VALLAS - Work and Identity in An Era of Precarious Employment

Article
Work and Occupations

2018, Vol. 45(1) 3–37
Work and Identity in ! The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0730888417735662
Employment: How journals.sagepub.com/home/wox
Workers Respond to
‘‘Personal Branding’’
Discourse
Steven P. Vallas1 and Angèle Christin2
Abstract
Recent efforts to understand the significance of precarious work have been
limited in at least two important respects. One is the neglect of the
ideological constructs that workers are led to embrace concerning the
employment relation, and the other is the undertheorized nature of much
research in this field. To address these limits, the authors adopt a two-
pronged strategy in this article. In empirical terms, the authors focus on
an important source of popular thinking about work: the career advice
genre, which has recently evolved into a growing literature on ‘‘personal
branding.’’ In theoretical terms, the authors appeal to Foucault’s theory of
governmentality in order to understand how and why workers respond to
personal branding discourses. Data are drawn from two linked qualitative
studies bearing on workers employed in distinct settings: freelance journal-
ists in Paris and New York (N ¼ 101) and a broader set of white-collar
employees who have faced market adversity in Boston (N ¼ 62). Findings
reveal that personal branding discourse has become both prevalent and
potent, encouraging many workers to conform to what Foucault referred
1
Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA
2
Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
Corresponding Author:
Steven P. Vallas, Northeastern University, 360 Huntington Avenue, 958 Renaissance Park,
Boston, MA 02115, USA.
Email: [email protected]
4 Work and Occupations 45(1)
to as the ‘‘enterprising self.’’ Yet the authors also find that workers respond
to personal branding in a multiplicity of ways, some of which Foucault left
unaddressed. The article thus finds qualified support for Foucault’s argu-
ments but identifies issues—especially that of agency and resistance—which
stand in need of additional elaboration.
Keywords
precarious work, personal branding, economic discourse, neoliberalism,
Foucault
The decline of ‘‘standard’’ work arrangements has attracted much schol-

arly attention in recent years (Kalleberg, 2011; Kalleberg & Vallas,
2017; Smith, 2001, 2010), greatly enriching our understanding of the
myriad ways in which employment relations are being transformed.
Scholars have focused particular attention on the structural determin-
ants of this precarization trend, such as the erosion of union strength
(Locke & Thelen, 1995; Western & Rosenfeld, 2011), the heightened
mobility of capital (Bronfenbrenner & Luce, 2004; Collins, 2003), the
digital revolution (Schor, Fitzmaurice, Attwood-Charles, Carfagna, &
Poteat, 2016), and the rise of the ‘‘shareholder conception’’ of the firm
(Fligstein & Shin, 2007; Ho, 2009a, 2009b). Yet relatively little attention
has been paid to the specifically ideological constructs that workers
encounter as they formulate conceptions of the employment relation
and of their own identities as employees (see Lamont, Beljean, &
Clair, 2014; for an exception, see Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005).
This gap has hampered our ability to understand the forces that may
legitimate the decline of the ‘‘standard’’ work arrangement and can
encourage workers to consent to their growing exposure to labor
market uncertainty.
A second absence in the literature on precarious work, bound up with
the first, regards the relatively undertheorized state of our knowledge
regarding this historical trend. To be sure, there is no shortage of ambi-
tious theorizing about the growth of precarity as a feature of social and
economic life. Such major thinkers as Giddens (1991), Bauman (2000),
and Beck (1992, 2000) have all made the question of precarity a central
theme of their respective analyses of late modernity. Yet relatively little
of this theorizing has been brought to bear on concrete empirical
research. Indeed, much of the U.S.-based literature on precarious
work has fallen into one of two camps: national-level quantitative
Vallas and Christin 5
studies of trends affecting job insecurity and labor market conditions

(Hollister, 2011; Kalleberg, 2009, 2011; Katz & Krueger, 2016) or
focused case studies of particular occupations or industries (Lane,
2011; Pugh, 2015; Sharone, 2014). With some exceptions (Ho, 2009b),
the literature on precarious work has exhibited great strength empiric-
ally but a relative weakness theoretically. This has made it difficult to
determine whether the exposure of workers to precarious labor market
conditions represents part of a Polanyian double movement (see
Kalleberg, 2009) or the onset of an entirely new stage of modernity,
such as the ‘‘end of organized capitalism’’ (see Kalleberg & Vallas, 2017;
Lash & Urry, 1987).
In this article, we address both these gaps in the literature on precar-
ious work. First, to capture the role played by the ideological influences
to which workers are exposed, we focus on one relatively neglected
phenomenon: the career advice genre (see Biggart, 1983). Specifically,
we analyze one specific off-shoot of career advice literature: The phe-
nomenon of personal branding, which has become a pervasive feature of
lay discussions about job seeking and career development since the late
1990s (Gershon, 2011; Marwick, 2013; Pagis & Ailon, 2017; Vallas &
Cummins, 2015; Wee & Brooks, 2010). Now manifest not only in books
and magazines but also blogs, social media, and in-person workshops,
personal branding discourse invites workers and job seekers to rethink
their dependence on bureaucratic employment as an economic platform,
and instead to view themselves as profit-seeking enterprises that can best
succeed by applying corporate marketing strategies to their face-to-face
and online interactions. Using interview data collected from workers
employed in distinct occupational contexts, we ask: How do job seekers
and workers react to the discourse of personal branding as a species of
entrepreneurial talk? And which social factors seem to shape their like-
lihood of consenting to this discourse?
Second, we rely on one strand of contemporary theorizing that has
yet to be fully incorporated within the mainstream lexicon of economic
sociology: Foucauldian theories of governmentality, which we argue are
particularly well suited to address the role of ideology and discourse in
shaping popular thinking about employment and economic institutions
more generally (du Gay, 1996; Foucault, 2008; McNay, 2009). Foucault
was among the first social scientists to acknowledge the cultural signifi-
cance of neoliberal doctrines, arguing that modernity increasingly fos-
ters the rise of what he termed the ‘‘enterprising self’’ as form of
subjectivity that aligns with market needs. Yet Foucault’s work has
received a wary posture from most American sociologists studying
work. We find that this has limited the growth of knowledge in two
important respects. First, it has deprived sociologists of work of poten-
tially important theoretical tools with which to understand subtle yet
important shifts in the meanings that work and employment assume
within the contemporary setting. In addition, sociological neglect of
Foucauldian theory has denied the latter the opportunity to extend,
revise, or refine its theoretical claims on the basis of empirical research.
To ground our analysis empirically, we conjoin qualitative data
gathered from two projects utilizing distinct yet complementary
research designs. The first project focused specifically on freelance
web journalists in Paris and New York, whose careers hinge on their
success at audience promotion. The second focuses on precariously
employed white-collar workers and job seekers in multiple occupations,
all residing in or near the Boston metropolitan area. The first project
holds occupation constant (all interviewees are practicing journalists)
but allows geographical location to vary (France and United States); the
second project manifests the opposite set of features, holding geograph-
ical location constant while allowing occupation to vary. This compara-
tive approach in turn provides the basis for a wider set of findings than
would otherwise be possible.
The article begins by introducing the main tenets of the Foucauldian
theory of governmentality, outlining how its conceptual framework can
inform research on work and employee identity. It then turns to a dis-
cussion of ‘‘personal branding,’’ an entrepreneurial turn in the career
advice literature that has begun to exert broad influence over many of
the norms and assumptions that govern paid employment in precarious
times. After sketching the methods and research strategies that have
guided our data collection, the article next presents the views of personal
branding discourse held by freelance journalists in Paris and New York
and by precariously employed white-collar workers in Boston. We find
that the predominant response to personal branding is one of consent or
conformity to its terms, and thus a tendency for workers and job seekers
to embrace an increasingly commercialized conception of self. This
response, we find, bears a close resemblance to Foucault’s notion of
the ‘‘enterprising self.’’ Yet we also find other, more defiant responses
to self-branding rhetoric—that is, forms of resistance—which seem to
depend on several institutional features experienced by workers during
the course of their careers, including national context, occupational
norms, and labor market trajectory. The article concludes that
Foucauldian approaches toward work, employment, and subjectivity
hold substantial promise for sociological analysis, but that they stand
in need of further theoretical and empirical refinement, particularly with

respect to the question of worker agency and resistance to neoliberal
forms of economic activity. The article closes by sketching fruitful lines
of future research on work, entrepreneurial discourse, and the commer-
cialization of the self in late modernity.
Economic Discourse and the Worker’s Soul

Although he was trained as a philosopher, Michel Foucault’s (1978,
1979, 2008) work pursued fundamentally sociological questions
throughout the course of his career, blending theoretical analysis with
concrete historical studies of the systems of mentality that underpinned
the exercise of power and authority during the rise of modernity.
In some respects, Foucault’s work can be viewed as an effort to mod-
ernize and deepen Weber’s theory of legitimate domination.1 Yet
American sociologists have tended to view Foucault as a thinker
whose work does not lend itself to empirical research. We argue
that this view is overly narrow and short sighted, in that it deprives
sociological thinking of important theoretical resources with which to
understand how cultural or discursive constructs are bound up with the
processes that foster institutional change. Decades before the term
‘‘neoliberalism’’ came into common usage, Foucault sensed that neolib-
eral economic discourse was likely to figure prominently in the exercise
of power over human subjectivity during the latter part of the 20th
century (see Foucault, 1979, 2008). He also developed a highly original
interpretation of human capital theory that is sharply distinct from that
adopted by sociologists of work and organizations (Vallas & Hill, 2012).
In what follows we offer a brief sketch of Foucault’s theory of govern-
mentality and the insights it provides, on which our empirical analysis
will draw.
From his earliest studies, Foucault’s work was concerned with the
linkages among power, knowledge, and the predominant forms that
human subjectivity assumed within particular historical periods. In
this spirit, he developed a series of influential historical accounts of
the definition and treatment of madness, sickness, criminality, and
sexual difference (Foucault, 1978, 1979, 1988). One important theme
in much of his work was an effort to show the historical connections
(or genealogies) that united particular rituals or practices, such as the
Christian ritual of confession and the modern practices of therapy or the
examination (Foucault, 1993). Toward the latter stages of his life,
he adopted a more comprehensive approach toward power, knowledge,
and subjectivity, eventuating in his widely influential theory of govern-

mentality (Behrent, 2016; Burchell, 1996; Gordon, 1991; Lemke, 2001;
McNay, 2009). Moving beyond his earlier stress on the trend toward
‘‘disciplinary’’ rule—the highly rationalized system of authority rela-
tions discussed in Discipline and Punish (1979)— and responding to
criticism that he had not sufficiently taken into account the role of the
state, Foucault began to explore the normative apparatuses (dispositifs)
that characterized the exercise of power over civil society throughout
Western history.
This line of thinking emerged from Foucault’s interest in Greek cul-
ture and institutions, during the course of which he was struck by the
diffuse manner in which the term ‘‘governance’’ was used in ancient
Greece. Thus, the Greeks commonly spoke of the need to govern not
only the polis but also one’s estate (oikos), one’s family, one’s appetites,
and especially one’s self. With the rise of Christianity, there arose a
conception of the self as harboring deep-lying truths that could only
be identified through acts of subordination to one’s confessor (Foucault,
1993). Then, as the Western nation-state grew in size, and scale and
rulers sought to develop appropriate ‘‘arts of governing,’’ they relied
on a form of political rationality that Foucault (2007, 2008) termed
‘‘pastoral’’ power. Here, partly reflecting the example of the Church,
sovereign rulers exercised power over their subjects using categories
modeled on the notion of the shepherd overlooking and defending his
flock. With the rise of modernity, however, this model proved insuffi-
cient, and sovereign power was increasingly compelled to rely on the
human sciences (public health, demography, penology, and psychiatry),
thus spawning a model of sociopolitical rule that shifted power down-
ward into the institutions of civil society. Over time, ‘‘governmentality’’
transcended pastoral power, enabling the state to inscribe normative
apparatuses across the social landscape, institutionalizing social control
in ways that reached far beneath and below political apparatuses
themselves.
Three changes are notable with this shift toward governmentality.
First, the family no longer provides a model of government but instead
becomes its instrument. Institutionalized relationships begin to serve as
technologies of social control, with the state conducting norms from
above (Foucault refers to the ‘‘conduct of conduct’’). This presses the
exercise of power down into the ‘‘capillary levels’’ of the social body,
undergirding the exercise of state power from below. Second, a more
fully rationalized form of control takes shape that concerns itself with
the well-being of whole populations, using statistical measures of public
health, fertility, longevity, and productivity. Here, formal knowledge

and expertise enable elites to manage whole populations through behav-
ioral norms deemed suitable toward this end. Third, and of particular
importance, Foucault stresses the growing centrality of economic dis-
course as a human science, which he believed would serve to reshape the
nature and exercise of governmental power within Western capitalism.
In his lectures of 1978 to 1979, Foucault (2008) became particularly
interested in the significance of human capital theory, which he viewed
not as a doctrine to be tested or refuted empirically—the approach
commonly adopted among sociologists of work organizations—but
rather as a sign of a broader cultural shift that was destined to envelop
the social and political order writ large. Precisely because human capital
theory conjured the individual actor as an economic enterprise in his or
her own right, it embodied a set of principles that Foucault believed
would gain increasing purchase over human conduct as modernity
unfolded. In his view, governmental power increasingly rests on the
articulation of institutional arrangements premised on the neoliberal
conception of homo economicus, an ideal-type form of subjectivity
whose agents are endowed with the freedom and responsibility of creat-
ing and recreating their own value within the marketplace.
Several themes emerge from this turn in Foucault’s thinking. For one
thing, he argues that the exercise of power in the contemporary world
has come to rely on subtle yet important ‘‘technologies of the self’’—
micropolitical rituals and practices that conjure particular forms of sub-
jectivity, much as was presaged in the Christian ritual of the confession.
These technologies serve important political and ideological functions,
chiefly by aligning forms of subjectivity with the needs of the neoliberal
economy. A second, related theme is Foucault’s insistence that power
has changed its apparent logic. Rather than operating negatively,
through subtraction—that is, through a logic of denial, coercion, or
discipline—power now operates through far more positive or affirmative
mechanisms: It rules by seeming to multiply the opportunities and
choices that individual actors can enjoy. As Foucault (1978) writes,
power is increasingly ‘‘organized around the management of life
rather than the menace of death’’ (p. 147).
Third, and most importantly, a regime of selfhood emerges in which
workers are encouraged to become ‘‘entrepreneurs of themselves.’’
Rather than the mere ‘‘partner of exchange’’ central to classical liberal
economics, neoliberalism expects the worker to become an ‘‘entrepre-
neur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself
his own producer, being for himself the source of his earnings’’
(Foucault, 2008, p. 226). In this view, what the dominant institutions

produce is not docile or compliant subjects, but rather self-producing
subjects: individuals who take responsibility for working on themselves,
for enhancing their own value-creating qualities, and for willingly enga-
ging in productivity-generating activities. What results is a neoliberaliz-
ing trend that is both broad and deep: broad, in that it spreads across a
wide array of social and cultural institutions; and deep, because those
practices that were once specific to economic firms are increasingly
applied to the individual self. As a result, Foucault (2008) argues,
‘‘the individual’s life itself’’ is reconstrued as ‘‘a sort of permanent
and multiple enterprise’’ (p. 241).
This brief presentation brings into view some of the distinctive
strengths that Foucauldian analysis stands to offer to economic sociol-
ogy and the sociology of work. Where some scholars focus on the struc-
tural arrangements that account for recent shifts in economic
institutions, Foucault insists that culture and discourses cannot be
viewed as either residual influences or as individual-level attitudes.
Instead, the entrepreneurial ideology that now predominates—and the
normative discourses and conceptions of the self that come with
it—have a productive effect on their own, in that they create the
kinds of individuals needed to function in a precarious economy.
Following his analysis, it becomes crucial to identify the micropolitical
rituals and technologies of the self through which given forms of sub-
jectivity are produced. Implied here is Foucault’s (1979) insistence on
viewing the self as a political construct i.e., as an ‘‘effect of certain types
of power’’ (p. 29).
At the same time, it is important to acknowledge certain absences
and ambiguities within the Foucauldian corpus. One involves the role of
agency and resistance. Although Foucault (2007) authored cogent
accounts of what he called ‘‘counter-conduct,’’ (pp. 190–226), these
concerned late medieval religious movements whose relation to contem-
porary societies remains unclear (see Davidson, 2007; Foucault, 1982).
In his later work, Foucault addressed the possible ‘‘reversibility’’ of
institutionalized forms of power, and spoke of instances of truth telling
or ‘‘veridiction,’’ but he seldom specified their conditions of possibil-
ity—that is, the structural and cultural resources that counter-
conduct presupposed (Knights, 2016; Thompson & Ackroyd, 1995).
Mindful of this point, scholars such as Collinson (2003) have sought
to develop a more articulated conception of ‘‘subjectivity in practice,’’
acknowledging that multiple forms of selfhood can emerge in response
to neoliberal uncertainty. In this view, some workers may exhibit
‘‘conformist’’ selves, akin to homo economicus, which willingly embrace

the norms that constitute the enterprising self. Others may adopt neo-
liberal practices but in a purely strategic manner (what Collinson labels
‘‘dramaturgical selves’’). Still others may conceivably refuse or resist the
marketization of the self (‘‘resistant selves,’’ in Collinson’s framework).
Hence, a fuller conception of agency and resistance is needed than
Foucault himself provides.
A parallel problem is the relative absence in Foucauldian thought
of any comparative perspective toward sociohistorical change.
Foucault’s work usually sought to identify broad historical trends
that engulfed Western modernity as a whole. Yet this stance at
times led him overlook sharp variations across particular nation
states.2 Not surprisingly, Foucauldian approaches toward neoliberal-
ism have only rarely adopted a comparative approach. Yet scholars
have showed that neoliberalism has unfolded in a highly uneven
manner, given variations in the structural arrangements and cultural
repertoires that characterize social collectivities at various levels of
analysis, including occupational communities or national contexts
(Lamont & Thevenot, 2000; Mijs, Bakhtiari, & Lamont, 2016; Peck,
2010; Weber, 2000). Here too one finds need for refinement of the
Foucauldian approach.
The Entrepreneurial Turn: Career Advice and the

Rise of ‘‘Personal Branding’’
To explore workers’ responses to precarization and address the limita-
tions of the Foucauldian framework in terms of agency and resistance,
this article focuses on the case of personal branding discourse, an
important extension of the career advice genre. Although this latter
phenomenon has only occasionally been the object of social scientific
analysis (Biggart, 1983), it provides a well-identified body of thought
that serves to establish legitimate ways of being and thinking among
many employees, job seekers, students, and other participants in the
labor force.
Career advice literature has a long history (McGee, 2005) but the
modern era is often said to begin with the publication of Richard
Bolles’s What Color is Your Parachute, written in the late 1970s (see
McGee, 2005), stressing the importance of self-discovery and the pursuit
of one’s passions as the guiding principle for one’s career. By the 1990s,
this literature had begun to exhibit influences stemming from the wider
development of what some have called ‘‘brand’’ or ‘‘promotional
culture’’ (Wernick, 1991). The notion here is that brand management

has assumed an ever-greater economic significance, affecting the ‘‘repu-
tational capital’’ of not only capitalist enterprises but also universities,
cities, hospitals, and nation states. As executives at Nike or Starbucks
well understand, achieving success in the marketplace requires that firms
imbue their products with symbolic meanings of the sort that Marx’s
commodity fetishism only began to describe (Jameson, 1991, p. ix).
This was the point of departure for the rise of ‘‘personal branding’’ as
an economic discourse that fused career advice rhetoric with the logic of
brand management.
Prominent works in the personal branding genre exhibit many simi-
larities. Authors usually contend that the ‘‘standard’’ work arrangement
has become all but obsolete. Where many commentators see this as
cause for concern, personal branding authors instead embrace it as
an emancipatory development that can free workers of their dependence
on corporate paternalism. This point is evident in the very titles of the
genre’s leading works, such as Pamela Slim’s (2010) Escape from Cubicle
Nation: From Corporate Prisoner to Thriving Entrepreneur. The message
is clear: Appropriating corporate marketing practices will enable work-
ers and job seekers to gain greater power within the economy, to
advance their own interests in the labor market, and secure a source
of personal fulfillment that the Fordist wage-bargain could never pro-
vide (Gandini, 2015; Pagis & Ailon, 2017; Vallas & Cummins, 2015;
Wee & Brooks, 2010).
Personal branding discourse has become a prominent feature of the
labor market, whether in face-to-face settings or in online platforms.
In-person events commonly include workshops led by life coaches and
career consultants, conferences hosted by motivational speakers and
authors, seminars offered by outplacement services (at times as part
of severance packages), and trainings provided by state and local gov-
ernments, attendance at which is sometimes mandatory for receipt of
unemployment insurance. The development of digital technologies and
social media platforms over the past decade has further reinforced this
trend: Workers are encouraged to build their online visibility, curate
their presence in social media and job search websites, and promote
themselves on social networking sites (Marwick, 2013; Marwick &
boyd, 2010; Sharone, 2014), all in addition to presentational strategies
to be used in face-to-face interaction.
Many authors are quite explicit about the similarities they posit
between the marketing of inanimate products and human employees.
But this is not a matter of mere packaging, as Beckwith and Clifford
(2007) make clear in You, Inc.: The Art of Selling Yourself, where they
insist that a full immersion of the self (one’s ‘‘being’’) is necessary if
personal brand management is to succeed:
Yes, you sell your skills in this life. You sell what you know and can do. If
by using your skills you are able to help enough people, you will become
secure and may become rich. Beyond that, however, the most critical
thing you sell is literally yourself, your being. People ‘‘buy’’ optimists
because they enjoy their company. They ‘‘buy’’ people with integrity
because people with integrity do what they say they will. Like Maytag
washing machines, people with integrity can be relied upon. (p. 7, emphasis
in original)
Construing one’s being as a brand does not come naturally. It takes

practice, training, and tools: Expertise not only in technical skills (e.g.,
the use of social media) but also in relational or interactional ones
(Pagis & Ailon, 2017). Here, the texts are happy to help, offering exer-
cises, drills, and techniques that are sure to do the job. Three examples
can be mentioned: (a) Strength–Weakness–Opportunity–and–Threat
analyses, here applied not to a business enterprise or department but
to one’s self as an economic entity; (b) the ‘‘Personal Branding
Statement,’’ a short, engaging expression of one’s distinctive attri-
butes—one’s ‘‘personal commercial’’ (Chritton, 2013) that serves as a
template for one’s in-person and online interactions; and (c) the use of
focus groups to test one’s branding statement in front of one’s friends
and associates.
The growing prevalence of personal branding discourse can readily
be assessed. Figure 1 presents the results of a LexisNexis search of news
media and magazines. It reveals a strong increase in the prevalence of
personal branding discourse during the past 30 years. The discourse has
shown unrelenting growth in spite of (arguably, because of) severe
downturns in the broader economy, which have underscored the need
to position oneself in an ever-more turbulent labor market.
This growing phenomenon of personal branding in turn nicely
instantiates Foucault’s notion of homo economicus as an ideal typical
form of employee subjectivity. Indeed, texts in the personal branding
genre often suggest to their readers that the application of self-branding
tactics will open up new avenues for autonomy and empowerment that
would not otherwise be available, thus illustrating the ‘‘positive’’ face of
power, in Foucault’s terms. In addition, the exercises, scripts, and rit-
uals these texts supply can readily be viewed as ‘‘technologies of the
Figure 1. Newsmedia mentions of personal branding, 1986–2015, using

LexisNexis.
self’’ whose outcome explicitly aims to reconfigure individual subjectiv-

ity along the lines of the capitalist enterprise (‘‘me, Inc.’’; see Lane,
2011). Finally, many of these texts invite the reader to confess the par-
tial, limited, and even deadening nature of their prebranded self, viewing
such admissions as a necessary condition for the discovery of the ‘‘real,’’
passionate self that Fordist institutions had concealed. In all these ways,
personal branding discourse closely conforms to themes outlined in
Foucault’s arguments regarding neoliberal governmentality and the
generalization of the enterprise form, all the more so given the growing
prevalence of the discourse over the course of the last two decades.
But no textual analysis can suffice to explore the efficacy of this or
any discourse (Molyneux, Holton, & Lewis, 2017). Here, it becomes
vital to ask how workers and job seekers respond to the discourse of
personal branding (see Williams & Connell, 2010). Thus, we return to
the research questions mentioned in the introduction: How do precar-
ious workers react to ‘‘personal branding’’ discourse? What social and
cultural conditions influence the capacity of workers to resist such
discourse?
Methods
To address these questions, we use two sets of data that allow us to
gauge the influence of personal branding on the work orientations and
identities found among labor force participants in white-collar occupa-
tions. As noted, the first study focuses on a single occupation—web
journalists—across two geographical settings, while the second study
analyzes a single regional setting but allows for variation across multiple
white-collar occupations. Both studies were conducted between 2011
and 2014 and aim to understand the meanings that precariously
employed workers attach to their positions in the labor market. Both
used qualitative methods to explore the social conditions accounting for
variations in workers’ views. Both relied on grounded theory (Charmaz,
2006) to make sense of their findings. Conjoining the two studies enables
us to explore a wide range of responses to personal branding discourse
among different kinds of workers facing highly uncertain prospects
in the labor market—journalists, whose industry is wracked with
structural change and whose positions are intrinsically insecure, and
white-collar workers who have encountered economic hardship in the
wake of the Great Recession.3
The first study focuses on web journalists, an occupation that under-
went major transformation over the past 20 years. Financially, journal-
ism is going through exceptionally dire times. As the news moved online
(Boczkowski, 2005), the revenues of print publication fell substantially:
between 2000 and 2013, newspapers’ advertising revenues decreased by
more than half, from $63.5 billion to $23 billion (McChesney & Pickard,
2011; Ryfe, 2012). This decline was not compensated for by increased
revenues on the digital side (Turow, 2011). As a result, 23,000 news-
paper positions were lost between 1989 and 2015; an additional 38,000
magazine jobs disappeared between 2009 and 2014. News websites only
created about 5,000 new jobs, a far cry from all the full-time positions
that were lost (American Society of News Editors, 2015; Pew Research
Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2014).
These broad changes led to a dramatic reconfiguration of journalistic
employment in the digital era. For most of the 20th century, journalism
as an industry relied predominantly on salaried employment: Most jour-
nalists would start their careers with short-term or part-time contracts,
before getting a full-time position in a newsroom, perhaps moving once
or twice when opportunities arose. Over the past 20 years, however,
independent contracting became increasingly prevalent: The number
of journalists who freelance and have temporary or part-time positions
has been increasing steadily over the past decades, in the United States
and in Europe (Cohen 2015; Marwick, 2013; Weaver, 2007). Note that
these recent transformations have affected journalism—online and off-
line—in various national contexts, including in the United States and
France. Traditionally, American journalism has been analyzed as a
marked-based system that developed relatively independently of the
state (McChesney & Pickard, 2011). In contrast, the development of
French journalism has historically depended on state sponsorship, at
least since the 1930s. The state monopoly on radio and television ended
in the 1980s, but public subsidies are still an important source of finan-
cial support of print newspapers and individual journalists—including
freelancers, who can receive employment subsidies under a number of
specific conditions (Aubert, 2011; Benson, 2013).
The first study thus examined changing attitudes toward work and
employment of freelance journalists writing for news websites in Paris
and New York. Since freelance web journalists typically live and die
according to their ability to generate an Internet presence, they provide
an important test regarding the power of personal branding discourse
and how it varies depending on the national context. The collection
method began with ethnographic fieldwork conducted at five prominent
online news organizations in Paris and New York (two online-only web
magazines, two online-only news aggregators, and one legacy news-
paper that also has a website). This served as a basis for the use of
snowball sampling techniques, eventuating in a sample of 101 journal-
ists and bloggers at varying stages of their careers. The U.S. and French
interviewees presented rather similar characteristics in terms of age
(with an overrepresentation of the 30- to 45-year-old age-group) and
number of freelancers: 40% of the sample were freelancers at the time of
the interview (about 90% of the web journalists interviewed in the pro-
ject had been freelancers at some point in their careers). The French
journalists were also more likely to have graduated from journalism
programs (58% compared with 11% of the Americans), and included
a higher proportion of women (40%) than in the United States (25%).
These samples are roughly consistent with the sociodemographic char-
acteristics of the U.S. and French journalistic workforces.
The second study targets a sample of educated white-collar employ-
ees and job seekers across a range of occupations in the Boston metro-
politan area, most of whom have been exposed to relatively high levels
of labor market uncertainty since the economic crisis of 2007 to 2008.
Data collection began by recruiting participants through contacts
at two local universities, using alumni lists and club memberships.
To maximize the study’s ability to capture the effects of labor market

precarity, we made a particular effort to include participants who had
registered with a university program that was geared to the problems of
the long-term unemployed. A modest compensation (a $20 gift card)
was offered as an incentive for participation. The resulting sample
yielded 62 semistructured interviews, almost all of whom were college
graduates (two held only the associate’s degree). Nearly a quarter had
postbaccalaureate degrees, including nine with MBA degrees, three with
law degrees, and two with PhDs. Interviewees were experienced in a
broad range of occupations, with computer programming, technical
writing, public relations, human resources, paralegal work, sales, mar-
keting, and nonprofit work among the more prominent occupational
fields. While some had strategically valuable skills and qualifications,
with experience at the ‘‘C-level’’ (indicating senior positions in a busi-
ness organization), most had been employed at mid-level positions in
the corporate or the nonprofit world.
Despite their relatively high levels of education and experience, evi-
dence of hardship was apparent among these participants. A third of
these individuals (20 of the 62) were unemployed when interviewed, and
some had been jobless for more than a year. Half the sample was working
at nonstandard or contingent jobs, whether at temporary agencies, con-
sulting, or piecing together numerous part-time jobs. Fewer than one in
five held full time, ‘‘W-2’’ positions. Although a small handful had
received severance packages when laid off, most interviewees shared
stories of financial pressure and hardship in one or another form.
Some had been compelled to level their career aspirations, as with one
woman in her 40s, who commented that ‘‘me finding a job that pays 40
grand or more is starting to seem like an unreachable goal.’’ As with the
web journalists, this sample provides a useful empirical platform for
exploring how workers in precarious labor market positions respond
to entrepreneurial ideologies such as personal branding rhetoric.4
Findings
The first question we address is how workers and job seekers conceive of
or respond to ‘‘personal branding’’ discourse. Here, our data attest to
the prevalence of this rhetoric and to a willingness among many of our
interviewees to embrace self-branding discourse and techniques as
necessary features of their career pursuits.
One sign of the ubiquity of personal branding discourse emerged
from the fact that many of our interviewees spontaneously invoked
the term even when asked a generic set of questions about their labor
market activities. Such spontaneous uses of the discourse suggested that
many interviewees view personal branding as a ‘‘natural’’ feature of any
modern economy, or as a set of practices that any job seeker is obliged
to master as a matter of course. In the journalism case, freelancers were
often intimately convinced that personal branding strategies were help-
ful to find jobs and to gain a significant presence for their work. A good
example is that of John, a 29-year-old freelancer in New York who
explained his personal branding efforts with no prompting from the
interviewer:
I try to promote myself . . . I know the importance of branding [emphasis

added] so I hired a friend to do these business cards for me. I left them
everywhere. They’re colorful and engaging. It’s a way of keeping people
interested . . . And my website is like an online portfolio that allows me to
show editors, ‘‘hey, look what I’m doing,’’ but also to show my work to
the rest of the world, with social media . . . So that’s a way to get my name
out there and my writing out there . . . for free, of course, but it’s
exposure . . . I’m going to conferences, being persistent, meeting contacts,
trying to get my ideas out there . . .
John uses a multifaceted effort at self-branding, relying not only on

business cards but also on a personal website, social media, and in-per-
sonal networking. The use of social media—especially Twitter—emerged
as a constant among virtually all of the web journalists in both New
York and in Paris, with many of the interviewees in both cities carefully
monitoring their visibility in quantitative terms (Christin, 2017;
Marwick, 2013; Revers, 2014). For instance, Patricia, who writes for a
political magazine website in New York, shared her frustration at the
challenge she encounters in cultivating her own personal brand:
On Twitter I have 2,000 followers . . . I still don’t know how to pass the
threshold and be followed massively on Twitter. But now I’m followed by
several editors, it’s really important. It’s a way to build my brand. That’s
what online journalism is about today . . . You have a brand and the
people who read you follow you. I want to get to that point.
Similar patterns emerged among white-collar workers and job seekers in

the Boston data. Here too interviewees commonly invoked branding
rhetoric without special prompting and commonly embraced its use.
In some cases, interviewees credited self-branding with their career
success. When asked how she initially encountered the discourse of per-
sonal branding, Maureen (a web designer now working as an informa-
tion technology consultant) explained:
That’s what gave me the whole idea [her own consulting practice]. I
started out when I didn’t have a job and I said, ‘the only way I’m
going to get a job is if I brand myself as an expert.’ I sat down and put
down my strategy for how I was going to create an online brand for
myself. It was a very conscious decision to create a personal brand.
That’s exactly what I was doing. That’s why I was constantly looking
at my ‘‘klout’’ score, because it was an indicator to me of how successful I
was at creating my personal brand.
Maureen’s mention of her ‘‘klout’’ score refers to her use of klout.com,

an online platform that captures real-time shifts in one’s social media
presence, much in the manner of one’s stock portfolio. In some cases,
interviewees made even more enthusiastic use of personal branding,
immersing themselves in the discourse so deeply as to become avatars
of its message. Indeed, several of the job seekers led networking groups
that actively trained others in the work of personal branding. An exam-
ple was Beverly, a specialist in educational technology now in her 60s,
who said of personal branding:
It’s a great thing. And you have to be able to do that, and be able to speak
to it, and be able to do it all the time. You have to be able to tell everybody
that that [your personal branding statement] is you . . . It has to come from
your hip. If it doesn’t, everybody can see right through it. [emphasis
added]
To ensure that your personal branding statement is an organic part of

you, Beverly repeated:
You have to practice it all the time. You have to practice it to everybody,
even when you’re at the grocery store. If it’s someone you know, you turn
around and you tell them your branding statement. You tell them.
Because, a lot of people will say ‘‘I didn’t know you did that! I didn’t
know that that was you!’’ And ‘‘Oh my gosh! So and so works at such and
such.’’ And it can lead you right into that [job opportunity]. So I think it’s
very important that you do that, that you do it all the time. You have to
be able to develop a dialogue with it. A branding statement has to start a
dialogue . . . I’ve helped a lot of other people brand themselves.
Gilda, another interviewee in the Boston case, showed even greater

enthusiasm for personal branding and explained that her training in
the discourse extended beyond the groups she ran, reaching into her
family life:
I got my daughter on LinkedIn when she was 15, so she could begin her
personal branding . . . If you go to her LinkedIn page, you’d have to say,
‘My God, for 17 years old, look at her personal branding!’ So yes, I’ve
been an advocate and a teacher of personal branding . . . I’ve been helping
young people do that as a matter of course for the last decade . . . You
have to give the value proposition of you.
Gilda’s last comment—‘‘you have to be able to give the value propos-

ition of you’’—begins to reveal the mimetic nature of personal branding
discourse: Interviews, seminars, and workshops often made use of the
same rhetoric as is found in published guides and manuals.
In conducting the interviews, we took care to adopt a neutral orien-
tation toward this phenomenon. Yet when we posed specific questions
about personal branding, some interviewees nonetheless expressed a
sense of guilt that they had not worked hard enough to craft their per-
sonal brands. This is the case of Perry, an unemployed man in his 40s
who had much experience as a facilities manager in Boston. When he
was read a personal branding excerpt, he immediately agreed with its
logic, but then confessed that he had been putting off the effort to per-
fect his branding statement and needed to redouble his efforts in this
regard.
I consider it like work, and something I probably want to avoid. But no

one’s going to come knocking on my door and give me a job. I have to put
the work in [to achieve] a nice, clean, and succinct elevator speech, one
that’s believable, that sells you . . . If you asked me to give you [my per-
sonal branding statement] now, I’d hem and haw. I think that exercises,
narrowing it down, and then making people believe it, that’s the key,
that’s the real key. I’m getting there, but I’m not quite there yet.
Similarly, Philip, an attorney in his 50s with his own practice, told us
that the interview had ‘‘crystallized a lot of things for me’’ and allowed
that ‘‘branding myself [better] is what I need to do.’’ We interpret these
responses as exhibiting a widely shared view of self-branding as a moral
obligation—an instance of what Collinson (2003) has dubbed
‘‘conformist selves,’’ who fully embraced the marketization of one’s self.

Thus personal branding rhetoric does seem to have become a widely
institutionalized form of economic discourse, signifying a willingness
among many workers and job seekers to adopt an increasingly entre-
preneurial posture in relation to their career pursuits. In short, homo
economicus is no stranger to these interviewees.
Yet this was not the only pattern we found. Alongside such enter-
prising subjects, we also found less fully acquiescent responses, in keep-
ing with Collinson’s (2003) typology. Some interviewees indeed adopted
a ‘‘dramaturgical’’ relation to personal branding—that is, a form of
strategic compliance that utilized what Goffman (1961) called role dis-
tance and what Hochschild (1983) dubbed ‘‘surface acting.’’ Others
adopted a posture of opposition or resistance, explicitly refusing, as a
matter of principle, the marketization of the self that personal branding
implies.
Instances of a strategic or dramaturgical relation toward personal
branding were largely confined to the Boston interviewees, several of
whom were willing to adopt self-branding rhetoric but who viewed it as
a performative maneuver that had no necessary connection to their
‘‘real’’ identities. Instances of this stance seemed especially common
among employees who held jobs in public relations, communications,
and events planning, who had developed the ability to engage in market-
positive behavior while shielding their identities from their outward
performances. One example was that of Anna, a public relation staffer
in her late 20s, who spoke of having to consciously ‘‘turn my interview
self ‘off’ and turn my real self ‘on’.’’ Switching tropes a moment later,
she explained that ‘‘it’s like a hat that you wear [and can remove].’’
Another case of dramaturgical compliance was that of Rachel, an
administrative assistant, who had carefully crafted one personal brand-
ing statement for medical assistant jobs and another, equally elaborate
one for positions as a legal assistant (the field in which she was most
qualified). When asked which traits she tries to project in interviews, she
remarked that ‘‘I try to project all the personality traits that have been
valued by my previous employers.’’ When interviewing at a large med-
ical organization, she speaks of her ability to ‘‘make the patient feel they
are a star in their own performance. It’s catchy.’’ Some workers in this
vein approached personal branding as an extension of their involvement
with amateur theater. A customer service representative explained that
‘‘It’s like your own little one-man show. You wrote the script, now go
perform it.’’
Crucially, we also found cases involving ‘‘resistant selves’’ among

both groups of interviewees. In the case of journalism, resistant
approaches were largely confined to the French freelancers rather
than their American counterparts. Indeed, when the French respondents
referred to branding discourse, they often did so in ways that expressed
a determined refusal of its logic. Marie, a Parisian freelancer in her late
20s, puts the point most concisely:
Networking . . . I’m not very good at it. Once I know people, yeah, I’ll
follow them on Twitter and I’ll try to stay in touch, but it’s not systematic.
I don’t do personal branding [spoken in English], I’m trying to be myself.
But then it’s true that when I post one of my slideshows and tweet: ‘‘look
at my latest slideshow,’’ well, I’m selling myself, it’s true that I try to get
attention, but I think that it’s natural, I just finished a slideshow, it’s
natural, it’s not strategic or mathematical . . .
Here, Marie makes a sharp distinction between ‘‘strategic or mathem-

atical’’ forms of audience-seeking behavior (which she rejects) and a
more ‘‘natural’’ and authentic, non-commercial pursuit of one’s reader-
ship (which she views as simply ‘‘trying to be myself’’). She acknow-
ledges that her effort to win an audience for her own creative work could
be construed as a form of self-branding (‘‘well, I’m selling myself’’). But
she immediately rejects this way of framing her own practices, which she
views as more natural, honest, and thus morally sound. Interestingly,
when Marie speaks of self-branding she uses the English phrase,
implying that she sees this discourse as an American import that has
limited applicability on her home terrain. Overall, and as shown in the
comments of John and Patricia quoted earlier, personal branding
was more widely accepted among the American journalists, who
viewed it as an inevitable feature of freelancing work itself, for better
or for worse.
Similarly, the Boston case also revealed many instances of a refusal
or rejection of the discourse as such. In some cases, interviewees invoked
a sharp distinction between commercial products and living human
beings. One example is that of Francesca, a woman in her 40s with a
PhD in molecular biology:
I find it extremely hard to create a brand for a person, as opposed to a

service . . . and overall I’m quite turned off by the infusion of marketing
concepts into the job search field . . . I just hate it. Maybe that’s just my
scientific background.
Similarly, Catherine, the former director of a mental health agency,

now unemployed for months, responded to an instance of personal
branding rhetoric by saying this:
It’s junk. It’s just words . . . As an employer, if somebody’s resume was full
of all this marketing hyperbole on the top of their resume . . . [presenting]
their skills [as] if it was an advertisement, I’d probably laugh. I might look
at their resume anyway but I would think it would take away from my
feeling about them as a professional.
Those who resisted or refused personal branding rhetoric sometimes

spoke with disdain of the ‘‘false face’’ that branding discourse required
users to adopt, arguing that personal brands seem ‘‘fake’’ or ‘‘PR-ish,’’
and referred to it as ‘‘business-speak’’ or ‘‘internet slang.’’
It is important to note that in many cases, we found evidence that
resistance toward personal branding was not a static response but was
instead subject to change over time, especially in light of the labor
market uncertainty to which workers were exposed. Numerous
instances emerged in which interviewees spoke of an initial refusal of
personal branding but eventually embraced its dictates out of sheer
desperation. For instance, Wanda, a paralegal employee in her mid-
50s, initially refused to conceive of herself as needing a personal
brand, but after a long spell of unemployment, and after feeling her
way through various workshops, eventually embraced personal brand-
ing so fully that she now speaks of her ongoing effort to ‘‘incorporate
everything I can, everything that’s useful, in the hopes of bettering and
developing me, my brand.’’ Similarly, an unemployed engineer who
made clear his strong objection to personal branding eventually closed
the interview by expressing his willingness to surrender any critical
stance, if doing so would enable him to find secure employment.
Discussion
The evidence presented thus far allows us to make two general obser-
vations. First, familiarity with personal branding is indeed widespread.
Many of the web journalists we interviewed find personal branding to be
a useful means of audience-promotion, and this stance is also quite
pronounced among the broader sample of Boston white-collar employ-
ees. Alongside this finding, however, is a second point: that interviewees
respond to entrepreneurial discourse in a multiplicity of ways, defying
characterization in simple or uniform terms. While people like John
(New York journalist), Beverly (educational technology specialist) or

Maureen (information technology consultant) all neatly fit the profile
of the ‘‘conformist’’ or enterprising self, individuals such as Marie
(Paris-based journalist), Francesca (PhD in molecular biology), and
Catherine (health-care administrator) clearly matched what Collinson
(2003) dubs the ‘‘resistant’’ type. The ‘‘dramaturgical’’ category, too,
was evident, as in the cases of Rachel and Anna (both performing rou-
tine administrative work in public-facing occupations), and to some
extent Marie. The question then becomes one of identifying the sources
of variation in employee responses to personal branding rhetoric.
Although many factors are doubtless at work, our data point to three
important factors, involving the nationally specific cultural repertoires
to which workers are exposed, the occupational norms that workers
have experienced and internalized, and the level of labor market inse-
curity that workers have had to confront. We discuss these in turn.
Cross-National Differences
Our ability to compare workers’ response toward personal branding
discourse in the American and French context enables us to identify
the influences that shape subjective orientations toward work and the
self in the two countries. Here, our data clearly indicate cross-national
differences as far as web journalists are concerned: Overall, the French
freelancers are less likely to engage in personal branding while their
American counterparts see self-branding as a useful tool with which
to engage in the audience-seeking behavior their occupations ‘‘natur-
ally’’ require. The question, then, is why this cross-national difference
occurs.
One obvious approach points to the structural differences that
accompany employment in the two different societies. In theory,
French freelancers enjoy access to a host of social insurance bene-
fits—wage subsidies in particular, and other labor protections as
well—that are denied American freelancers. Arguably, the availability
of material benefits or subsidies from the French state might allow free-
lancers to enjoy greater distance from necessity. But this account is not
easily squared with our data, as few of the French freelancers in this
study had availed themselves of state-provided benefits, either because
of their reluctance to satisfy the complex bureaucratic protocols that are
required or a lack of knowledge regarding their actual eligibility. This
finding suggests that normative constructs have exerted a relatively
autonomous effect on the freelancers’ views. In other words, the
material resources provided by the French state seem here less conse-
quential than the nationally specific ‘‘cultural repertoires’’ (Alvesson &
Willmott, 2002; Lamont & Thévenot, 2000, p. 8) that freelancers are
able to invoke. Specifically, French freelancers seem to rely on dis-
courses involving ‘‘civic solidarity,’’ framing their audience-seeking
efforts in terms of authenticity but also as a contribution to the public
good (Lamont & Thevenot, 2000). Self-branding is also often viewed as
an expression of American capitalism, as suggested in Marie’s switch to
English when using this term, which further supports this idea of a
cultural refusal. For their part, the American freelancers have little
access to such a cultural repertoire imbued with civic solidarity and
are far more prone to view their audience-seeking behavior in market-
ized terms.
It is interesting to note, however, that the two groups appear to
manage their occupational choices and daily decisions in highly similar
ways. French freelancers do work in a highly competitive market-
place—that is, they too must promote the visibility of their work—yet
they refuse to define this promotional work in instrumental or market-
based terms, whereas American journalists have no such hesitation.
The question arises, then, as to whether the antimarket posture of the
French freelancers exhibits an internal tension between its actual behav-
ior on the one hand and its discursive framing on the other (Jerolmack
& Khan, 2014). As the French state encounters pressures to embrace
neoliberal ideas, and the French labor market increasingly moves in the
direction of flexibilization (Abdelnour & Lambert, 2014), antimarket
discourses may become harder to sustain over time—for journalists
and others as well.
Occupational Norms
Although we find important cross-national differences in cultural orien-
tations toward work and self, we also find similarities across national
boundaries. Importantly, there are groups of American workers who,
like the French freelancers, refuse market norms. This posture of resist-
ance was especially pronounced among U.S. employees whose back-
grounds exposed them to occupation-based norms encouraging them
to expect autonomy from market imperatives (Thornton & Ocasio,
1999; Turco, 2012). Recall the cases of Catherine (the mental health
administrator who said she would ‘‘laugh’’ at instances of personal
branding by job candidates), and Francesca (the molecular biologist
who ‘‘hated’’ market-based views of people, a view she attributed
to her training in natural science). Similar views were expressed by

others who had been employed in such professional occupations as
technical writers, archivists, graphic designers, and academics. What
unites the French and the Americans holding these critical views is
their shared conviction that the assertion of an autonomous self at
work—a practice which personal branding appears to threaten (but
see Pagis & Ailon, 2017)—is a necessary condition for the maintenance
of one’s dignity as a professional employee.
Interestingly, however, there were also numerous instances of
employees whose employment in professional occupations did not
foster such a counter-discourse. The American freelance journalists,
who pursue professional distinction precisely through the market for
page views and social media popularity, are one case in point. But in
the Boston data, we also found that lawyers who maintained their own
practices saw value in market-based norms, as was true with engineers
and especially those who had been trained and employed as program-
mers and computer scientists. Indeed, technical professionals with
expertise in the field of information technology—including many with
successful stints as consultants—were disproportionately supportive of
personal branding as an orientation toward work and self. Arguably,
this gulf between subjects valuing professional autonomy from the
market on the one hand, and their counterparts who are more fully
(and willingly) immersed in market-based practices on the other, may
stem from the wider division between two distinct fractions of the ‘‘new
class,’’ as Gouldner (1979) conceived it.
Exposure to Labor Market Uncertainty

A third observation is that specifically material influences, in addition to
cultural patterns established at the national and occupational levels,
also shaped employees’ orientations toward career and self. Here, we
refer to the disciplinary effects of labor market uncertainty. Specifically,
prolonged exposure to economic precarity exerted significant effects on
workers’ views, albeit differentially so in France and the United States.
As we have seen, French freelancers who held uncertain positions in the
field of journalism nonetheless remained highly critical of self-branding
rhetoric. Among the American workers who were exposed to precarious
conditions of employment, however, such a critical stance came to seem
like a luxury that interviewees could not—or no longer—afford.
This last point was most pronounced in the data gathered from the
Boston participants, as employees who were less exposed to precarious
forms of employment seemed somewhat more likely to question or resist

self-branding rhetoric than did those in more contingent or precarious
positions. Conversely, interviewees who had been exposed to longer
spells of labor market uncertainty seemed consistently more amenable
to self-branding practices. These subjects—some of whom faced uncer-
tain situations with their homes, credit card debt, or health-care expen-
ses—made clear that they were in no position to question the nature of
the career advice they encountered, and even asked the interviewer for
information about pro bono branding coaches. As noted, exposure to
economic precarity also inclined the Boston interviewees to shift their
views over time, relinquishing any initial skepticism toward self-
branding rhetoric and exchanging it for a more acquiescent stance.
Little evidence of this ‘‘disciplining’’ effect emerged among the French
interviewees, suggesting that the erosion of the ‘‘standard’’ work
arrangement exerts different effects on actors’ identities depending on
the institutional context at hand.5
Conclusion
This article began as an effort to address two deficiencies that have
limited recent sociological efforts to explain the proliferation of precar-
ious work: The field’s relative inattention to ideological or discursive
influences in legitimating precarious work arrangements, and the rela-
tively undertheorized state of research in this field. In an effort to
address these deficiencies, our article has adopted a two-pronged strat-
egy. In theoretical terms, we have appealed to the work of Michel
Foucault, whose theory of governmentality provides a useful lens
through which to study how individual subjectivities reinforce—or
not—specific types of political and economic arrangements. In more
empirical terms, we have used data drawn from two distinct yet comple-
mentary studies of precariously employed workers: freelance journalists
in New York and Paris and white-collar workers in Boston. Using this
data, we have examined the meanings workers attach to an increasingly
influential form of economic discourse: ‘‘personal branding,’’ an out-
growth of the career advice genre. Our findings have implications both
for this particular form of discourse and for theoretical thinking regard-
ing neoliberalism more generally.
Our data reveal that entrepreneurial discourse has indeed become a
ubiquitous feature of the economic landscape for many workers, much
as Foucauldian theory expects. Respondents in both national contexts
seemed highly familiar with personal branding rhetoric, often even using
it without any prompting from the interviewer. Personal branding dis-

course seemed especially potent in the U.S. context—both among the
freelance journalists in New York and the white-collar workers in
Boston. Although not the only response to personal branding discourse,
conformity or consent to its logic—and thus to the notion of the ‘‘enter-
prising self’’—was the predominant posture that many workers
assumed. Here, we see at least partial warrant for the Foucauldian
expectation regarding homo economicus. Facing economic precarity,
many workers do exhibit pressure to adopt forms of subjectivity that
construe their career horizons and work identities as objects to which
corporate marketing techniques must be applied. Advice regarding the
application of corporate techniques to one’s self are by no means limited
to the pages of Branding for Dummies and other personal branding
texts; they have been adopted in everyday life by workers and job see-
kers seeking to defend or advance their careers. Indeed, the argument
can be made that personal branding discourse has grown even more
pervasive since our data were collected, as social media like Twitter
and Instagram have become almost ubiquitous platforms on which
the enterprising self routinely performs.6
Yet we also document variation in the postures that actors assume.
Our data suggest that enterprising or conformist selves do exist but sit
alongside less conformist forms of subjectivity—dramaturgical and
resistant selves—which themselves vary depending on the institutional
conditions to which workers are exposed. Three such conditions
emerged in our analysis: those stemming from the nationally specific
cultural repertoires (Lamont & Thévenot, 2000; Mijs et al., 2016); the
occupational norms workers have experienced at work; and the degree
of material precarity they have endured in their labor market situations.
Interestingly, in the United States, the group that seemed most resistant
to entrepreneurial discourse included workers who had been steeped in
professional settings that favored or even required autonomy from the
market. This finding aligns with a number of similar results, such as
reported by Turco (2012) and Cornfield (2015), who found important
instances in which occupational norms and discourses enabled workers
to resist the application of market logics to their work or labor market
situations (cf. Kellogg, 2011). This point suggests that the maintenance
of occupational autonomy has effects that reach beyond the workplace
itself, in that it provides important cultural resources that workers need
if they are to envision alternatives to an ever-more neoliberalized world.
At a more theoretical level, the question emerges as to the value that
Foucauldian theory holds for sociologists seeking to understand the
precarization of work more generally. Much of Foucault’s (1979) own

work proceeds on the assumption that the emergence of particular types
of subjectivity can best be viewed as an ‘‘effect of certain forms of
power’’ (p. 29). Foucault applied this insight to multiple historical con-
texts, seeking to understand the micropolitical rituals through which
distinct regimes of selfhood arise. Composing one’s personal branding
statement or practicing one’s performance in front of a mirror—rituals
that are often suggested in the personal branding literature—constitute
precisely such technologies and may well have subtle yet important
effects on the modern worker’s identity, fostering a more acquiescent
posture toward neoliberal practices than would otherwise be the case.
One contribution of Foucauldian theory, then, is that it sensitizes us to
the types of interpellation that arise in given contexts (Althusser, 1971),
and that may underpin the emergence of newly emergent forms of
subjectivity.7
A second strength of Foucauldian theory stems from Foucault’s
(2008) own discussion of human capital theory (Becker, 1964/1993).
As noted, sociological approaches toward human capital theory have
usually engaged this approach as a scientific prediction to be confirmed
or refuted (e.g., Lin & Tomaskovic-Devey, 2013). In contrast, Foucault
suggests that the ‘‘truth’’ lurking within human capital theory lies not in
its empirical validity (or lack thereof), but in its cultural or normative
power, which he believed would grow over time. In his view, human
capital theory is but one element within a system of governance in which
power is increasingly invested in economic apparatuses and the forms of
subjectivity they conjure. Foucault reasoned that a culture of ‘‘enter-
prise’’ was likely to emerge (du Gay, 1996) that would individualize
actors, foster a view of the self as a revenue-generating enterprise, and
define this marketized condition as a source of agency, autonomy, and
empowerment. Arguably, this individualizing discourse is one of the
main reasons why the precariously employed have remained relatively
quiescent (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005).
Yet a third and final point that emerges from this study concerns the
existence of variations in responses to neoliberal or entrepreneurial rhet-
oric. Here, Foucauldian theory leaves us with a number of unresolved
issues. For one thing, Foucault and his followers have only rarely
thought to consider cross-national variations in the processes they
sketch. Yet, as we have seen, variations in nationally specific cultural
repertoires can hardly be overlooked. Indeed, neglect of such repertoires
may even impede scholarly analysis. It may be that American cultural
repertoires have so deeply naturalized entrepreneurial language that
U.S. scholars have found little reason to problematize the enterprising

self. Perhaps this is why critical analysis of ‘‘enterprise culture’’
has largely emanated from the United Kingdom, owing to the
emergence of the forms of political contention which the Thatcher revo-
lution provoked (Harvey, 2005; Vallas & Cummins, 2015). Absent such
explicit struggles over neoliberal practices and social policies, the
entrepreneurial norms that impinge on the self may remain taken
for granted, even by scholars seeking to grasp the marketization
process.
It is not difficult to find evidence that neoliberal thinking has begun
to impinge on employee identity in many national contexts, even (or
especially) in the wake of economic crisis.8 Many instances can be found
in which public policy in the European Union has applied enterprising
discourse in ways that many Americans would find familiar. In
Germany, for example, the Hartz reforms of 2002 contained an import-
ant revision dubbed Ich AG (‘‘Me, Inc.’’), as part of the government’s
explicit effort to implement an entrepreneurial culture of innovation.
Similarly, a study of life coaches in Finland (Makinen, 2014) found
that entrepreneurial discourse has proved highly popular even in
this Nordic nation. Evidence of neoliberal discourse has also found
expression in the notion of the auto-entrepreneur in France
(Abdelnour & Lambert, 2014). The question—which Foucault left in
an ambiguous state—is whether nationally specific structures and cul-
tural repertoires will equip workers with the capacity to modify, chal-
lenge, or refuse such neoliberalizing discourses. As web-based platforms
such as Twitter and Instagram proliferate across national boundaries,
enabling or requiring participants to engage in audience-promotion and
identity work of various sorts—but always constrained by the plat-
form’s features—what meanings will workers and job seekers attach
to such activities? What cultural resources will they need to resist the
entrepreneurial definitions and practices they increasingly confront?
And what alternative conceptions of work and self must emerge if effect-
ive forms of counter-conduct are to take root? Such questions remain to
be addressed to better understand how work arrangements are being
transformed in an increasingly globalized and dematerialized employ-
ment era.
Acknowledgment
The authors wish to acknowledge the generous and supportive commentary of
Woody Powell, Heather Haveman, Cat Turco, and the anonymous reviewers of
Work and Occupations. Any remaining flaws are of course entirely our own.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the
research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.
Notes
1. There are important similarities between Weber and Foucault. Both stressed
the role of formal knowledge or expertise in the exercise of domination. Both
adopted a wary view toward Marxism and toward science as a source of
human emancipation. And both placed great emphasis on the subjective
orientations that actors embrace. Arguably, Weber’s Protestant Ethic consti-
tutes a discourse analysis that anticipates many themes which Foucault was
later to develop along novel lines. On the relation between Weber and
Foucault, see O’Neill (1986).
2. In his History of Sexuality (1978), Foucault initially drew a distinction
between Eastern and Western knowledge about sex (juxtaposing ars erotica
in the East to sexualis scientia in the West), but quickly abandoned this
distinction as unfounded.
3. The two studies began independently, with somewhat different goals in mind:
The U.S. and French journalism focused largely on digital transformation in
different national contexts, while the Boston study aimed to understand the
economic discourses found among the precarious unemployed. As we dis-
cussed our respective findings, the results seemed so congruent as to warrant
their combination. The comparison between the two cases, we believe,
enables us to make a broader set of comparisons that either project alone
can achieve. Yet this comparative approach also comes with limitations. In
particular, the design of the two studies differs. In one case (the U.S. and
France study), the project was ethnographic and started with observations of
five newsrooms, complemented by semistructured interviews with journalists
working for these newsrooms. In the second case (the Boston study), the
project was interview based and more explicitly focused on workers’ experi-
ence of precarity, which resulted in a different sampling method and inter-
view grid. Despite these differences, which the methods section details, we
found enough similarities between our two sets of data to develop a fruitful
comparison in this article (for a recent study adopting a similar comparative
design, see Lara-Millan & Van Cleve, 2016).
4. In both sets of data, the overwhelming majority of the interviewees were
White, reflecting the relatively privileged channels through which partici-
pants were recruited. This point limits the study’s ability to tease out the
differential experiences of historically excluded groups, which cannot be
addressed in the current study.
5. Even here, we suspect that a subtle interplay exists between economic and
cultural influences. Lacking an antimarket cultural repertoire, precariously
employed subjects in Boston were understandably more susceptible to self-
branding discourse. Armed with a more pronounced antimarket outlook, the
French freelancers responded to their precarious positions with a greater
degree of independence and resistance.
6. Although our data reveal few if any gender differences, analysis of platforms
such as Instagram might suggest otherwise, as many aspiring models use
Instagram to post photographs of themselves wearing designer goods that
are ‘‘tagged’’ (or labeled), doing so in an effort to gain prominence and
marketability for their personal brands.
7. This is a point of difference between Weber and Foucault. Although the
former paid little explicit attention to individuality, the latter viewed indi-
viduality as itself a technology, the deployment of which played an important
role in the operation of power within civil society. This is an important
difference between our approach to personal branding and the more
Weberian approach adopted by Biggart (1989), which uses a Weberian
perspective.
8. LexisNexis data (not shown) indicate that the traffic in ‘‘personal branding’’
rhetoric was initially limited to the United States but has increasingly spread
across national lines.
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Author Biographies
Steven P. Vallas teaches sociology at the Northeastern University in
Boston. He has written and edited on various facets of work organiza-
tions, emphasizing the tensions and contradictions that emerge among
classes and groups when workplaces undergo rapid structural change.
His current work focuses on the shifting meaning of work in an age of
flexible capitalism.
Angèle Christin is an assistant professor of communication at the

Stanford University. She studies how digital technologies and algo-
rithms affect work practices, careers, and organizational forms. Her
book project examines the growing influence of audience metrics
(clicks) in web journalism in the United States and France.

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Article

Work and Occupations

Steven P. Vallas1 and Angèle Christin2

The decline of ‘‘standard’’ work arrangements has attracted much schol-

studies of trends aﬀecting job insecurity and labor market conditions

in need of further theoretical and empirical reﬁnement, particularly with

Economic Discourse and the Worker’s Soul

and subjectivity, eventuating in his widely inﬂuential theory of govern-

health, fertility, longevity, and productivity. Here, formal knowledge

(Foucault, 2008, p. 226). In this view, what the dominant institutions

‘‘conformist’’ selves, akin to homo economicus, which willingly embrace

The Entrepreneurial Turn: Career Advice and the

culture’’ (Wernick, 1991). The notion here is that brand management

Construing one’s being as a brand does not come naturally. It takes

Figure 1. Newsmedia mentions of personal branding, 1986–2015, using

self’’ whose outcome explicitly aims to reconﬁgure individual subjectiv-

To maximize the study’s ability to capture the eﬀects of labor market

I try to promote myself . . . I know the importance of branding [emphasis

John uses a multifaceted eﬀort at self-branding, relying not only on

Similar patterns emerged among white-collar workers and job seekers in

Maureen’s mention of her ‘‘klout’’ score refers to her use of klout.com,

To ensure that your personal branding statement is an organic part of

Gilda, another interviewee in the Boston case, showed even greater

Gilda’s last comment—‘‘you have to be able to give the value propos-

I consider it like work, and something I probably want to avoid. But no

‘‘conformist selves,’’ who fully embraced the marketization of one’s self.

Crucially, we also found cases involving ‘‘resistant selves’’ among

Here, Marie makes a sharp distinction between ‘‘strategic or mathem-

I ﬁnd it extremely hard to create a brand for a person, as opposed to a

Similarly, Catherine, the former director of a mental health agency,

Those who resisted or refused personal branding rhetoric sometimes

(New York journalist), Beverly (educational technology specialist) or

to her training in natural science). Similar views were expressed by

Exposure to Labor Market Uncertainty

forms of employment seemed somewhat more likely to question or resist

it without any prompting from the interviewer. Personal branding dis-

precarization of work more generally. Much of Foucault’s (1979) own

U.S. scholars have found little reason to problematize the enterprising

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Becker, G. (1964/1993). Human capital: A theoretical and empirical analysis, with

Marwick, A. E., & boyd, D. (2010). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately:

Angèle Christin is an assistant professor of communication at the

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