Within the personal branding movement, people and their careers are marketed as brands complete with promises of performance, specialized designs, and tag lines for success. Because personal branding offers such a startlingly overt invitation to self-commodification, the phenomenon invites a careful and searching analysis. This essay begins by examining parallel developments in contemporary communication and employment climates and exploring how personal branding arises as (perhaps) an extreme form of a market-appropriate response. The contours of the personal branding movement are then traced, emphasizing the rhetorical tactics with which it responds to increasingly complex communication and employment environments. Next, personal branding is examined with a critical eye to both its effects on individuals and the power relations it instantiates on the basis of social categories such as gender, age, race, and class. Finally, the article concludes by reflecting on the broader ethical implications of personal branding as a communication strategy.

The current literature yields contrasting diagnoses of the diversity problem in the professions: (a) a dominant ‘absence’ view, which explains the exclusion of certain people as a lack to be rectified and (b) an alternative ‘presence’ view, which explains exclusion as a consequence of tacit inclusion. Although the latter challenges the former by exposing the historical interdependence of exclusion and inclusion, it fails to illuminate a path towards contemporary inclusion. This article develops a third, dialectical, view, which theorizes the inclusivity‐exclusivity relation as a contemporary crisis of representation managed through occupational branding. The proposed stance mediates between the optimism of the absence view and the scepticism of the presence view by placing historical formations in undetermined tension with contemporary exigencies. By analysing how specific inclusivity‐exclusivity tensions are confronted through strategic interventions in the marketplace of occupational identity, the dialectical view stands to generate novel possibilities for social change.

This paper investigates the relationship between the body and leadership through a case study of a transgender leader. The study shows that the leader's body, presumed gender, and gendered appearance are salient markers that employees use to make sense of leaders and leadership, and that this gendered nature of leadership shows the deep roots of gender dichotomies and the heterosexual matrix that permeate our understanding of leadership. These two findings lead us to emphasize the need to queer leadership. All leaders experience gendered restrictions, to some extent, via the social norms and expectations of the way leadership should be performed. The construction of leadership through a transgender body reminds us to stay open to the exploration of performativity, particularly the relationships between bodies, gender, sexuality, and leadership and how any body can benefit from queering leadership.

This article explores how postfeminist and prosperity gospel discourses intersect in an organizational context to produce a particular ideal of feminine subjectivity that reproduces a neoliberal agenda. We focus on narratives written by female national vice presidents in a multi-national network marketing organization headquartered in America. Network marketing tends to attract a vast number of women who are enticed by grand messages of material and spiritual riches; however, such messages are often at odds with the precarious and uncertain working conditions. We contribute to gender and organization scholarship by introducing the concept of evangelical entrepreneurial femininity to explore the tensions and demands that are placed on women in an organizational context where postfeminism and prosperity gospel discourses intersect. In doing so, we question the expectations and constraints that many working women negotiate in this neoliberal age of alleged ‘freedom’ and ‘equality,’ and raise a number of concerns for feminist critique.

This study investigates the lived experience of one transwoman, Claire, a public advocate and a manager with client services responsibilities. We examine Claire's story in order to discuss how situated contexts, such as different roles, locales and interactions, shape the way she experiences and perceives her trans body and gender identity. In particular, our analysis centres on how Claire's lived experience of personal and professional life shift across three different situated contexts, each enabling and constraining opportunities for political transgression. Our findings contribute to existing conversations within queer theory, transgender and organization studies by highlighting how situated contexts mediate the political potential of queer bodies at work. By developing the concept ‘situated transgressiveness’, this article challenges notions of transgender as a stable, ideal disruptive category and advances a more contextually sensitive approach to understanding the contingency of transgender lives and politics. Such insights are important in facilitating more nuanced understandings of the situatedness of transgression and transgender bodies within work and professional settings.

This paper explores how men who perform intimate labour negotiate perceptions of themselves and their work through complex intersections of masculinity, proximity and propriety. Its focus is on the ways in which embodied organizational negotiations are shaped by gendered perceptions of bodily propriety in three examples of physically, sexually and/or emotionally intimate forms of labour: male massage therapists; men who work in sex shops; and men working as Santa Claus performers. While ostensibly quite different forms of work, each is shaped by the expectation that a ‘quality’ interaction with customers or clients will be based upon the nurturance of a close physical, sexual and/or emotional bond between the service provider and recipient, at the same time as maintaining appropriate bodily boundaries and professional distance. Mediating both imperatives requires a careful negotiation of being appropriately close while at the same time understanding that social perceptions of their work, themselves as workers, and their interactions with customers and clients mean that they are frequently under heightened scrutiny, requiring constant vigilance on their part. Drawing on insights from phenomenological writing on embodiment, specifically Merleau-Ponty’s (2002 [1945]) Phenomenology of Perception, the analysis considers the ways in which intersections between masculinity, propriety and proximity are perceived and negotiated in intimate forms of labour, reflecting on instances when a touch becomes ‘too much’. It considers what these instances reveal to us about gendered experiences of embodiment within organizations and the importance of perception in understanding embodied negotiations of workplace intimacy.

Seen through the growth of progressive diversity policies it may appear that contemporary organizations are sites of equality. But although inclusion is the formally stated aim of many organizations, exclusionary pressures toward LGBT workers still challenge sexual minorities' access to full inclusion. A central concern in this paper is exploring how to understand inclusion in organizational contexts where inclusion is formally advocated, and yet where both inclusionary and exclusionary pressures exist. Drawing on an interview study of Swedish gay and lesbian police officers we present the concept ‘peripheral inclusion' as a way to understand inclusion in contemporary organizational life. In addition, we theorize that the dynamics between silencing and voice is a key mode that impacts the informal ways in which exclusion and inclusion occur. We thereby contribute to previous research on inclusion that has focused on the degree to which minorities are included by conceptualizing the mode in which inclusion occurs in everyday work. Studying modes and degrees of inclusion and exclusion in relation to each other highlights how inclusion is a collective and fragile process in which inclusionary and exclusionary pressures coexist, and that questions of who and what is included in contemporary organizations are shifting and open questions.

This article explores desexualization in massage therapy as a complex interaction between therapists and clients wherein sexual subjectivities are co-constructed, reified and in one case revised to highlight how workers can create a professional sexual identity in the spaces between desexualization and re-eroticization. Findings suggest that organizational mandates for desexualization as well as therapists’ own framing maintains gendered subjectivities that paint men as aggressors and women as victims. It also offers, through the philosophy of one female therapist, an alternative to desexualization that seeks to encourage sexuality based on professionalism, respect and choice. A key implication of this study is that a more holistic and context-dependent view of work and workers is necessary for scholars and practitioners to understand the promise and perils of organizational desexualization.