Consumption, and the institutions and rituals that make it possible, have become overwhelmingly significant in modern life (Zukin & Maguire, 2004). The arrival of the consumer society during the last hundred years has transformed not only our material existence but also our ontology, our very being itself (Lee, 2000). We are encouraged to talk to and think of each other and ourselves less as workers, citizens, parents or teachers, and more as consumers (Du Gay & Salaman, 1992; Gabriel & Lang, 2006). Since Knights and Morgan’s (1993) seminal article, several organizational researchers have explored the new forms of constraints placed on employees through direct contact with customers. Service employees are encouraged to create emotional proximity with the customer (Du Gay, 1993; Korczynski, Shire, Frenkel & Tam, 2000; Sturdy, 1998; Warhurst & Nixon, 2007). Front-line service industries have been shown to be a convenient setting to observe sales agents simultaneously promoting and struggling with the enchanting myth of the customer sovereignty discourse (Korczynski, 2005; Korczynski & Ott, 2004; Sturdy, 1998), a situation that potentially leads to customer abuse (Korczynski & Evans, 2013). Employers demand aesthetic labour to provide a ‘stylish’ service (Pettinger, 2004; Warhurst & Nixon, 2007, 2009). Until recently, such demands upon employees, whether emanating from corporate culture programmes, teamwork, monitoring or HRM systems, were interpreted in organization studies as producing ‘disciplined’ organizational selves (Alvesson & Willmott, 2002; Clegg, 1989; Deetz, 1998; Knights & Willmott, 1989; Rose, 1989; Townley, 1993, 1995; Webb, 2006). However, in today’s society, disciplinary power techniques which tend to enclose, fix and confine have been supplemented by biopolitical techniques for management of the population (Foucault, 2007, 2008; Munro, 2012; Rose, 2007). These biopolitical techniques, acting as centrifugal forces, facilitate explanation of the remarkable growth in national and international markets, and the rapid development of capitalism in neoliberal societies. They form an apparatus of security which organizes the circulation of commodities, consumers and producers (Foucault, 2007; Munro, 2012). Acknowledging this, an increasing number of scholars in organization studies have been inspired by the Foucaldian lectures on biopolitics (2008) to take a fresh look at contemporary forms of organizations and new work trends, and connect them to neoliberal government (Fleming, 2014; Munro, 2012; Weiskopf & Munro, 2012). Fleming employs biopower as a lens to analyse transformations in the sphere of work over the last 20 years, showing how ‘life attributes that were previously considered exogenous, irrelevant or detrimental to formal organizational productivity’ have become instrumentalized (Fleming, 2014, p.886). However, organization studies have not yet taken an interest in what biopolitics has to say about the work of ‘market-makers’, and their role in the consumer society. Foucault does not make consumption a central object of his analysis in
Birth of Biopolitics (2008). But we think several key concepts of neoliberal governance such as the central nature of power techniques, and the figure of the enterprising self, offer a new angle to approach the work of market-makers and consumption. A neoliberal understanding of consumption as suggested in
Birth of Biopolitics (Foucault, 2008) challenges certain sociological and neoclassical perspectives on consumption, particularly in connection with the demonization of producers, the supposed passiveness of consumers, the concept of exchange in the relationship to consumption and the standardizing nature of mass consumerism. The neoliberal view, in contrast, suggests we should see consumption as a differentiating enterprise of the self, an investment to generate returns on the human capital possessed. The consumer thus becomes a producer (Foucault, 2008), a
bricoleur who is free to reinvent the product through its uses (de Certeau, 1984; Gabriel, 2002), a co-constructor of brands (Arvidsson, 2006b; Land & Taylor, 2010). In this context, the question arises of whether the brand manager has any
raison d’etre, and the content of her work.
In particular, this study aims to answer the following research question: How do neoliberal brand managers trigger consumption? The idea behind this question is to approach the work of market professionals from a neoliberal angle, in other words ‘as economic conduct practiced, implemented, rationalized’, leading us to look at how ‘the person who works uses the means available to him’ (Foucault, 2008, p.223).
To answer our question, we conducted a field study at the world’s leading beauty products firm (called ‘Beauty’ in our study), based principally on twenty-one interviews with brand managers. We show that brand managers trigger consumption by developing self-practices that bring them to embody the ideal consumer, and additionally their brand and products. We also highlight self-practices used by brand managers to continuously market this capital. These self-practices trigger consumption in the neoliberal society as they turn brand managers into enterprising consumers, vectors of the centrifugal forces of consumption.
Our contributions are threefold. First, by showing that enterprising selves are all potential consumers, our findings extend the results of previous research on emotional proximity (Du Gay, 1993; Korczynski et al., 2000; Sturdy, 1998) and aesthetic labour (Warhurst & Nickson, 2007; Warhurst, Nickson, Witz & Cullen, 2000; Witz, Warhurst & Nickson, 2003) which focus on front-line service employees. We show that in a neoliberal context, aesthetic labour can occur without any direct contact with the end consumer.
Second, our results examine subjectivation in the context of biopower. Biopower has been considered as ‘captur[ing] what the subject of power already is’ (Fleming, 2014, p.876), but this study leads to a different stance. We highlight the transformative dimension of self-practices in order to capture how power circulates in practice, and how normalization works on a mass level. It is in embodying their products that the brand managers become insider-outsiders (Ellis & Ybema, 2010), vectors of centrifugal forces of consumption.
Lastly, our study brings materiality back into the neoliberal interpretation of consumption. Rather than a product that disappears in the neoliberal exchange (Foucault, 2008; Land & Taylor, 2010), we show a product embodied in the brand manager. Through their self-practices, brand managers become objects of consumption and promote themselves as objects. Beyond homo œconomicus as entrepreneur of himself (Foucault, 2008), we picture homo œconomicus as seller of himself.
