Organizing beyond organization: Branding, discourse, and communicative capitalism
主张批判组织研究学者应更重视企业品牌作为当代资本主义组织核心特征的现象，探讨品牌如何作为沟通资本主义的媒介与结果，涉及漂浮能指、沟通劳动和情感沟通三个要素。
This essay presents an argument for critical organization studies scholars to more seriously address the phenomenon of corporate branding as a central, constitutive feature of organizing in contemporary capitalism. While brands and branding have historically been the domain of marketing and consumer studies researchers, I argue that a focus on the intersection of branding and organizing enables critical researchers to more effectively address the ways in which neoliberal capitalism and post-Fordist organizational forms mediate processes of meaning construction and human identity formation. Taking up Böhm and Land’s claim that neoliberal capitalism is characterized by a ‘new hidden abode of production’, I adopt Dean’s conception of ‘communicative capitalism’ to explore how branding processes are ‘hidden in plain sight’ as a key, constitutive element of this ‘new hidden abode’. As such, branding can be explored as a particular case of ‘organizing beyond organization’. The essay develops three elements of the branding and organizing relationship as medium and outcome of communicative capitalism: (1) floating signifiers and nodal points, (2) communicative labor, and (3) communication and affect.