The Brand Called You
In several of my recent posts, I referenced a Tom Peters’ article in Fast Company entitled The Brand Called You. Tom Peters has been described as the best-selling business author in history, but he is perhaps most well known for his book In Search of Excellence, which he has said he wrote in response to the cookie-cutter MBA training that was the norm in the 1960s and 1970s. I read Peters’ article during the writing of my dissertation, which reflected on the ways that market discourse was being used internal to a corporation. The primary objectives of that discourse were to...
Read MoreTalent Management
In my dissertation research, I explored the different mechanisms of control at work within the corporate context. I took advantage of my insider access as a corporate employee to describe and analyze varied of business practices and deconstruct them from an anthropological point of view. I looked at everything from employee communications, to budgeting, to HR practices. For a theoretical framework I used the work of Foucault. Towards the end of his career, Foucault described a form of power he called ‘technologies of the self’, in which people self-manage because they have...
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