Branded Lives: The Production and Consumption of Meaning at Work

Citation

Best, K. (2013), "Branded Lives: The Production and Consumption of Meaning at Work", Journal of Organizational Ethnography, Vol. 2 No. 1, pp. 118-120. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOE-11-2012-0042

In the past, branding was largely seen by organisations as “something” which resided in the products made and sold – a mark which identified who had made the product and thus built customer loyalty and trust (Brannan et al., 2012). However, the move to a more service‐based economy means that this is no longer sufficient as many companies have no products to sell. If they do, they are made by the same machinery as their competitors’ products. Thus, branding is located within and expressed and reinforced by their employees to separate their product or service from that of their competitors. Branding, like organisational culture, is an idea which transcends the academic‐practitioner divide.

The closely entwined and often conflated notions of employer branding (most widely used to mean employers “branding” employees) and employee branding (employees “working on” or appropriating the organisational brand) are seen as significant by practitioners and academics alike. Employee/employer branding have received considerable coverage despite being a relatively new topic. However, this coverage has been dealt with mainly in silos, such as lone journal papers, monographs or occasional appearances in conference streams. As such, this book performs an important role in bringing together a wide range of (largely qualitative and often ethnographic) perspectives on employer/employee branding within one text.

The book has 11 chapters, including an introduction and conclusion – both of which are written by the editors. In these summaries, the editors successfully bring together the disparate voices of the field and their contributors without stifling or showing favouritism. By choosing an easily demarcated topic (employee/employer branding) and restricting the book to qualitative contributions, the editors ensure that chapters tessellate well. Indeed, the adoption of primarily ethnographic methods to study these issues allows the emergence of sets of issues within each chapter. The findings are thus close enough in form and texture to allow the reader to notice the same set of issues emerging multiple times and to compare and contrast what they have read. This would have likely been impossible with a more “mixed methods” approach. As the power of the book comes from the sum of its parts, I now summarise each contributed chapter and its significant contributions briefly.

Willmott's chapter (Chapter 2) establishes why branding became so important in the first place, through the monetization of intangible features of the firm. It sets the tone for the significance of the following chapters very well. In Chapter 3, Land and Taylor conduct an ethnographically informed study of “Ethico”, a UK‐based surf clothing company. They explore how the organisation's brand is used not only to communicate a particular brand to customers but also to control the way in which workers act in order to remain in line with the brand expectations. In Chapter 4, Smith and Buchanan‐Oliver use three employee drawings – accompanied by interviews – to understand the relationship between self, organisation and brand. Their post‐structuralist perspective allows them to show how employees see this relationship idiosyncratically and thus to argue that, in order to understand employee branding in depth, we must look at the phenomenon at an individual level. Even just by comparing Chapters 3 and 4, we can see two very different perspectives on employer branding; Land and Taylor see a common set of issues shared by all employees in Ethico – namely that they are instructed on which version of themselves to be; Smith and Buchanan‐Oliver focus on individual perception and difference to a much greater degree.

In Chapter 5, the theme of resistance (hinted at by Smith and Buchanan‐Oliver) is explored in more detail. Cushen uses ethnographic data to analyse how a “brand essence” exercise – designed to encourage employees to act in line with the brand – had backfired. Due to the short‐termist company culture during the financial downturn, brand essence efforts were seen as futile by employees, especially because the values were not seen to be espoused by management. Thus, employees resisted them. The tale of resistance continues in Chapter 6, where Russell presents another case of resistance to employee branding. Russell examines through ethnographic methods (non‐participant observation, interviews) how an employer used a range of tactics to ensure brand affiliation within employees. These included designing a highly branded service scape and using spontaneous rewards. The resistance is of branding is not as absolute as in Cushen's previous chapter, but a notable finding is how employees use the very devices designed to increase employee brand absorption – such as giving tokens for “good brand work” to people who do not deserve them just because they are on your team. This thus is shown to undermine and thus resist the brand values of “integrity” and “commitment”.

Chapter 7 is the first of four consecutive chapters which may be of particular interest to managers. Hurrell and Scholarios explore how employer branding could be used to reduce the soft skills gap in the hospitality sector by comparing the recruitment processes at Glaswegian outposts of two national hotel chains. In the one with better reported soft skills, the recruitment process is used to check whether potential employees are “on brand”. In the hotel with more of a soft skills gap, the recruitment process is seen as a formality and brand is not a focus or point of discussion. In Chapter 8, Tarnovskaya compares interviews with two different IKEA Russia employees, showing how, for one employee, little effort is needed to act in accordance with the brand values, whereas for another, it takes a great deal of effort. Most interesting here is how the employee who finds it easy to express brand values nonetheless does appropriate them in ways which are different to that which is expected by IKEA, whilst the employee who does not find it easy to act in accordance with the brand does not try to change them at all. The significance of this chapter for managers centres on how they might encourage employee branding without simultaneously encouraging brand appropriation.

Simms’ chapter (Chapter 9) compares ethnographic case studies of four recently unionised organisations with high numbers of front‐line service workers. She uses these comparisons to show how unions use the “service brand values” to expose tensions in customer service delivery and to improve working conditions. They often do this by recognising the alignment between the needs of the customer and the needs of the front line service worker, meaning that management are essentially “hoisted by their own petard”. Lastly, Edwards and Kelan use Chapter 10 to explore– through a literature review as opposed to empirical data – how creating “one brand” may serve also to undermine the sought‐after diversity which companies see as also being beneficial. This chapter may thus also be read as a cautionary tale about a problematic unintended consequence of employee branding.

Overall, this book presents a fascinating and useful read with very few shortcomings – most of which the editors are only too quick to point out for themselves. Certainly, as they say, it is very euro‐centric and a little more could have been done to try to understand, in the conclusion, how the findings here might relate to other continents or countries outside Europe and its direct environs. It would also have been satisfying to see in a few more chapters just how workers and employers “do branding”. We are told by the contributors and the research participants that workers have agency in the branding process and are able to resist or play along. What does “brand work” look like and how, exactly, is it undertaken?

This does not detract from the book's many successes, however. It is a well‐written, well‐edited multi‐vocal account of employer/employee branding which does much to build our understanding of a topic which has recently gained much currency but of which there is still much to find out. The adoption of an ethnographic approach by many of the chapters allows a textured and yet subtle approach to employer branding to develop. This may not have been possible with a wider range of methods, leading to findings which would have been largely incomparable with one another. This book does much to fill in gaps in knowledge, as well as addressing a range of common assumptions and misconceptions. It is a satisfying and useful read which, as the reviewer on the back cover suggests, should be read from cover to cover. To treat it like a usual edited collection will reduce its power, which comes from the complementarity of its many different parts.