Personal Branding and Identity Norms in the Popular Business Press: Enterprise Culture in an Age of Precarity
通过分析1980-2010年职业建议文本和53名员工求职者访谈，发现创业文化理论部分成立，个人品牌话语普遍且被不加批判地接受，但创业话语已超越最初基于“主权消费者”的概念，要求员工主动塑造客户需求以建立个人品牌价值。
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.