"BE YOURSELF OR RATHER BE YOUR BRAND!" CARE OF THE SELF AS A CONTROL TOOL IN A COSMETICS FIRM
Claire DAMBRIN & Caroline LAMBERT HEC School of Management, Paris dambrin@hec.fr, lambert@hec.fr
Abstract Care of the self, a technique for governing the individual in society, proves to be equally a control technique for the individual in the firm. In a firm dedicated to the cult of beauty, there is a blurring of the lines between employee and consumer individual. This blurring makes care of the self a control tool whose rising power over individuals is all the greater because it is nurtured and maintained by the individuals themselves.
1 Introduction
In organisations today, productivity, quality and innovation tend to be fostered less by Taylorian hierarchical control than by the active commitment of the employee, which guarantees an alignment of personal desires with the goals of the firm. This identification with the goals of the organisation is, for some scholars, the result of a control of the thoughts and feelings of the employee (Hochschild, 1983; Van Maanen and Kunda, 1989; Perlow, 1998). Governing organizational life to ensure "excellence" necessitates the production of certain types of person, namely "enterprising", autonomous, productive, self-regulating, responsible individuals (du Gay, 1991, Rose, 1990). Creating enterprising individuals from themselves echoes the new forms taken by the desire to "enact oneself", to become oneself in a performance-focused society. Describing the great developments in individualism in society, Ehrenberg shows that, "to the Gospels of personal fulfilment of the 1970s" have been added the "stone Tablets of individual initiative of the 1980s" (Ehrenberg, 2002, p.89). The emergence of "the cult of performance combines a model of action (being enterprising) and of justice (in sport, the first is always the best) with a style of existence (the personal fulfilment of an individual emancipated from the forbidden choices that prevented one from choosing one's lifestyle) […] In short, the ideal is to become the entrepreneur of one's own life" (Ehrenberg, 2002, p.90). The aspirations of individuals in society therefore seem almost naturally to meet the new forms of government within the organisation. However, the organisation's instrumentation of care of the self must be discreet because the autonomy of the subject is the proclaimed ideal of the emancipating aim. Bearing witness to this are the discourses circulating on empowerment, presented as a process of the individual's acquiring power (Kanter, 1983) or rather as a process enabling members of the organisation to nurture the feeling of their own efficiency (Conger and Kanungo, 1988). In this paper, our aim is to understand how this ideal of being an entrepreneur of oneself may be used as a means of control within the organisation. In our study, the path that leads to this ideal is seen through the Foucauldian concept of care of the self (Foucault, 1984, 2001). A case study of the world leader in beauty products enables us to analyse the techniques of care of the self that are practised within the marketing function and to shed light on the mechanisms that make care of the self a means of governing individuals in the organisation. This instrumentalising of care of the self is made possible through a blurring of the lines between, or an amalgamation of, the different facets of individuals (employee and consumer) 1

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