Self-Presentation and Self-Praise in the Digital Workplace

By Anna Danielewicz-Betz

Self-Presentation and Self-Praise in the Digital Workplace presents the findings of an interdisciplinary study of the ‘self-entrepreneurial self’ and, in particular, the rationale behind its need to self-present under the current socio-economic and business conditions. It addresses the complex landscape of the levels, typologies, categories, triggers, as well as both internal and external factors impacting self-praise in the context of a digital workplace (with the focus on enterprise social media).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Dec 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781785278211

Book preview

Self-Presentation and Self-Praise in the Digital Workplace

Self-Presentation and Self-Praise in the Digital Workplace

Anna Danielewicz-Betz

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2022

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © Anna Danielewicz-Betz 2022

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021950093

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-819-8 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-819-3 (Hbk)

Cover credit: Photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash

This title is also available as an e-book.

To Mamuś

In loving memory

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Preface

1. Putting the ‘Self’ First

2. Enterprise Social Media Affordances as Drivers of Self-Presentation

3. Self-Presentation and Self-Praise on Enterprise Social Media

4. Going beyond Self-Presentation and Self-Praise in the Corporate Environment: Academia and LinkedIn

Bibliography

Index

This book discusses the findings of an interdisciplinary study devoted to ‘self-presentational self’ and addresses the changing practices and perceptions related to self-praise in the face of the need, if not necessity, to self-praise in the neoliberal business environment. It presents the complex ‘landscape’ of triggers, as well as internal and external corporate factors of self-promotion and self-branding, resulting in a multilayered typology and classification of self-praise, as documented by numerous examples.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures

1.1 Macro and micro context of self-presentation

2.1 ESM: Affordances and practices leading to strategic self-praise

2.2 Features of strategic self-presentation on ESM

2.3 ESM as a stage for face maintenance

2.4 ESM: Features of institutional complexity

2.5 Quantification of self-presentation

2.6 Enforced self-praise

3.1 Self-centred behaviour: Construction of desired identity

3.2 (Non-)Self-praise spaces

3.3 Self-focused FFAs

3.4 Self-praise classification: explicit/direct vs. implicit/indirect

3.5 Four levels of self-praise in business context

3.6 Elements of an ESM profile

3.7 Celebrity endorsement of customer-centric practices

3.8 Frequency of nodes in ‘About us’

3.9 Frequency of nodes in ‘Success stories’

3.10 ‘About us’: word cloud

3.11 ‘Success stories’: word cloud

3.12 Exemplary success stories

3.13 Audience and steps to self-praise normative behaviour

3.14 Self-praiser and multiplication of self-praise

3.15 Loop of self-praise dissemination or suppression

3.16 Justified vs. unjustified self-praise

3.17 Aspects taken into account when self-praising on ESM

3.18 Code frequency in relation to cases

4.1 Emoticised default speech acts on LinkedIn

4.2 Word cloud composed of the most frequent words in the LinkedIn corpus (pre-COVID-19)

Tables

3.1 Coding content representation (‘About us’ and ‘Success stories’)

3.2 Testing correlation between attitude to visibility and being active on social media (H1)

3.3 Testing correlation between being mandatory activities on ESM and finding it difficult to collaborate (H2)

3.4 Testing correlation between posting content on ESM and being competitive (H3)

3.5 Testing correlation between being visible for team members’ sake and being competitive (H4)

3.6 Testing correlation between posting positive content and showing understanding for self-praise (H5)

3.7 Testing correlation between attitude to visibility and regularly sharing updates (H6)

3.8 Testing correlation between being visible to management and overall attitude to visibility on ESM in general (H7)

3.9 Reliability test

3.10Inter-item correlation matrix

3.11Code representation (qualitative survey data)

3.12Survey 2: Chi-square cross-tabulation results (p-values)

PREFACE

The idea to write this monograph grew out of my panel presentation at the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) conference held in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in July 2017. I had been intrigued by the panel proposal titled ‘Self-Presentation and Self-Praise: The Neglected Speech Acts’ put forward by Daria Dayter and submitted my abstract, feeling that the topic was suitable to corporate communication.

After the conference, all the panellists were asked to contribute their papers to a joint volume on self-praise. It was while working on the draft paper that I realised the inability to confine my ideas to an 8,000-word format, within the boundaries of a single research discipline only (i.e. Pragmatics). By then I had already moved a long way from teaching applied linguistics and business English (communication) courses, being more and more drawn towards business as a research and educational field. Currently working in a private business school, teaching business and management courses, as well as instructing students from all over the world how to successfully complete their research projects, and supervising many in a wide range of research topics, as well as engaging in conversations with practitioners representing various industry sectors, I have finally found my interdisciplinary ‘niche’.

Most of my own recent research projects have also tended to be of interdisciplinary nature (combining methods and insights of numerous academic disciplines), with the interest lying specifically in the interconnections between business and society (including technology), and the multi-stakeholder view on business practices. Such an approach is also mostly suitable to the topic at hand for it is impossible to investigate the complexity of self-presentation and self-praise from a single perspective. In order to account to this complexity, an exploration of the interconnectivity of and interdependency between the numerous factors impacting multilayered corporate behaviour, both on the macro and micro levels, incorporating the applied, ‘hands-on’ practitioners’ vantage point, as well as that of theoreticians and academic researchers is necessary.

To reflect the intricacy of the area under investigation and interconnectivity of the constructs addressed, insights from such fields as socioeconomics, sociology, social psychology (specifically identity studies), software and services (IT sector), business intelligence (BI) and business analytics, digital media communication, organisational behaviour or corporate communication are thus combined, with a mixed qualitative-quantitative methodological approach utilised to provide an in-depth presentation of the evolving constructs.

Thus, this monograph presents the findings of an interdisciplinary study of the ‘self-entrepreneurial self’ and, in particular, the rationale behind its need to self-present under the current socio-economic and business conditions. It addresses the triggers as well as both internal and external factors prompting self-praise in the context of the digital workplace (with the focus on enterprise social media) and professional networking platforms.

From the broader socio-economic perspective of hyper-globalisation, the impact of the neoliberalism economy on workplace relations, and ultimately on employee behaviour, is considered first to lay the background and introduce some of the key concepts.

Self-presentation and specifically self-praise are considered in their multiple forms against the backdrop of precarious work relations, dictated by neoliberalism, that lead, among other things, to self-exploitation, but also to putting self-interest above anything else.

The focus is placed on the manifestations of the social self (how a person thinks the others perceive them) and the situational self (a person’s self-image in a specific situation) in the digital workplace, where individual (cultural) values are frequently overridden by those imposed by a given corporate culture, as aligned with the prevailing market conditions. These in turn impact workplace or employee identity.

This exploratory-explanatory study contributes to a rather limited number of research endeavours on self-praise, conducted (mostly recently) within the narrow pragmatic linguistic discipline (cf. Wu 2011; Speer 2012; Dayter 2016, 2018; Tobback 2019; Rüdiger & Dayter 2020; Guo & Ren 2020; Ren & Guo 2020; Luo & Hancock 2020; von Rohr & Locher 2020) mainly with regard to self-praise on social media and online fora.

To my knowledge, research of self-praise in the digital workplace is very scarce. There are practically no studies on self-presentational and self-praising activities in the corporate environment of enterprise social media (ESM) or such tools of remote communication as conference calls or collaboration software. The current one also takes situational antecedents (broadly what occurred before) and the audience (including their reactions) as main prerequisites into account in order to provide a contextual frame of analysis and assess attitudes to enhanced self-disclosure and self-praise.

Self-presentation and self-praise are explored, among others, from the perspective of organisational behaviour and workplace behaviour, whereby the refined concepts of the self and identity play a crucial role. Organisational behaviour is the study of both group and individual performance and activity within an organisation. This area examines human behaviour in a work environment and determines its impact on job structure, performance, communication, motivation, leadership and the like. Workplace behaviour, on the other hand, refers to the behaviour expected of employees and of management that contributes to the entire company culture.

Self-praise and self-presentation can be interpreted as manifestations of transforming ethos of business organisation in the face of precarious neoliberalist work conditions and digitalisation of workplace, whereby, as Birch (2020) points out, digitalisation is leveraged to optimise business processes (and by default, one may add, to ‘optimise’ the contributors). Thus, when looking through a rhetoric lens, this book attempts, in essence, to track a redefinition of ethos (broadly defined as the character or values of the person and the practices or values that distinguish a person or organisation), arguing that the choice to individually shape ethos is increasingly being limited by the practices and values of an organisation one works for.

For Burke ([1950] 1969), self-persuasion is inherent in the socialisation process which involves presenting oneself to the others so that identity can be examined, judged and rectified externally (see Crable 2006, 10–11), that is by the audience referred to throughout the book. It can be argued that one is impelled to resort to rhetoric, that is the process of self-persuasion (building character – ethos) and self-presentation (garnering audience’s approval and reinforcements of the self-construction – pathos). Burke’s (1951) system of rhetoric that models dynamic aspects of creative expression can be extended to include self-expression in the context of self-presentation. Burke (ibid.) resorts to Aristotle’s identification as a function of persuasive appeal aimed at identification with one’s audience, expressed in an appeal to the speaker’s ethos. In a broader sense, ethos can also be demonstrated by self-praise provided that one’s character and actions cannot speak for themselves.

Hartelius and Browning (2008) see rhetoric as fundamental to the construction of identity, which, as emphasised in management scholarship, takes place both individually and collectively. Self-praising inoffensively in the Graeco-Roman era (see Chapter 3, Section 3.3) can be linked to the general tendency at the time, as pointed out by Foucault (1997), to reflect manifestations of individual freedom or civic liberty as ethics.

In the organisational context, rhetoric can be conceptualised as an action, an act of persuasion contributing to individual or organisational identity (Hartelius & Browning 2008). Leaders persuade followers, organisations persuade stakeholders, and individuals persuade internal and external audiences to acknowledge and give credit to their skills and competences. Rhetoric interpreted as manipulation can thus be employed to impact the perception of self by the others, by taking control over the narrative about own ‘brand’, that is by determining how one is presented and how one’s ethos is evaluated by others. Rhetoric, at least indirectly, can be said to empower the self-praiser, whereby one is in a position to purposefully communicate own values. Rhetoric further implies that language is used deliberately to highlight one’s own value (ethos) or contribution to the organisation.

Chapter 1

PUTTING THE ‘SELF’ FIRST

1.1 Introduction: Neoliberalism and the Self

In the current socio-economic climate, where profit increase is not achieved by expansion to new markets anymore but rather by increase in or optimisation of productivity and efficiency, social and economic aspects are becoming combined as a part of the neoliberalism paradigm in which an individual plays an instrumental role in the market, and not vice versa (cf. Precht 2018; Flassbeck & Steinhardt 2018). The primary enablers of the so-called time-to-market (TTM) strategy (which refers to the time period starting from when a company initially conceives a product or service idea to the point when the actual product or service is accessible to buyers in the market) are information technology (IT) and digitalisation, as reflected in corporate vision and mission statements. Siemens’ Vision 2020+ serves as an example here: ‘Vision 2020+ is our strategy to shape the next-generation Siemens. With Vision 2020+ we are setting the course for long-term value creation through accelerated growth and stronger profitability with a simplified and leaner company structure’

(https://www.dc.siemens.com/vision2020plus/).

Consequently, as will be argued below, the pressure to monitor one’s digital footprint and manage the ‘cyber-self’ and consistently present oneself in a positive light (self-brand) keeps increasing, with the primary objective being that of pursuing individual interests and meeting one’s own goals (since no one else will).

Figure 1.1 Macro and micro context of self-presentation.

As depicted in Figure 1.1, created for the purpose of illustrating the broader background of self-praise, on the micro level of socio-economic developments, neoliberalism and technology impact corporate and workplace communication, facilitating transparency, visibility, and knowledge sharing, further resulting in shifted roles and scope of work responsibilities. These factors constitute important aspects to be addressed, with the focus placed on self-presenting behaviour, mainly of so-called knowledge workers (or ‘no-collar workers’), functioning in the new economy (mainly referring to high-growth industries that are on the cutting edge of technology and are believed to be the driving force of economic growth and productivity – cf. Kenton 2020), frequently under the conditions of ‘gig economy’. The gig economy is based on flexible, temporary or freelance jobs, often involving connecting with clients or customers through an online platform (see Catalano 2021). So-called gig workers entail independent contractors, online platform workers, contract firm workers, on-call workers and temporary workers. Consequently, non-traditional or gig work consists of income-earning activities outside of traditional, long-term employer–employee relationships.

Neoliberalism, as explained by Birch (2017, 2–5), is a concept commonly used to describe a variety of policies, ideas, and behaviours, ranging from corporate tax evasion through rising student debt to environmental deregulation (cf. also Harvey 2005; Crouch 2011; Mirowski 2013; Birch 2015a, 2015b). Harvey (2005, also cited in Birch 2017, 3, 101, 274) defines neoliberalism as the deliberate extension of markets as the main, if not only, institution to organise society and its members. Neoliberal perspective emphasises individual preferences, individual responsibility, and individual choices of homo oeconomicus, or rather homo neoliberalis (with the distinction between an ego and the self no longer relevant; see Teo 2018) as the best and only way to understand human nature and human organisation. Yet, it is business actions that dominate everyday life and shape our world, that is those of an organisational entity, and not the market mechanisms that operate on the basis of the rationality principle of the economic agent.

As Kalleberg and Vallas (2018) elaborate, precarious and/or insecure work conditions, characterised by the shift of risks from employers and governments to workers, are on the rise, as demonstrated by temporary and (sub-)contract jobs in the gig economy referred to above or ‘sharing’ economy which, according to Scott (2020), is an economic model defined as a peer-to-peer (P2P)-based activity of acquiring, providing or sharing access to goods and services that is often facilitated by a community-based online platform.

Zukin and Papadantonakis (2017), for example, demonstrate how software industry’s main stakeholders influence workers’ perceptions and manufacture their consent by sponsoring so-called hackathons that serve to reshape precarious and unpaid work into an extraordinary and exciting opportunity, thus revealing the political functions of occupational identity in the new economy. Given the pressure of neoliberalism, some European countries have begun to adopt more restrictive levels of support for the unemployed (as in the case of Germany; see Brady and Biegart 2017).

It has to be noted here that employment precariousness (EP) has expanded over recent years and is now also affecting the entire salaried population. However, the prevalence of EP tends to be higher among temporary workers. Julià et al. (2017) determined that there exists a positive relationship between poor mental health and EP, with precariousness among salaried workers having a stronger impact on poor mental health. Those in possession of employment contracts may also experience precarity in that they are uncertain about how long their jobs will last, given the spread of employer practices that use redundancies as a business strategy rather than as a last resort during downturns in the business cycle. Precarity in full-time labour relations is further exhibited in a common practice of outsourcing functions/activities to other companies, independent contractors or involuntary part-time work (Kalleberg 2014).

Specifically, as addressed by Kalleberg (2014), precarious work relations have contributed to forming precarious and individualised work identities since they have had a negative impact on individuals’ health and well-being and their ability to form families, leading to community disintegration. As for wider ramifications, the anxiety and anger triggered by the spread of uncertainty, insecurity, and inequality associated with precarious work have contributed to social protests, fuelling populist movements in various countries (cf. also Petriglieri et al. 2019).

1.2 Neoliberalism at Work in the Digital Workplace

At the micro level of ‘self’ (see Figure 1.1), the transformation of socially dependent – yet increasingly ‘independent’ and self-centred – self encouraged, if not forced, to self-praise in the self-presentational corporate environment is explored. As observed by Duffy and Pruchniewska (2017), a profound growth of independent employment in post-industrial economies has sparked the emergence of self-enterprise and entrepreneurial self (see also Moore 2018), whereby the ideal of entrepreneurialism has taken on a political valance, that is individuals are seemingly ‘empowered’ to pursue their passion projects in digital environments. This, for instance, can be illustrated by a growing number of web-based digital labour platforms on which services are ‘crowdsourced’ from groups of workers (‘the crowd’) living across multiple time zones and offering businesses the possibility of completing projects at any time, day or night. These ‘invisible’ human workers are essential for a range of services often portrayed as automated, or ‘artificially intelligent’ – from data processing to home security systems and self-driving cars (Newman 2017; Fussell 2019; Gray and Suri 2019). According to Berg (2019), such digital labour platforms typically classify their workers as self-employed independent contractors, thereby denying them any labour protection or social security benefits, as well as depriving them of the right to organise collectively.

The informal economy, as exemplified by digital work referred to above, is defined as a diversified set of economic activities, enterprises, jobs, and workers that are not regulated or protected by the state (Hossein 2017, 226). The concept was originally applied to self-employment in small unregistered enterprises. It has been determined that this also includes people in unprotected low-wage employment (Qiao 2021).

Scott and Peacock (2017, 166) refer to Smith’s ([1759] 1976) idea of self-interest as a central principle of mainstream economics, with homo oeconomicus characterised as a free individual who pursues his own self-interest, knows what his self-interest is, and can measure his own self-interest in economic terms (e.g. in terms of price and cost) and thus act accordingly. This, combined with the human brain being wired for survival, may, at least to a certain extent, explain why people tend to (positively) self-present or even self-praise in the workplace context. According to Smith (ibid., 169), ‘Each economic agent asks not how he should act to maximise utility in society at large but how he should act so as to maximise his own utility.’

Ciepley (2013) asserts that the private rules and laws of business still hold. For example, a business employer can determine what employees have to wear (e.g. uniform), how they have to work (e.g. labour process) and what they can say (e.g. discipline), no matter what more general rules and laws are in wider society, which can be extended to approval – if not indirect prescription – of self-praise to highlight one’s achievements in order to be noticed or to advance professionally. Birch (2017, 285–6) notes that the sharing economy reflects the expansion of the Internet as a site of human activity, socialising, and interaction – as a ‘place’ where people now share their lives, emotions, desires and fears, their ideas and thoughts (see also Skågeby 2015). It is based on the rentiership business model, as stated by Keen (2015, 37–9). Sharing economy is about identifying something to monetise and then about creating the socio-technical means to capture value from that monetisation (see Airbnb, Uber, Google, Facebook, and Twitter as examples), with the social media extracting value from our habits, desires, preferences, relationships, thoughts, and the like. Consequently, consumers have become ‘prosumers’, generating value for online businesses via consumption and co-production of digital content (Moulier-Boutang 2011; Marazzi 2011).

McCormack and Salmenniemi (2016, 3) rightly point out that precarity forces one to constantly produce an improved ‘self’ that exceeds all others. Lorey (2012, 164) further claims that one has to put one’s whole personality on the market, suggesting that personality is a form of labour that requires professional management, support, and optimisation.

As McCormack (2014) and McCormack and Salmenniemi (2016, 6) put it, neoliberalism triggers a move towards assessing life as a series of projects demanding self-regulation, which also requires care for the self. Such care, as I will be arguing, may be manifested in the form of enforced, survival-geared self-praise. Hence, the necessity arises to brand or commodify oneself in order to enhance employability, which results in a ‘flexible self’, capable of adjusting to any task or situation (McCormack & Salmenniemi 2016, 10). This in turn may trigger self-enhancing behaviour, aimed at not only highlighting but also augmenting one’s achievements, therefore increasing one’s ‘value’ on the market. The precarious employment relations of the on-demand, independent (sub)contractor model are illustrated by Malin and Chandle (2017) with the example of Uber and Lyft, where the drivers represent ‘independent contractors’ working ‘flexibly’. The other concepts displayed in Figure 1.1 are discussed together with further key terms and concepts in the sections below and in the following chapters.

1.3 The Neoliberal Work Ethos and On-Demand Economy

Nguyen (2017) states that rhetorical production of homo oeconomicus, discoursal subjects, and power relations are irrevocably transformed by neoliberal computational culture.

Neoliberalism has become a way of thinking, orienting, and organising all aspects of life around economised metrics of individualised and individuated success.

In this context, epideictic rhetoric can be expanded to include modern self-praise. Since in the postmodern culture (and in the economic environment of neoliberalism in particular) there are competing voices unequally positioned with respect to power (with practices of silencing in place), it is in the best interest of self to speak for itself (cf. also Bourdieu 1991; Baumlin & Meyer 2018). In the face of unequal distribution of power, the self has no choice but to compete for ethos that becomes a ‘weapon’ in the fight to be seen via own words, which renders self-praise compelling (see Foucault’s convergence of power and discourse).

The term ‘epideictic’ – the epideiktikon genos (Lat. Genus demonstrativum) – covers all forms of public speaking which are not directed to convincing a judge or a deliberative body. Whatever the original force of the term, it commonly denoted the ‘display’ or ‘exhibition’ of the orator’s skill. It aims at the admiration of an appreciative audience or, at best, the creation of a mood (Oxford Classical Dictionary 2012).

Epideictic rhetoric – loosely translated from Greek as ‘fit for displaying or showing off’ – is a type of demonstrative rhetoric and ceremonial discourse exhibited in speech or writing that praises or blames (someone or something). It includes funeral orations, obituaries, graduation and retirement speeches, letters of recommendation (see Chapter 4 in reference to LinkedIn) and nominating speeches at political conventions (Nordquist 2019).

The main characteristics of the neoliberal work ethos include flexible working conditions, project-based work structures, multiskilling, entrepreneurship as well as individualism (Julier 2017, 52). Work precarity and contract-based work demand not only multiskilling but also continuous upskilling. As Scolere (2019, 1894) points out, ‘attention economy’ (cf. Bueno 2016) compels workers to think of themselves as individual brands in need of being promoted.

Today’s workforce on demand no longer represents a set of employees who come into the office or factory each morning, or according to their shift, and clock out when their shift is over (Disselkamp et al. 2015). The term ‘open talent economy’ is used to denote a social environment, a dynamic network, where people can connect, share information, and build a sense of community. As mentioned before, under the post-welfare neoliberal work conditions, one must come to terms with a new working environment in which flexibility (cf. ‘flexible self’ – McCormack & Salmenniemi 2016) and adaptability take priority over job security, long-term employment, structured environments, and standardised job roles.

The