Capitalism and Personality: Remarks about the Management Discourses on Self-profiting through Personal Branding

Abstract

One of the themes that recurrently emerges in contemporary management discourses is the issue of the personality of the worker. In the current context of a global knowledge economy with boisterous markets, companies seem to have the need to find out workers who stand above the average, and they actually strive to identify them and hire them. Therefore, firms seem to be obsessed about one specific signifier, talent, which will define these extraordinary employees vis-à-vis less skilled workers who cannot meet the increasing demands of the market. The search for such talent by firms will have, as a counterpoint, the need for the workers themselves to try to stand out by building their own personal brand in order to attract attention and enhance their professional reputation, forcing them to market themselves constantly. In this article, our goal is to decipher those discourses on talent and personal branding in order to promote a wider reflection on the construction of a neoliberal personality. We will also discuss the implications of these discourses in the emergence of new justifications of social inequality.