Of course, when it comes to work, image studies naturally seem trivial to many people. Exploitation, bullying and insecurity are the sort of issues which go to law and get media coverage. Fair enough, such matters are more tangible. Yet there are clear links between the images of work which propaganda seeks to create and the hard truths of the vast majority of working lives. Consider the glut of people who boast they "work" 16 and 18-hour days.
Before Christmas I would have both enjoyed and admired Arena or Omnibus - I now regard both programmes as elitist, pretentious, artsy-fartsy and weird. Blind Date and any programmes about fixing up a house or a garden I now find infinitely preferable.
JT Walsh: played gutless ogres - but he was one of the good
Big mother is washing you
`Looking good' and `sounding right' has become more important than competence
Picture it: you arrive at a bank manager's office to find he's middle-aged and wearing a T-shirt plugging some puerile vulgarity. He has studs in his pierced ears, nose and eyebrows. He has a pony-tail. He is wearing mirror shades. As he bends to open a filing cabinet, a builder's bum crack peeks, then gapes over the waistband of his low-slung, baggy denims. Would you feel comfortable borrowing the price of a second-hand car from such a man?
After all, his appearance should make absolutely no difference to his ability to engage in money-lending. There is no reason why a rival, sober-suited manager - a regulation guru of greyness - should be more morally entitled to make profit out of people's needs and wants. None the less, we know that any bank with T-shirtwearing, stud-bedecked, builder's-bum managers could expect difficulties in attracting customers, especially corporate customers. Certainly, it's hard to see IBM types maintaining accounts with such an outfit.
Truth is, every sane person acknowledges that, in many types of work, style can be as crucial as substance or skills. Now however, a new report in Britain - "Looking Good, Sounding Right" by Chris Warhurst and Dennis Nickson - raises serious worries about the increasingly intense role of image in the workplace. Something quite sinister, way beyond any defensible conventions of dress and demeanour, is occurring. The traditionally derided "company man" and "company woman" may yet seem like wild mavericks beside the emerging automatons.
The Warhurst and Nickson report has found it is increasingly important to employers that employees reflect the "lifestyles" being sold by many sorts of businesses. Restaurants, cafes and shops don't simply sell grub and goods any more. Perhaps they never did. But now they sell notional connections to "lifestyles" more aggressively and more totally than ever. As in advertising, where the rule-of-thumb is to sell an image and let that image sell the product, workers are increasingly seen as a part of the "image packaging".
For instance, at the coffee house chain Caffe Nero " . . . it is definitely more important that the employees reflect what Caffe Nero stands for [`sexy, continental, cultured', apparently] than that they have experience," says Jerry Ford, the company's chairman. He is unashamedly forthright about it. "We want people who reflect the Caffe Nero brand and it's much easier to train someone to make a cup of coffee than to revamp their personalities," he recently told the Guardian newspaper.
"Reflecting what a company stands for" now means more than wearing a uniform or a baseball cap with the company name and logo on it. It means you - your very being - should exude the essence of the image advertisers have dreamed up for the product. In fact, the ideal employee nowadays ought to look and sound like the sort of people the company would use in an ad about itself. It's a kind of second degree enhancement of an illusion which has no rational basis in the first place. Really, it's aim is to deepen delusion.
A generation ago, the film, The Stepford Wives (1974), in which too-good-to-be-true wives turned out to be robots, was a cautionary feminist tale about male-dominated corporatism in the US. Now concentration on image is, it seems, becoming so intense that employers are seeking "Stepford Workers" - human placards, really - whose very appearance is expected to reflect the "lifestyle" (sexy, continental, cultured, for instance) on offer with a cup of coffee or a pair of shoes. Should we be wary of such branding of people?
Well, to those who object to religion on the grounds that it is too proprietorial of the person - that, quite simply, it seeks to own people's souls or spirits or selves (the issue is so charged that to many people the different words have crucial nuances) - such a turning of workers into objects sounds a warning. The idea that workers create the image of a company is widely accepted. Suits, uniforms and various corporate, vocational and status markers of identity are everywhere.
But even in the military - where, of course, individualism among privates is often brutally discouraged by the brass - image and role are no more synonymous than they are in these emerging business armies. It's understandable that commercial outfits want to establish solid, unambiguous identities. And fair enough, it's even understandable that, up to a point, workers should be part of such identities. Most people prefer sober, even staid-looking, bank managers to, say, grunge bank managers.
Yet we've seen how successful business and aggressive branding has led to a few dominant - generally efficient but inevitably bland - chain stores. In this regard, Dublin, many shoppers say, is like a provincial British city. It's not unreasonable to assume that dominant strains of efficient but bland workers - robotised people, really - may emerge to staff the limited number of successful brands. There is nothing new in the concept of "if the face fits", but there is a huge difference between socialising people and standardising them like commodities. With the state in retreat, the new armies, it seems, will be business armies.
OF course, when it comes to work, image studies naturally seem trivial to many people. Exploitation, bullying and insecurity are the sort of issues which go to law and get media coverage. Fair enough, such matters are more tangible. Yet there are clear links between the images of work which propaganda seeks to create and the hard truths of the vast majority of working lives. Consider the glut of people who boast they "work" 16 and 18-hour days.
No doubt some people do work such hours and, if they want to, fair enough. But it's dysfunctional to carry on like that for more than a brief, perhaps necessary period, and it's boorish to boast about it. Yet, since the rise of Thatcherism, there's been an egregious breed which demands to be considered heroic for claiming to work ridiculously long hours. A capacity for hard work can be admirable - certainly it's better than laziness - but expecting to be lionised for disproportionately furthering your own interests bespeaks a frightening blindness.
It's usually executives or people trying to get a business off the ground who boast about working ludicrously long hours. Even in Alan Gilsenan's recent RTE documentary on lap-dancing in Dublin, one self-proclaimed "manager" of the dancers sighed and told us resignedly that "people don't understand that there are 18-hour days in lap-dancing". Hello? Earth to manager! We saw him eating, drinking, handing out leaflets around Temple Bar to promote the dancing and counting money at the end of the night. Tough "work", that.
It was telling, though, that this "18hours-a-day" bloke clearly felt that, so long as people believed he was working long hours, even making money from a sleazy activity might be more morally justified. It was an example of that bizarre but prevalent business ethic which seems to believe that excessive work (or even claims of it) denotes virtue in itself. It might be that the lap-dancers' manager was abiding by Aristotle's dictum that "Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work", but it didn't sound like that.
IT sounded more like the typical, contemporary casting of work as the purpose of life itself. And sure, work can have rewards beyond money - self-image, for one. But to counter the prevailing propaganda, the idea that work is fundamentally a necessary means to a livelihood and not the purpose of living needs regular reiteration. There is a rational defence for the notion that to work is to pray, but the priests of the new religion of business exude the kind of manic religiosity which characterised traditional Catholic Ireland.
Now boasts are made about hours worked, sales made and even asses kicked instead of decades of the rosary said, plenary indulgences stacked-up and novenas completed. But the pathology is the same. It's just the perception of morality which has changed. A feature in The Irish Times of last week mentioned "face-time" - apparently an American term for the image game of being seen around the office as much as possible. Talk about the Holy Joes who used to live in the churches.
Then there's bullying and/or allegations of bullying at work - a thorny matter and much in the news this past year. High-profile cases in, for instance, RTE and Independent Newspapers have made headlines, but most do not. Still, we know workplace bullying is prevalent - not that that's anything new. But it's logical to conclude that, along with a bully's typical inadequacies, the aggressive, fundamentalist worship of career (which has replaced booking a place in the hereafter) often fuels much of the browbeating.
Between being turned into objects, working longer hours, being bullied, seeing incontrovertible figures that show how "social partnership" has benefited employers much more than employees, these Celtic Tiger times have not been great for most workers. It's true that, unlike a decade or two ago, when there wasn't enough of it, there's now too much of it, and that is preferable to unemployment or forced emigration. But many people feel that their lives are being stolen by work.
"Work," Morrissey (of the Smiths) once observed, "is a four-letter word." Indeed, these days few things - even the original four-letter word that dare not speak its name - are getting people more worked up than work itself. Oscar Wilde thought that work was "the refuge of people who have nothing better to do", and, for once, Oscar was wrong. At least some of the time, we've all got better things to do than work, but not many of those better things pay the bills.
Anyway, if the trend identified in Britain by the "Looking Good, Sounding Right" report continues apace, it's likely that, along with the interview, aptitude tests and psychometric scoring, workers of the future may have to submit to a swimsuit section and a voice test. After all, if you want coffee to pander to that sexy, continental, cultured, inner you, you don't want it poured by some middle-aged, African immigrant who might actually need the job but spoils the image. Got to have your priorities right, don't you?