The ‘production of meaning’ is a central focus of the contemporary organisational life. As we saw last week, it is necessary for organisations to ‘make meaning’ for people at work, in order to compete effectively in the competitive and global markets. Culture is accorded a privilege position because it is seen to structure the way people think, feel and act in organisations. The aim of ‘managing culture’ is to produce the sorts of meanings that will enable people to identify with the organisation for which they work and thus enable them to make the right and necessary contribution to its success. Culture changes the way people conceive of and relate to work, and it suggests that identity is flexible/malleable.

We shall examine the nature of identity, and how it has constructed in the advanced industrial societies, by investigating the enterprise culture and the consumer culture. We shall also discuss how this relates to the wider issue of the evolution of industrial organisation; the debate over Fordism, Post-Fordism and Flexibility (notes on this to follow later).

Paid work shapes the lives of most people in advanced industrial societies. Classifying someone’s social identity in the basis of their occupation is fraught with difficulties. When we ‘read off’ identity from occupation, we assume a particular meaning and identity associated with that particular form of work. There are two approaches to connecting occupation and identity.

1. The Marxist Approach: It claims an essentialist link between work and identity. It states that there is an essential structural antagonism or opposition between the identities and interests of ‘labour’ and ‘capital’. Workers’ objective interests consist of increasing wages, reducing working hours, minimising effort and imposing various constraints upon the activities of their employers. Employers’ objective interests are linked to the expansion of profit through increasing productivity, de-skilling, keeping wages low and weakening the collective power of their workers.

Yet, the Marxists fail to acknowledge other identities that make up a wage-earner. According to the Marxist approach, social actors always appear to follow a pre-written script, which is basically stable and unaffected by the contingencies of culture and history.

2. The Social Constructionist Approach: It claims a contingent link between work and identity. It states that economic identity is a culturally and historically changeable category. ‘Worker’, ‘manager’ and ‘employer’ are products of a concrete, cultural and historical circumstance, not an objective, pre-determined ‘given’. For example, Corporate Culture writers claim to restructure the employment relationship. There is no conflict between the pursuits of economic aims of productivity, efficiency and competitiveness, and cultural aims of humanisation and meaningfulness of work.

Importantly, constructing a ‘work identity’ is a discursive and political process. For example, to govern an organisation or an economy depends upon a particular mode of representation – conceptualising a set of processes, activities or relations as an ‘organisation’ or an ‘economy’. In this way, representation captures the nature of reality, and makes it open to deliberation, calculation and intervention. The ‘programmes of government’ are always ‘personal’ matters, in that programmes of government offer particular representations to those to be governed, and construct certain ways for people to conceive of and conduct themselves – though the programmes’ success is not guaranteed. (Please note, here, the term ‘government’ does not refer to the state, but to a diversity of ways of managing social reality.)

Organisations are expected to be ‘flexible’, to become ‘entrepreneurial’, to restructure and to become more responsive to customers’ needs.

The notion of enterprise occupies the crucial position in contemporary language and discourse of organisational change. The concept of ‘enterprise’ offers a new rationality of organisational government. The commercial enterprise form is a privileged model for all forms of conduct. In other words, any type of organisation, whether private, public or voluntary, is regarded as an enterprise. Businesses, schools, universities, hospitals, prisons and charity organisations are all expected to act in entrepreneurial ways. Enterprising features include initiative, risk-taking, creative and innovative practices and business responsibility.

In addition, people are also conceptualised as an enterprise. The idea of an individual as an ‘enterprise’ suggests that the person is always engaged in the ‘business of living’ that makes adequate provision for the preservation, reproduction and reconstruction of one’s life. The individual has responsibility for his/her own self-advancement and care. According to the Corporate Culture projects, the conception of the worker as ‘an entrepreneur’ characterises employment not as a painful obligation nor as an instrumental activity, but rather as a means of self-development, self-responsibility and individual empowerment. Within the entrepreneurial discourse, paid work (no matter how alienated, deskilled or degraded it is) is represented as a crucial element in the path to individual responsibility, freedom and self-fulfilment.

Workers are expected to undertake self-management and self-optimisation so as to ensure organisational success. Working in teams, workers are involved in activities such as managing budgets, assessing staff and delivering services. Previously supervisors and personnel departments dealt with such responsibilities. However, the price of this involvement is that workers must assume responsibility for carrying out these activities and for their success or failure.

Importantly, the claim is made that workers are ‘empowered’ because they are offered the opportunity or freedom to take more responsibility for their own self-organisation and management rather than relying on others to take risks and responsibilities, and being directed by others. Workers become personally involved in the risk and responsibility of particular activity. Such entrepreneurial strategies are more motivating for people, and profitable for the organisation that sees its costs fall and productivity rise. However, the cost of this is that the worker must take responsibility for the outcomes for this new arrangement.

While, it is seems reasonable to expect white, professional middle-class men to accept the autonomy and the responsibility of their work, this cannot be transferred to disadvantaged groups. Are women, ethnic minorities, disabled people, young and old expected to be self-reliant, and to take personal responsibility for their circumstances? Moreover, can non-professional (say, factory) work really be self-fulfilling?

The discourse of enterprise re-conceptualises the economic the economic role of the citizen in a fundamental way, privileging an ethic of consumption over the traditional productionist ‘work ethic’. The primary image offered to the modern citizen is not that of the producer, but of the consumer. People are obliged to make their lives meaningful by selecting a personal lifestyle by purchasing products, and to manage and market themselves. The image of the citizen as ‘a choosing self’ entails a new image of the productive subject. The worker is an individual in search of meaning, responsibility, a sense of personal achievement. The individual is not to be emancipated from work, but to be fulfilled in work – work represented as an activity through which individuals produce, discover and experience ourselves.

The focus on ‘consumer’ (and consumer sovereignty) is a central feature of organisational projects and reforms. Representations of ‘the customer’ act as devices for restructuring organisations in entrepreneurial ways.

In retail service industries, the ‘quality of service’ between the firm and the customer has become an important source of value. The quality of the interactive service offered by workers to customers is crucial to organisational success. For example, the employers use customer feedback mechanisms to manage workers’ conduct. Customer evaluation of workers’ service removes managers’ control and the hostility between managers and workers. The presence of the customer shapes the workers’ conduct, turning them into self-governing subjects.

Service workers learn to manage their emotion, body, and ‘face-work’ in order to project a particular image of themselves. Quality service is not fully secured through a system of close supervision and formal and direct rules. Rather workers’ behaviour is governed by customers’ expectations and workers’ own implicit expectations. In this sense, this form of control is referred as ‘government at a distance’. In addition, workers are taught to be self-regulating, self-actualising, and responsible individuals. In this way, service work, such as retailing, concerns the simultaneous production of profit, of meaning, and of identity. Production of profit is bound up with the production of meaning, through presentation, communication and display.