struggles around competing interests, rights, and responsibilities (Banet-Weiser, 2012). Through their brands, corporations have increasingly positioned themselves to take on the role traditionally occupied in modernity by the processes and practices of citizenship, including, for example, articulating brand image with particular forms of issue advocacy (Banet-Weiser, 2012). Attention to branding processes therefore extends critical scholars’ exploration of the relationship between organizing and democracy. Corporate brand strategists are eager to make the case that branding serves a democratizing function, enabling consumers to make informed choices between trusted, responsible, and ethical brands and those that are less responsive to consumer beliefs and values (e.g. Gobé, 2002). Critical organization scholarship, on the other hand, has the ability to explore the mechanisms of complexity reduction that lie at the heart of branding, as companies attempt to mediate (and hence monetize) every aspect of human experience and, indeed, life itself. Such complexity reduction is achieved through the creation of ready-made narratives that affectively connect employees and consumers alike to the brand experience. Critical scholarship, then, can explore and critique the branded creation of human experiences that limit the possibilities for community and democracy beyond the domain of the brand. Addressing and critiquing the marketization and monetization of democracy is an important—perhaps the most significant—task for critical scholars.
Third, brands are a constitutive element of the increased emphasis in neoliberal, post-Fordist organizing practices on aesthetic and emotion-based work (Brannan et al., 2011). As the distinction between production and consumption, work and life becomes more blurred, employees are increasingly expected to bring their whole, ‘authentic’ selves to work (Fleming, 2009). From a managerial perspective, this ‘authentic’ self translates into forms of employee performativity that function as both medium and outcome of the corporate brand. Employees are both hired and trained in accordance with brand principles and then embody and (ideally) increase brand value through their aesthetic and performative enactment of its elements. Importantly, both employees and consumers are implicated in this process, as the former are expected to play an increasing role in embodying and enhancing the branded experience constructed for the latter (Land and Taylor, 2010; Pettinger, 2004).
Fourth, brands function as a principal mechanism through which identity and sense-making processes are mediated and constructed. In an era of ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman, 2000) and its attendant, ontological insecurity brands offer the possibility for a stable sense of identity in a prestructured corporate space. In this sense, ‘Brand management is about making the becoming of subjects and the becoming of value coincide’ (Arvidsson, 2006: 93). Branding is thus both a quotidian dimension of organizational life in which everyone is implicated (Vásquez et al., 2013) and a principal mechanism through which meaning creation and human identity formation occur (Arvidsson, 2006; Banet-Weiser, 2012). Indeed, as Brannan et al.’s (2015) study suggests, an important part of the ‘work of the brand’ involves both providing internal symbolic resources for employees’ professional identity work and its mobilization by organizations as a source of corporate meaning management and employee control. Moreover, as several authors have demonstrated, brand value is increasingly tied to identity management as corporations shift from providing consumers with products and services to creating experiences that enable particular ‘lifestyles’ that are lived through brands and brand communities (Arvidsson, 2005, 2006; Banet-Weiser, 2012; Dholakia and Firat, 2003; Morandin et al., 2013). Importantly, both employees and consumers are implicated in this process, as the former are expected to play an increasing role in embodying and enhancing the branded experience constructed for the latter (Land and Taylor, 2010; Pettinger, 2004).
The study of branding therefore represents an important extension of critical organization scholars’ focus on identity that—in the last 15 years or so—arguably has become the central agenda item of critical scholarship (e.g. Alvesson et al., 2008; Alvesson and Willmott, 2002; Driver, 2009; Holmer Nadesan, 1996; Kenny et al., 2011; Knights and Willmott, 1999; Kuhn, 2006). This focus is largely a result of the intersection of the increased sense of insecurity and precarity that characterizes 21st-century neoliberal capitalism and the efforts of its principal institution—the post-Fordist organization—to make employee identity regulation a key practice through which economic value is realized (Ross, 2003).
However, while critical studies of organizations and identity have focused on the disciplining effects of post-Fordist organizing, little of this research has systematically connected this disciplining process to the broader political economy of contemporary neoliberal capitalism (which tends to be assumed rather than taken up as an object of analysis). Part of my argument, then, following Moran (2015), is that identity ‘cannot be separated from the cultural political economy of the capitalist societies in which it came to prominence’ (p. 4) and that, moreover, branding functions as a principal organizing and mediatory mechanism in articulating the relationship between identity and the capitalist value creation process. Thus, it is a principal goal of this essay to begin to unpack the connections among branding, organizing, and identity in the creation of value within neoliberal capitalism.
A complementary critique applies to critical marketing studies. While critical marketing scholars have systematically deconstructed marketing and branding as a ‘managerial discourse’ (Tadajewski and Brownlie, 2008) that reproduces the existing structure of consumption, it has tended to gloss over the particularity of the relationships among politics, capital accumulation process, and political economy under neoliberal capitalism. A central element of my argument here, then, is that critical organization—and, by extension, critical marketing—scholarship needs to more effectively examine and theorize the elements of neoliberal capitalism in the current conjuncture. That is, how are power, organizing, identity, meaning, and capitalist value creation being articulated together at a particular historical moment when the old ‘hidden abode’ of production appears to giving way (or is at least being repositioned) to a ‘new hidden abode’ in which the relationship between production and consumption is undergoing transformation.
One way in which we can historicize this shift, I argue, is by exploring branding in the context of ‘communicative capitalism’. In particular, I will argue that branding is a principal medium and outcome of ‘communicative capitalism’ as it articulates together micro-level, everyday practices of communication, meaning, and identity formation and macro-level organizational practices and societal discourses of self, work, professionalism, and so forth.
Branding and communicative capitalism
Contemporary capitalism does not first arrive with factories; these follow, if they follow at all. It arrives with words, signs, and images. (Lazzarato, 2004: 190)
Defining brands and branding
My conception of brands is consistent with recent Autonomist Marxist understandings of the brand as a constellation of signs through which processes of social interaction and communication are mediated and captured and hence transformed into economic value (Arvidsson, 2005, 2006; Banet-Weiser, 2012; Land and Taylor, 2010). Branding, in this sense, involves both the strategic process of image management and the putting to work of sociality and public communication in ways that reproduce or enhance the qualities that the brand image embodies. For example, as Banet-Weiser (2012) shows in her analysis of Dove soap’s ‘campaign for real beauty’, Dove’s branding relies on the immaterial labor of ‘citizen consumers’ who want to engage with important social issues (in this instance, female body image and unrealistic media representations of beauty). As such, Dove provides a ‘mediatic ambience’ (Arvidsson, 2006) or cultural space within which politics can be practiced and identities constructed. At the same time, this cultural space relies for its reproduction on the surplus of meaning and affective ties of citizen consumers. For example, Dove appropriates mother–daughter relationships through the establishment of ‘mother–daughter workshops’ and the availability of online ‘self-esteem tools’ that encourage mothers and daughters to talk together about body image and self-esteem issues. In this sense, the brand is the mechanism through which capital is socialized. In Arvidsson’s (2006) terms, the brand is a hypersocialized, deterritorialized factory in which the ‘ethical surplus’ of human interaction (e.g. social activism) becomes an object that has exchange value. Brands, then, are ‘the affective stuff of culture’ (Banet-Weiser, 2012: 45); they are not simply inserted into existing culture, but rather (from a brand strategy perspective) are the constitutive elements around which culture, sense-making, and identity are produced.
It is here, then, that we can see clearly how the process of value adding takes the immaterial form of ‘communicative labor’ (Carlone, 2008; Dempsey and Carlone, 2014) in which everyday communication and social interaction is ‘put to work’ in order to create economic value. In this important sense, communication and social interaction is constitutive of the ‘new hidden abode’ of production. As we saw earlier in the case of ‘Alex from Target’, value is created solely through the appropriation of autonomously produced social interaction rooted in the subjectivities of teenage girls doing what many teenage girls do—sharing information about boys. Furthermore, once ‘Alex from Target’ became a media meme, a social media marketing company called Breakr claimed the entire event as its own marketing campaign, created in order to demonstrate ‘how powerful the fangirl demographic was’ (Levy, 2014). However, this ‘origin story’ was immediately debunked by all parties involved, and Breakr had to rescind its claim (Peterson, 2014). Thus, Breakr saw an opportunity to enhance its brand value simply by appropriating the autonomous communication of hundreds of thousands of teenagers. 1
I want to add a dialectical element to this conception of brands and branding, however, by rejecting the idea that brands simply act as a form of cultural authority that fully encompasses and mediates the process of meaning and identity construction for consumers. As Holt (2002) has indicated, while this may have been true for the high modern post–World War II years when consumers purchased trusted brands as embodiments of the good life, in the current neoliberal moment, brands actually expect and, indeed, require consumers’ ironic stance on the marketing of ‘lifestyle’ products. As Holt (2002) states, “What has been termed ‘consumer resistance’ is actually a form of market-sanctioned cultural experimentation through which the market rejuvenates itself” (p. 89; see also Goldman and Papson’s (1996) conception of the ‘alienated spectator’ for a related discussion). From a brand perspective, then, consumers’ ironic appropriation of brands is part of the productive autonomy and potential of the commons—a principal element of the hidden abode of production that can be transformed into value.
Framed through an Autonomist Marxist lens, however, such efforts of brand management to capture the productive potential of the networked multitude (Hardt and Negri, 2004) positions brands both as a key capitalist institution for the production of value (Arvidsson, 2006) and as a challenge to the very creation of that value. As such, brands embody a contradiction—they rely on the productivity of the social and the communicative labor of social actors, but at the same time are increasingly unable to fully capture that sociality. This contradiction is at the heart of a dialectics of branding that revolves around the discursive politics of common sense and meaning formation; given the inherent indeterminacy of meaning, brands both attempt to ‘fix’ meaning—however temporarily—in particular ways in order to create a stable cultural space and are subject to contestation and appropriation by brand ‘prosumers’. Sometimes this works to extend the brand in unexpected and profitable ways (e.g. the creative appropriation of Doc Martin boots by various subcultures, resulting in a vastly expanded market); sometimes it destabilizes the universe of meaning associated with the brand (e.g. the now legendary email exchange between MIT student Jonah Peretti and Nike customer service representatives when Peretti attempted to order a pair of shoes personalized with the word ‘sweatshop’—a story that went viral in the early 2000s and caused Nike much embarrassment in drawing attention to its outsourcing practices).
This dialectical conception of branding helps to draw attention to the discursive politics of common sense and meaning formation in which brands play a significant, constitutive role. Here, I draw on Hall and O’Shea’s (2013) conception of ‘common sense’ as A form of ‘everyday’ thinking which offers frameworks of meaning with which to make sense of the world. It is a form of popular, easily available knowledge which contains no complicated ideas … It works intuitively, without forethought or reflection. It is pragmatic and empirical, giving the illusion of arising directly from experience, reflecting only the realities of daily life and answering the needs of the ‘common people’ for practical guidance and advice. (p. 1)
It is in this sense that, under neoliberal capitalism, the ‘new hidden abode’ of production is actually ‘hidden in plain sight’ to the degree that branding aims to work intuitively as a common sense element of ‘direct’ human experience. As Böhm and Land (2012) state, using an actor–network theory frame, the brand is an ‘obligatory passage point’ through which processes of meaning production pass. It is hidden only to the degree that it functions as a medium for human experience and identity management without forethought or reflection. The meaning of brands becomes common sense and hegemonic when their contingency and historicity are hidden. For example, the socially constructed character of the relationship between diamonds and love/marriage has been largely lost to history; the giving of an engagement ring is presumed ‘natural’ and common sense despite its origins in a carefully orchestrated marketing campaign by DeBeers in the first half of the 20th century (Epstein, 1982). The goal of critical studies, then, is to make the construction of such common sense realities visible and hence subject to critique and potential transformation.
In the next section, I lay out the concept of ‘communicative capitalism’ as a useful generative mechanism for exploring the intersection of organizing and branding.
Communicative capitalism
A number of scholars have argued that with the emergence of neoliberalism, we have witnessed a second ‘corporate enclosure’ (e.g. Fleming, 2014; Hardt, 2010). While industrial capitalism depended on the passing of laws of enclosure to privatize the common and hence produce the expropriated labor that filled 19th-century factories, neoliberalism depends on the seizure of another form of common—the knowledge, language, and forms of affect that make up the social—in order to create surplus value. In a series of writings, Jodi Dean has used the term ‘communicative capitalism’ to capture this development and to analyze the current conjuncture of economics, politics, meaning, and identity (see, for example, Dean, 2009, 2010, 2012, 2014). 2 The principal thrust of Dean’s argument is that while industrial capitalism exploited labor, communicative capitalism exploits communication and does so in a way that subsumes democracy, undermining the possibilities for genuine political action and social transformation. Indeed, she argues that capitalism has appropriated communication to such a degree that ‘communication does not provide a critical outside’ (Dean, 2012: 128). Communicative capitalism therefore ‘doesn’t depend on the commodity-thing. It directly exploits the social relation at the heart of value’ (Dean, 2012: 129). 3
Dean argues that there are three key features of communicative capitalism: (1) message as contributions, (2) the decline of symbolic efficiency, and (3) reflexivity (Dean, 2009, 2012, 2014). First, under communicative capitalism, the value of messages depends not on their content or elicitation of responses but on their ability to circulate, to add to the circuits and flows of communication. In this sense, one act of communication is equivalent to another, and the exchange value of a message trumps its use value. Content is subsumed under the mere act of contributing to an ever-increasing data pool. Thus, reduced to the ‘logic of the count, democracy loses its capacity to provide a critical wedge against capitalism’ (Dean, 2014: 153).
Second, Dean argues (following Žižek) that under neoliberalism, communicative capitalism is characterized by a decline of symbolic efficiency such that the meanings of symbols are increasingly local and unable to translate from one context to another, leading to a decrease in the circulatory capacity of symbols. This creates a fundamental uncertainty and insecurity in that we are unable to count on any stable reality (in the sense of a shared set of norms and values). There are thus no ultimate guarantors of meaning. One consequence of this shift is that ‘affective intensities’ become more powerful as people seek imaginary identities that can take the place of the eroded symbolic identities (Dean, 2014). For example, the recent ‘anti-vaccination’ movement among a small segment of well-to-do Americans might be attributed to this decline of symbolic efficiency (scientific knowledge has less circulatory capacity in an age where all opinions are equivalent in their exchange value) and the concomitant increase in efforts to articulate a strong sense of identity around a particular set of affects (my family comes first, and it feels right not to put these toxic substances in my kids’ bodies).
Third, and related, communicative capitalism intensifies conditions of reflexivity, whereby technologically mediated subjectivity is characterized by ‘infinite doubt, ultimate reflexivization’ (Dean, 2014: 155). The conditions under which a sense of ontological security (Giddens, 1991) might be attained are consistently foreclosed insofar as ‘there is always another option, link, opinion, nuance, or contingency that we haven’t taken into account’ (Dean, 2014: 155). Reflexivity, then, ‘goes all the way down’ as we are captured in continuous loops of self-questioning and doubt. With the decline in symbolic efficiency, Dean argues, there are no stable criteria by which to assess whether particular decisions or answers are productive or adequate. Indeed, this endless loop of reflexivity that lacks any Master Signifiers and external points of reference becomes, for Dean (2010), the very process of ‘capture and absorption’ of any real democratic possibilities (p. 13).
There is, then, a contradiction at the heart of communicative capitalism: on one hand, the kind of networked communication technologies that Dean describes realize the ‘fantasies’ of democratic participation in a connected, communication rich, highly engaged, and globalized world (what Dean (2009) describes as the fantasies of abundance, participation, and wholeness); on the other hand, these same communicative exchanges capture social actors in ‘intensive and extensive networks of enjoyment, production, and surveillance’ (Dean, 2010: 3–4) that enable the commodification and capitalization of social interaction. In short, communicative capitalism, for Dean (2010), is an ‘economic-ideological form wherein reflexivity captures creativity and resistance so as to enrich the few as it placates and diverts the many’ (p. 4).
Dean does not address in any detail the role and function of branding in communicative capitalism. She does point to its significance, however, with her discussion of the rise of corporate blogs and her observation that, by 2009, 70% of bloggers were blogging about brands (Dean, 2010: 34). If, as she argues, blogging and social networks such as Facebook and Twitter grease the wheels of neoliberal capitalism by accessing the current conjuncture of media, subjectivity, and politics, then clearly the brand is central to this process. Corporations recognize the possibilities of blogging as a means by which to access the immaterial labor of an almost limitless, ongoing circuit of sociality that can be converted into economic value. However, I want to argue that brands function in a particular manner in this conjuncture. That is, the brand in neoliberal capitalism is one of the principal means by which the decline of symbolic efficiency and the continuous loop of reflexivity are—at least temporarily—arrested. Brands, in this sense, function to ‘arrest the flow of differences, to construct a centre’ around which a stable system of meaning or chain of signification can be articulated (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 112).
Brands are thus a central element of the dynamic struggle within neoliberalism around the indeterminacy of meaning. To the degree that neoliberalism privileges words, signs, and images over material production in the creation of value, brands function as a central, constitutive mechanism in the effort to manage the processes through which indeterminacy is transformed—however temporarily—to determinacy and currency. Brands, then, are part of the hegemonic struggle at the center of what Deleuze (1992) refers to as the ‘societies of control’, that is, the shift to a ‘higher-order production’ in which the corporation has replaced the factory and marketing (and, by extension, branding) ‘has become the center or the “soul” of the corporation’ (p. 6). Societies of control eschew the enclosed, disciplinary spaces of Foucault’s (1979) vision of modernity and instead provide us with the ‘freedom’ to do whatever we want, but always in contexts where our behavior is coded and modulated (rather than molded). We experience a regulated freedom in which we are constantly evaluated according to our ability to live up to the neoliberal entrepreneurial ideal of excellence. The brand, in this sense, is a flexible system of capture that is constantly adjusting to shifting meanings, identities, and affects. While symbolic identity is increasingly fragile and uncertain in the societies of control, brands provide a ‘point of purchase’ (pun intended), a frame of reference that—however temporary and imaginary—provides meaning and value for the neoliberal, entrepreneurial self.
The concept of ‘communicative capitalism’, then, recognizes not only the centrality of knowledge work and immaterial labor to current modes of production but also the degree to which the organization of work and consumption is rooted in the communicative construction of particular identities, meaning systems, conceptions of democracy, and modes of engagement with self, world, and other. In this sense, 21st-century capitalism is about more than the cognitive work of immaterial laborers or the appropriation of the digital free labor of ‘prosumers’. It is, more fundamentally, about the ways that discursive and communicative resources are utilized to construct, institutionalize, and perhaps challenge our relation to work and consumption. As Virno has stated, ‘the primary productive resource of contemporary capitalism lies in the linguistic relational abilities of humankind, in the complex of communicative … faculties … which distinguish humans’ (Virno, 2004: 98).
Framing capitalism communicatively draws attention not only to how capitalism in its current ‘spirit’ operates according to (and legitimates itself through) issues of meaning and identity (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005), but it also focuses on the communicative constitution of both organizational and economic practice (Ashcraft et al., 2009). Neither activity has meaning outside of the particular discourses that constitute them. Neoliberalism is a discourse that creates particular conditions of possibility and material effects; as Du Gay (2000) indicates, ‘the “organizational” and the “economic” … could not operate or have “real” effects outside of “culture,” meaning or discourse’ (p. 166). For example, the marketization and monetization of everything within neoliberalism create a form of common sense that privileges individual freedom (rather than justice or equality of opportunity) and demonizes the poor and anyone unable to construct a successful ‘enterprise self’ (Du Gay, 1996). ‘Common sense’, then, presumes a particular ethics, privileging and reifying particular conceptions of the true, the good, and the possible. Common sense can thus be thought of as a site of political struggle (Gramsci, 1971) that has ethical consequences—as the discursive space in which everyday realities are reproduced, negotiated, and contested.
I turn now to a more detailed discussion of how we might conceptualize the relationships among branding, organizing, and communicative capitalism. Branding as a way of constructing particular ‘common sense’ realities has become an endemic feature of everyday life for corporations, non-profits, political parties, and individuals interested in increasing their value—‘Brand You!’ as Tom Peters has ‘branded’ this condition (Peters, 1997). Below, I unpack the features of communicative capitalism and draw out the central role of branding in its production and reproduction. The focus here is on explicating and critiquing how particular forms of power are rendered tolerable and hence normalized and taken-for-granted (Willmott, 2013).
Branding, organizing, and communicative capitalism
In this section, I lay out three central analytic foci in exploring the connections among branding, organizing, and communicative capitalism. These are not intended to exhaust the theorizing of these relationships but represent an initial effort to articulate what I see as the principal generative mechanisms of the branding process in the current historical moment of communicative capitalism. The three analytic foci are (1) floating signifiers and nodal points, (2) communicative labor, and (3) communication and affect.
In addressing these foci, however, I want to frame them in a dialectical manner, exploring the indeterminacy of meaning that is inherent to the branding process. As we have seen, brands are never fully stable and, indeed, are generally the site of struggle among stakeholders (consumers, employees, management, etc.). Indeed, brands embody what Banet-Weiser (2012) refers to as a ‘politics of ambivalence’; that is, the indeterminacy of meaning upon which brands thrive enables them to mediate the contradictions between the neoliberal privileging of the entrepreneurial self on the one hand and the formation of meaning-based communities on the other. As Brannan et al.’s (2015) study of an IT company demonstrates, for example, employees draw on the company brand as a means to provide a stable self-narrative without necessarily feeling strong commitment to the work per se; for these employees, the brand functions as a symbol of prestige that enables the imagining of an ‘ideal future self’ that mitigates the mundane, deskilled character of the actual call-center work. In a general sense, then, the brand might be thought of as a proxy for what used to be called ‘corporate culture’; as the shift to neoliberalism and employment precarity picked up pace in the 1990s and it became difficult to expect employees to identify with and commit to an organizational culture, the brand increasingly became a key point of reference and meaning for employees whose traditional identity markers were disappearing.
Let me now turn to a discussion of the three foci identified above.
Floating signifiers and nodal points
The idea of the ‘floating signifier’ is developed most importantly by Stuart Hall in his analysis of race as a discursive construct (e.g. Hall, 1985, 1997). In showing that race has no fixed or biological essence, Hall explores how it functions like a language, with racial meanings gaining significance through shifting relations of difference, established with other concepts and ideas in a signifying field. The relational character of such signifying processes can never be finally fixed, existing as temporary ‘nodal points’ that are continuously open to contestation and appropriation (Cederstrom and Spicer, 2013; Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). Thus, the term ‘floating signifier’ identifies the unstable and arbitrary character of the relationship between signifier and signified in the construction of meaning.
In the context of communicative capitalism, then, where value arises from the ability to construct ever more nuanced ‘differences that make a difference’, the floating signifier is an indispensable (and well-understood) element of wealth creation (Fırat and Dholakia, 2006). In the effort to communicatively create value, any signifier has the potential to be linked to any signified, and hence any meaning or quality can be connected to any branded product or service. In this sense, anything is brandable, including water and air. And, concomitantly, the meaning of any brand can change given its conventional and arbitrary construction. For example, Marlboro cigarettes, indelibly branded through the iconic figure of the rugged, frontier cowboy (‘Come to Marlboro country’), began life as a women’s cigarette and was marketed as ‘America’s luxury cigarette’ (‘Smart women demand them!’).
One can argue, then, that branding practices have become central in configuring relations of difference in contemporary culture and society, including differences such as race, gender, and sexuality. For example, a number of companies, including McDonald’s and Abercrombie and Fitch, among others, deploy racial signifiers in their branding. McDonald’s markets fast food to minority communities through particular constructions of family, and A&F encodes whiteness into its brand in specific ways through the deployment of signifiers such as ‘classic’, ‘natural’, and ‘American’ in constructing the ‘A&F look’ (see McBride, 2005, for an insightful analysis of the raced character of the A&F brand).
The operation of the floating signifier, however, occurs in the broader context of organizational relations of power and resistance. While any signifier can be theoretically connected to any signified, and hence any brand (signifier) to any meaning (signified), such ‘arbitrary’ connections are the product of an ethical–political process intended to shape common sense understandings of what is true, right, and possible (Therborn, 1980). Such processes can both reproduce and challenge extant power relations. For example, in the 1970s, soft drinks companies, concerned about their stagnant sales, launched a strategic marketing campaign aimed at undermining public confidence in the quality of tap water. Destabilization of the meaning of tap water as public, safe, reliable, and cheap was coupled with a complementary campaign to extol the virtues of bottled water as pure, exotic, and signifying an active, healthy lifestyle. Despite the fact that bottled water is, on average, about 2000 times more expensive than tap water, the success of this campaign is indicated by the fact that by 2013 total US bottled water consumption had increased to over 10 billion gallons, up from 9.1 billion gallons in 2011 (International Bottled Water Association report, available at http://www.bottledwater.org/public/2011%20BMC%20Bottled%20Water%20Stats_2.pdf#overlay-context=economics/industry-statistics). Framed within the discourse of neoliberalism, such a shift speaks to consumers’ choice of a healthy and convenient product. What this discourse obscures, however, are bottled water companies’ efforts to privatize and monetize a public good and the concomitant degradation of investment in public water utilities infrastructure (see Otto and Bohm, 2006, for an example of local and successful resistance to such privatization efforts). Moreover, as Brei and Böhm (2011) demonstrate, such privatization efforts are often framed within a larger discourse of corporate social responsibility that attempts to discursively construct the consumption of bottled water as an ethical act (e.g. giving aid to impoverished communities in the ‘developing world’).
Deployment of the ‘floating signifier’ has thus become one of the primary strategies through which value is created in neoliberal, post-Fordist capitalism (Fırat and Dholakia, 2006). Indeed, as Holt (2002) indicates, an ironic and reflexive brand persona is a prerequisite for 21st-century marketing. Irony has become an indicator of cool, signifying a ‘permanent state of private rebellion … a stance of [apolitical] individual defiance’ (Poutain and Robins, 2000, quoted in Arvidsson, 2006: 73) that companies attempt to capture in order to strengthen brand equity. Brands, then, exploit a dialectic between ‘common sense’ and ‘cool’, tapping into an ironic resistance to common sense that, over time, becomes part of the new common sense.
However, the arbitrariness of these systems of meaning implies that they are, by definition, indeterminate and thus under constant threat of breakdown and instability. As Kornberger (2010) points out, brands are simultaneously incredibly powerful and incredibly vulnerable. There is thus an additional contradiction at the heart of all branding efforts in that brands are designed to be stable and enduring, and yet they are precarious and subject to (mis)appropriation. Brands, in this sense, always contain an excess of meaning—an indeterminacy—that creates the possibility for political engagement. Brands, then, are a site of struggle through which contestations over meaning and identity occur. They have the power to mediate many aspects of people’s lives, including their sense of a coherent identity, but they can also be appropriated in ways that are beyond the control of the brand strategists.
Much of the resistance to branding processes occurs in ways that expose the contradictions between the brand image and the structural inequalities on which they are built. An example of brand resistance in a political context is the British social movement UK Uncut and its opposition to the Tory government’s public sector funding cuts. In many respects, UK Uncut’s site of struggle is the neoliberal system of meaning through which the Tory government’s ‘Big Society’ brand is constructed. The group is an excellent example of organized resistance that strategically utilizes networks, mobility, and social media as modes of engagement with the circuits of capitalism. Interestingly, protests are not directed at the government per se (no marches on Whitehall, etc.) but at British corporations and company owners who have been identified as ‘tax avoiders’ (e.g. Phillip Green of Top Shop).
From a communication perspective, UK Uncut engages in various efforts to appropriate and reconfigure the government’s rhetorical framing of the ‘austerity cuts’ (e.g. David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ vs UK Uncut’s ‘Big Society Tax Collection Agency’; Bail-out vs Bail-in, where demonstrators occupy bank foyers and turn them into libraries—a target of government cuts). UK Uncut thus uses discourse in a strategic way to expose the tensions and contradictions in government policies. Two common refrains at demonstrations (organized through social media) have been (1) ‘Our message is this: you have chosen to bring your market into our education; we will bring our education into your market’, and (2) ‘The savage cuts and marketization of higher education are not inevitable; they are undoubtedly an ideological choice’. The first phrase (used at occupations of high-street chain stores like Top Shop) directly challenges the marketization of public education and the introduction of student fees. The second phrase draws attention directly to issues of meaning and ideology and the constructed character of ‘common sense’ policies. UK Uncut thus ‘cuts’ through the signifying practices of the brand, exposing the floating signifier for what it is—an arbitrary construction of meaning that masks the disjuncture between the customer’s ‘brand experience’ and the material practices of the corporation. An example of a UK Uncut demonstration is available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0Z3kBqurIY&NR=1
UK Uncut is a prime example of mobile and flexible organizing that contests the mobility of capital at the point of consumption. It is a form of ‘organizing beyond organization’ that is responsive to the mobile character of capital, strategically exploiting uncertainty and deploying a ‘politics of ambivalence’ in its efforts to ‘unfix’ institutionalized meanings and representations.
Communicative labor
Communicative labor is a central, constitutive element of communicative capitalism and is key to the creation of surplus value (Carlone, 2008, 2013; Dempsey, 2009; Greene, 2004, 2007; Hanan and Hayward, 2014). Indeed, one might argue that the shift from Fordist to post-Fordist capitalism has witnessed a parallel transformation in the conception and practice of communication. Under Fordism, a Taylorist, information-based (and Cartesian) model of communication predominated, with managers as the (enlightened and rational) subjects and originators of information who adopted a command and control strategy toward object-workers, providing them with the information necessary to perform their jobs. Under Fordism, a ‘conduit’ model of communication was paradigmatic (Axley, 1984), with communication channels serving as the conduits for the transmission of formal information. A parallel Taylorist, Fordist model of communication operated in marketing and branding strategies, with companies engaged in efforts to impose cultural authority on a (perceived) homogeneous audience who, in turn, were enjoined to accept the superiority of a particular brand (Holt, 2002).
Post-Fordism has seen the emergence of a different understanding of the relationships among communication, organization, and work. While under Fordism communication was a ‘handmaiden’ to the successful execution of work, aimed at increasing its efficiency, under post-Fordism it is constitutive of work and organizing itself (Ashcraft et al., 2009). Writers such as Lazzarato (1996, 2001) and Virno (2004) have used the term ‘immaterial labor’ to describe ‘labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity’ (Lazzarato, 1996: 133). This definition not only refers to changes in the labor process, where work itself is characterized by new communication processes (Just-In-Time, kaizen, etc.), but also to the stronger link between the capital accumulation process and the construction of systems of signification—including branding—that interpellate subjects as worker-consumers. Value within contemporary capitalism is tied less to factories and machinery and more to the ability of companies to communicatively create meaningful worlds within which social actors engage in processes of production and consumption. Brand management, then, is increasingly a matter of putting to work the ability of worker-consumers to create a common social world through autonomous processes of communication. As Lazzarato (1996) states, ‘The process of social communication (and its principal content, the production of subjectivity) becomes here directly productive because in a certain way it “produces” production’ (p. 143).
The term ‘communicative labor’, then, captures what Carlone (2008) describes as a ‘communication commonplace’ (commonly accepted norms of good communication) upon which communicative capitalism draws as a resource. While Fordism was built largely on the communication commonplace of accurate and clear information, post-Fordism is built on the communication commonplace of mutuality, authenticity, and affect, where successful communication enables people to come together and share experiences in a mutually enriching manner (Carlone, 2008: 160). Communicative labor thus refers to the myriad ways in which the creation of mutuality, intersubjectivity, and authenticity has become a key element of value production under communicative capitalism.
Communicative labor is therefore a key element of communicative capitalism in at least three ways. First, it speaks to the extent to which the creation of value through work is a communicative process (Land and Taylor, 2010). This includes not only interactive service work (Carlone, 2008; Korczynski, 2005; Pettinger, 2004), where the value of a brand lies significantly with the quality of interactions between employees and customers (an issue extensively addressed in the research on emotional labor), but also various forms of knowledge work (including brand strategy development) where the goal is the creation of systems of meaning as the corporate product (Nike, for example, famously markets a lifestyle, not athletic wear).
Second, and related, communicative labor functions dialogically in the relationship between production and consumption. That is, the principle of mutuality and intersubjectivity is applied to the brand as a process of ‘co-production through the act of consumption’ (Land and Taylor, 2010: 400). Brands function as the point of articulation between production and consumption, creating a dialogue with consumers. As communication phenomena, then, the meanings of brands are essentially indeterminate and open to appropriation in numerous ways (Doc Martin shoes, for example, have been stylistically appropriated by several subculture groups, including skinheads, punks, grunge music fans, and ‘hip’ college professors, to name a few). In this sense, the act of consumption is also a communicative act of production.
Finally, communicative labor refers to the extent to which, within communicative capitalism, the distinction between work and life has been eroded, and ‘life comes to evolve entirely within capital’ (Arvidsson, 2006: 30). Here, the reference is less to the amount of labor that occurs outside the formal place of work (e.g. working from home) and more to the extent to which all of life has become part of the ‘social factory’ (Gill and Pratt, 2008) and thus potentially productive of value (Fincham, 2008; Land and Taylor, 2010). This includes activities as diverse as personal blogs that extol the virtues of particular clothing brands, maintaining a Facebook page, and participating in online forums for resolving computer problems. Each is a form of communicative labor that is potentially monetizable. For example, Facebook’s market value of US$250 billion recently (July 2015) surpassed Walmart’s. Facebook has fewer than 5000 paid employees; Walmart has 2.2 million paid employees. Facebook’s market value is based largely on the immaterial and uncompensated labor of its users who leave data trails that are ‘informational goldmines’ (Cote and Pybus, 2011). Moreover, as Beverungen et al. (2015) reveal via a Marxist analysis of Facebook, ‘much of the labour employed directly by Facebook is actually concerned with the management of the free labor of its users’ (p. 483; emphasis in original).
Value, then, is derived not just from the symbolic creation and consumption of particular meanings and experiences but from the communicative construction of authentic brand identities that merge production and consumption, work and life. In this sense, the appropriation of the communication commonplace of mutuality, reciprocity, and authenticity (e.g. through a platform like Facebook) suggests that within communicative capitalism, the issue is not whether a brand is authentic or inauthentic, but rather how authenticity is branded (Banet-Weiser, 2012). Part of this process involves the communicative labor of articulating the values of everyday life (for both employees and consumers) with the values of the brand.
The creation of value through communicative labor is therefore ‘hidden in plain sight’ to the extent that it draws on a communication commonplace (mutuality, authenticity, and reciprocity) that is a basic, constitutive element of everyday social interaction and that, when managed effectively, obscures the process through which value is created. For example, as Korczynski (2005) indicates in his analysis of sales interactions between employees and customers, the success of the interaction (i.e. selling a product) depends on the communicative labor of the salesperson and his or her ability to create an interaction of mutuality and trust that disguises the structural contradictions that characterize the point of sale in capitalism. This contradiction (between the instrumental focus on the customer’s money and the espoused empathy for the customer) is managed, Korczynski argues, via the communicative cultivation of the ‘enchanting myth of customer sovereignty’ (p. 74; et passim) during the sales interaction. Importantly, such enchantment cannot work with a passive audience but rather requires the active participation of the customer in that process of enchantment. In other words, the creation of value is crucially dependent not only on a rational logic of exchange (goods and services in exchange for customer payment) but also on a communication commonplace that constructs that exchange as rooted in mutuality and trust, however temporary and fragile that may be (lasting only for the duration of the sales interaction).
But communicative labor also provides possibilities, contra Dean’s claim, for ‘a critical outside’. As Carlone (2008) indicates in his study of a customer service worker job training program, ‘Communication may infect capitalism just as capitalism may infect communication’ (p. 174). Carlone’s study effectively demonstrates what happens when service workers are unwilling to play the game of ‘enchantment’ that Korczynski outlines and deploy communication commonplaces in ways that destabilize the process of capitalist valuation. Carlone shows that, while customer service ‘draws from the general intellect the communication commonplace of mutuality’ (p. 173), the (largely working class) customer service representatives drew on their experience of economic dislocation and precarity to reject the instrumentalism and objectification of customers simply as sources of valuation and instead prioritize mutuality and connection. As Carlone (2008) argues in his analysis, trainees ‘reacted against the communicative labor of customer service work because the economic context of customer service perverted communication technologies derived from mutuality and directed them toward the management of customers’ (p. 168). In this sense, there is always a tension between the communicative labor that produces surplus value and communication that produces a social, ethical surplus (Arvidsson, 2006). Communicative connection with others always exceeds the limits of capitalist valuation (Carlone, 2013).
Communication, branding, and affect
One risks stating the obvious by pointing out that, for many decades now, brand strategists have been appealing to consumers’ emotions as an important—arguably essential—way to develop brand authenticity. Brand ‘guru’ Marc Gobé’s statement of what he calls ‘emotional branding’ is representative of this effort: Emotional branding provides the means … for connecting products to the consumer in an emotionally profound way. It focuses on the most compelling aspect of the human character; the desire to transcend material satisfaction, and experience emotional fulfillment. A brand is uniquely situated to achieve this because it can tap into the aspirational desires which underlie human motivation. (Gobé, 2001)
4
The creation of a particular affective response among consumers through the strategic, symbolic construction of specific meanings is a key dimension of the effort to create brand loyalty. However, the relationship between branding and affect is more complex than this. The centrality of branding to the creation of value has (not coincidentally) emerged at a time when affect plays an increasingly significant role in neoliberal communicative capitalism. On the one hand, employees at all levels are increasingly expected to bring their complete, affective selves to the workplace. As Fleming (2009) has shown in some detail, workers are frequently instructed to have fun and ‘just be yourself’ at work, and hence are required to draw on forms of affect typically associated with the non-work, private spheres of life. Illouz (2007) has even argued that since the early 20th century, one needs to speak of ‘emotional capitalism’ in describing capitalist relations of production, whereby the private self is publicly performed and harnessed to the discourses and values of the economic and political spheres. As such, ‘affect is made an essential aspect of economic behavior and … emotional life—especially that of the middle classes—follows the logic of economic relations and exchange’ (Illouz, 2007: 5).
On the other hand, at the same time that there is a call for deep emotional attachment to work, the post-Fordist work context is increasingly characterized by instability, precarity, and the attendant affective states of anxiety and depression (Cederström and Fleming, 2012). As a number of scholars have pointed out, the quest for ontological security (Giddens, 1991) is occurring under conditions in which the traditional institutional moorings for identity (work, family, class, etc.) have been significantly eroded (Bauman, 2000; Collinson, 2003; Sennett, 1998). The search for a stable identity, then, operates in contexts where the possibilities for such stability are constantly deferred, creating increased levels of stress and anxiety among people.
Moreover, if, as Dean (2010) argues, symbolic identity and efficiency are increasingly problematic and, indeed, meaningless in the societies of control, then branding processes mediate fluid and mobile subjectivities, providing the opportunity to internalize norms and values that provide a sense of stability, however temporary. In this context, branding is a means by which such anxiety and insecurity are affectively managed. The brand has, in this sense, at least partly replaced the institutions of modernist Fordism in creating systems of signification in which selves can invest. Brands might thus be said to function as what Ahmed (2010) refers to as ‘happy objects’ that have ‘sticky’ affect. As she states, ‘Affect is what sticks, or what sustains or what preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects’ (Ahmed, 2010: 29). As capitalist institutions (Arvidsson, 2006), brands function as important communication contexts in which social actors are able to articulate a relatively authentic and coherent set of ideas and values.
Of course, it hardly needs to be added that the very character of branding—its indeterminacy and arbitrariness of meaning—does not particularly lend itself to ontological security.
5
In the context of neoliberal political economy, the brand functions as a 21st-century expression of what Berlant (2011) refers to as ‘cruel optimism’—a relation that exists ‘when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing’ (p. 1). Berlant argues further that the affective structure of an optimistic attachment involves a sustaining inclination to return to the scene of fantasy that enables you to expect that this time, nearness to this thing will help you or a world to become different in just the right way. (p. 2; emphasis in original)
Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism effectively captures the relationship between brands and social actors, from both an employee and consumer perspective. From an employee perspective, brands affectively mediate identity work in a neoliberal economy. The branding of professional identity (e.g. Tom Peters’ ‘Brand You’) privileges an affective state in which social actors are supposed to revel in their freedom to construct a monetizable brand that companies want to purchase. As Peters (1997) states, ‘Everyone has a chance to be a brand worthy of remark’. The cruel optimism of this claim leads, for most people, to a constant failure to be ‘worthy of remark’ but also to an ongoing effort to rework one’s brand in the belief that this time things will be different. Neff (2012) directly addresses this issue in her study of ‘venture laborers’ from Silicon Alley and the sense-making narratives they employ to explain their failure in the creative industries. She shows how corporate risk has been increasingly externalized to the neoliberal entrepreneurial subject, such that it becomes a sustaining part of knowledge workers’ identities. Neff’s respondents make sense of failure (even in the face of mass layoffs and economic recession) as an individual inability to successfully leverage the opportunities and rewards that risk offers. Neff’s (2012) analysis highlights an affective fantasy in which the uncertainty and insecurity of the new economy become part of the ‘bohemianization of industry’ (p. 60) such that creative work (and the risk associated with such ‘venture labor’) is framed as ‘cool’ and controllable.
But brands and branding processes clearly do not fully capture the affective experience of social actors. Indeed, it is their appeal to and appropriation of affect that makes them vulnerable. Stewart (2007) provides a useful way to think about this vulnerability in her conception of ‘ordinary affects’. Stewart describes ordinary affects as ‘the varied, surging capacities to affect and to be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences. They’re things that happen’ (p. 2). Stewart argues that ordinary affects do not work through meanings per se but rather in the way they pick up density and texture as they move through bodies, dreams, dramas, and social worldings of all kinds. Their significance lies in the intensities they build and in what thoughts and feelings they make possible. (p. 3)
For Stewart, ordinary affects are more compelling than ideologies, as well as more fractious and unpredictable than symbolic meaning. They are, in this sense, not easily captured in representational practices.
An interesting example of how this notion of ‘ordinary affect’ problematizes the brand appropriation of affect is a recent story about customers—mainly elderly Korean immigrants—who ‘hang out’ for many hours at a McDonald’s restaurant in Queens, New York, limiting table space for other customers. In many ways, these customers draw on the ‘ordinary affects’ of community and friendship in inhabiting the McDonald’s space, appropriating the McDonald’s brand of ‘family and fun’ for their own, non-commercial purposes. By treating the McDonald’s as ‘their own personal meeting place’ (Maslin Nir and Ham, 2014), these patrons disrupt the smooth flow of capital, albeit in a minor way. The fact that McDonald’s employees routinely call in police to remove the customers (who leave and return later) suggests that this particular interpretation of the McDonald’s brand is not welcome.
As Stewart (2007) argues, Ideologies happen. Power snaps into place. Structures grow entrenched. Identities take place. Ways of knowing become habitual at the drop of a hat. But it’s ordinary affect that gives the things the quality of a something to inhabit and animate. (p. 10)
Ordinary affect, according to Stewart, tends to be erratic and uncontrollable. While brands attempt to articulate the relationship between meaning and affect, providing social actors with a frame through which to experience connection to self and others, ordinary affect can affectively charge meaning structures in alternative ways that do not necessarily fit with efforts to accumulate economic value (Grossberg, 2010).
Conclusion
As Spicer (2010) has stated, ‘The problem with brands is that we are too close to them’ (p. 1736). This essay has explored the implications of this claim by examining branding as medium and outcome of a ‘new hidden abode of production’ (Böhm and Land, 2012) that is ‘hidden in plain sight’ in contemporary neoliberal capitalism. Picking up on Spicer’s claim, it is precisely brands’ close proximity and their routine, common sense connection to (and, indeed, construction of) everyday meaning and sense-making that make them such an important object of study for organization scholars.
In exploring this proximity, I have attempted to draw attention to the intimate relationship between branding and organizing. For the last 30 years, critical organization studies scholars have argued that the corporation is the principal institution through which meaning and identity formation processes occur, replacing the state and government in this role (Deetz, 1992). With the advent of communicative capitalism in the late 20th century, one can legitimately argue that the brand has become a—if not the—central discursive mechanism through which this hegemony is produced and reproduced. The brand now shapes the ways in which corporations organize themselves, operating, as Kornberger (2010) argues, from the outside in—the very structure and operation of organizations are increasingly shaped by their brand identities. Moreover, as a number of scholars have shown, brands increasingly function as both a form of employee identity regulation (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002) and a resource for agentic professional identity work, as employees seek to establish stable self-narratives in increasingly precarious work environments (Brannan et al., 2011, 2015; Land and Taylor, 2010).
Dean’s (2009, 2010, 2014) conception (and critique) of communicative capitalism served as a starting point for my argument, in part because of its exploration of how contemporary communication processes are medium and outcome of social actors’ relationship to neoliberalism and its attendant processes of ‘capture’ of autonomous social interaction. In developing her argument, Dean makes the claim that in communicative capitalism, communication does not have a ‘critical outside’. However, I would suggest to the contrary that—as a principal institution of communicative capitalism—branding possesses its own internal (and frequently communicative) contradictions that lay it open to forms of immanent critique and resistance (Murtola, 2012). By unpacking these contradictions, it becomes possible to explore the ways in which communication processes are medium and outcome of the brand as a complex mode of organizing within neoliberal capitalism—a mode of organizing that has profound implications for human experience and identity formation.
Indeed, one might argue that the study of branding articulates together the central foci of critical organization research: power and resistance, D/discourse, identity, meaning, micro–macro organizing processes, and so forth. In particular, the effort here to reimagine capital accumulation processes and the production of surplus value as configured around struggles over the indeterminacy of meaning (rather than simply struggles over the indeterminacy of labor) enables us to explore the expanding sites of power-resistance relations in contemporary capitalism. As neoliberal capitalism extends its organizing efforts deeper into the autonomous social processes of everyday life, so the complexities and contradictions of power-resistance dynamics increase. Communicative capitalism is simultaneously powerful, protean, and precarious. It is all-encompassing and voracious (as people like ‘Alex from Target’ have discovered), constantly shifting its form to colonize and monetize social life in new ways. At the same time, the dependence of corporate brands on discourse and meaning management and the potentially ephemeral goodwill of ‘prosumers’ leave them open to contestation, especially when the signifying veil of the brand is drawn aside to reveal the contradictions that lie beneath. Sometimes this happens in minor, relatively trivial, ways (e.g. Joanh Peretti’s e-mail exchange with Nike, exposing its sweatshop-based supply chain); sometimes it happens in more significant ways (e.g. Greenpeace’s successful attempt—via a YouTube video called ‘Everything is Not Awesome’—to get Lego to end its promotional arrangement with Shell Oil). In each instance, however, the brand’s ability to fix and normalize systems of meaning and their attendant efforts to extend modes of capital accumulation are challenged.
And precisely because they are rooted in indeterminacies and struggles around meaning, possibilities for resisting corporate branding practices exist within the domain of branding itself (see, for example, Desmond et al., 2000). There may be no ‘critical outside’ to branding, but it is possible to work within branding process to critique and challenge the ‘new hidden abode of production’. Arguably, brand practices can be utilized as ways of constructing oppositional meanings that challenge neoliberalism and articulate alternative visions of social and political organizing. For example, Bell and Leonard’s (2014) study of Free Range Studios (FRS)—a media design and film company that works with socially progressive clients to create media content; e.g., the ‘Story of Stuff’ series—shows how, far from eschewing branding, FRS embraces it as a strategy that enables them to effectively serve their clients. As the FRS website states, “Together we empower people and organizations to create positive change through storytelling and design” (https://freerange.com/about/). Alternative branding strategies like those of FRS, then, provide possibilities for the immanent critique of corporate branding and, moreover, represent one means by which—within communicative capitalism—communication can develop a ‘critical outside’. 6
Critical scholars have, in many respects, functioned as the enemy of common sense, foregoing analyses that privilege the ostensible direct experience of the world in order to explore how such experience is mediated in complex ways, often in the service of hegemonic relations of power. The goal of critical scholarship is the analysis and critique of these mediation processes, along with the ways in which they obscure the structural contradictions and inequities on which they are built. Given the degree to which branding has become intimately tied to neoliberal politics, individual identity formation, immaterial labor, and processes of corporate colonization, it is especially important that organization and management scholars investigate branding as medium and outcome of the politics of common sense and their attendant processes of inclusion and exclusion.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this article was presented as a keynote address at the 11th International Conference on Organizational Discourse, Cardiff, UK, July 2014.