Corporate Branding As a Source For Employees' Moral Identity Work

There is a growing interest on the moral dimension of consumption (Luedicke, Thompson and Giesler 2010, Belk 1988; Arnold and Thompson 2005; Holt, 2002, 2006, Caruana and Crane 2008) and the ethical dimension of branding (Palazzo and Basu 2007, Land and Taylor 2010, Jeanes 2013, Arvidsson 2005). The present study engages in this discussion and sets the focus of inquiry onto how brands effect the ‘self’ of employees. It studies how the ethical branding of a chocolate company becomes a key resource for employee identity work. The ethical dimension of consumption and the ambivalent moral nature of brands gained increasing attention over the past years. There is an extensive critical literature that has highlighted the role of branding in the manipulation of consumers (Klein 2000, Curana and Crane 2008), and the role of brands in various consumption practices such as ‘brand avoidance’ (Lee and Conroy 2009) and ‘antibrand activism’ (Palazzo and Basu 2007), free labour (Arvidsson 2005, 2015, Cova and Dalli 2009, Curana and Crane 2008, Land and Taylor 2010), and in terms of managerial control and organizational culture (Jeanes 2013, Klein 2000, Willmott 2010). The question how branding conceptually relates to employee identity still a matter of discussion. The study draws on social identity theory (Giddens 1991, Watson 2008) and organization theory (Alvesson and Willmott 2002) in order to link the concept of self-identity with the concept of corporate brands. This perspective highlights how corporate brands can transform discourses in society into coherent brand-stories, which can be understood as meaningful social identities used by employees in their identity work. The paper then presents a case study which illuminates the various ways by which a corporate brand informs and affects employee identity work. The findings show the crucial importance of moral stories in the branding process and furthermore their significance in framing the moral superiority of employees who draw upon these stories in their identity work.