The theory of enterprise culture (du Gay, 1996) has provoked one of the more enduring strands of research on organizations and identities. Yet, after a decade and half of debate, the validity of this theory remains mired in ambiguity. In this article we revisit the theory of enterprise culture by exploring shifts in the popular business press and employee responses to them, in an effort to track the identity norms that have impinged on job seekers over time. Scrutinizing career-advice texts published between 1980 and 2010, we do indeed find partial support for the theory of enterprise culture, as the most popular renderings of work and employment have exhibited a marked yet complex turn toward entrepreneurial rhetoric. Interviews with 53 employees and job seekers suggest that a discourse of personal branding is indeed pervasive, and is often uncritically incorporated into the conceptions that job seekers bring to bear on their career horizons. Yet we also find that enterprise discourse has evolved beyond the notion of the “sovereign consumer” on which enterprise theory was initially based. Employees today are advised not merely to be responsive to the wants of customers; now, they must actively shape those wants, emulating corporate marketing techniques in an effort to establish the value of their own personal brands. Homo economicus is alive and well but has elided existing representations.
In recent years, theorists of social inequality have increasingly rejected analytic models using the individual as the unit of analysis, favoring "relational" models centered on the dynamic, group-level interactions that can account for disparities in the distribution of job rewards. In this article we scrutinize three distinct strands of relational thinking: categorical theories, analysis of symbolic boundaries, and theories of intersectionality. Our goals are twofold: first, to identify some of the major conceptual and methodological limitations in this field and, second, to begin the task of conjoining insights from each strand of thinking, fostering conceptually richer and more powerful theoretical formulations of organizational inequalities. The article sketches some potential avenues for empirical analysis that seem likely to advance relational models and highlight their advantages-advantages that provide rich sociological guideposts-compared to more individually centered or even aggregate descriptive models that have governed the field since World War II.
Keywords relational inequality, work, intersectionalitySociological research on workplace inequality has long rested on ontological assumptions that are rooted in methodological individualism. This tendency is perhaps most obvious in literature based on human capital, status attainment, and rational action theory, but it extends into virtually all research (such as attitude surveys) that draws inferences about structural properties through the aggregation of data using atomized
Research examining radical economic subjectivity processes involved in creating alternative economies remains extremely scarce. We address this lacuna by employing qualitative techniques including semi-structured interviews and participant observation to examine advocates who work to provide economic alternatives to economically dislocated communities along the USA/Mexico border. Theoretically we use a poststructural feminist perspective to illuminate the contradictions and complexities involved in how these advocates negotiate and often work against their interests arising from class, race, and geopolitical privileges. Contributions of this study include demonstrating the utility of a poststructural feminist approach to global political economic issues that extend beyond a focus upon gender. This theoretical approach provides insights into the complex relations radical economic subjects have to the state; the importance of critical self-reflection in building solidarity across different social locations; and the complexities related to language barriers and representation of the subaltern.
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