Identity Piece For Jane

Anita and Me: constructing identity with a corporate icon

Ann Rippin Department of Management Graduate School of Education 14 October 2009

Introduction •  Began with the question, ‘where are organisations?’ •  Where do they live? •  Can they be said to live in us? •  What part do they form of our identities?

Body Shop International

•  Took as my case The Body Shop International •  Long relationship with it beginning as impressionable adolescent in the 1970s •  Decided to trace my relationship with it at three biographical points

Anita and Me •  In my impressionable adolescence •  In my ‘middle period’ in the 1990s •  In my mature period in the 2000s

•  Project begins to spiral out of control early on •  Original intent was that there would be no paper but an interlocking set of mini projects aimed at representing the complexity of locating and (re)presenting organisation •  Uncontrollable amount of material generated •  Like therapy?

Our post-modern starting point •  As organisations are shifting, fluid, fragmentary, temporary, transitory, contingent, incomplete etc… •  Representations of them must also be shifting, fluid, fragmentary, temporary, transitory, contingent, incomplete etc… •  Approach is to use arts-based methods to a large extent

Arts-based approaches ‘The research self is not separable from the lived self. Who we are and what we can be, what we study are all tied to how a knowledge system disciplines its members and claims authority over knowledge. We need concrete practices through which we can construct ourselves as ethical subjects engaged in ethical research even if that means challenging the authority of a discipline’s cherished models of representation.’ Laurel Richardson (2003) ‘Poetic Representation of Interviews’ in J. Gubrium & J. Holstein (eds) Postmodern Interviewing, Thousand Oaks/London, Sage: 187-201, 197.

•  Bound together loosely around themes of communion, pilgrimage, shrines, devotion, sainthood and veneration, relics •  The love affair

Auto/biography – Duo/biography •  Writing critical biography of Anita through my own relationship with her (eg My Judy Garland Life, Susie Boyt, 2008) •  Major confusion over terms – Liz Stanley •  Relationship that of a love affair

Anita and Me again •  Infatuation stage – worship from afar, growing up green, idealism, activism •  Meeting the love object – working through difficulties of actually being together and making it work; picking up socks from the bedroom floor, loving despite the faults, the split •  Meeting again years later, inspecting the damage to the old lover.

From ‘Marcel Proust’ But one whiff of kiwi-fruit lip-balm from Anita Roddick’s Body Shop and wham! I’m back in the midst of the storm and stress of over a decade ago. I’m bewildered! Bewitched! anhedonia’s bone-cold hand clutching my throat like a mugger – in the toils of the bed, believing I’m Marcel Proust giving birth to the bright-white labour of life-lived… Leontia Flynn (2008) Drives, London: Jonathon Cape: 26.

My own effort There is a temple in our hearts to the girls we were and the women we might have become a temple stained dark pine green to hide black mould

Relics •  Do I carry the original values of the BSI within me? •  Am I a keeper of the sliver of the true cross? •  Am I a reliquary?

The shrines •  Encountered bell shrines in National Museum of Scotland when on pilgrimage to Tracy Emin retrospective, 2008 •  Early-medieval marketing campaign to whip up tourist/ pilgrimage trade

Shrines for iconic products •  •  •  • 

Carrot moisturiser Banana conditioner Peppermint foot lotion Dewberry perfume

•  The goddess herself •  The BVM prototype

‘Artists expand both the interpretation of the altar for women and its visual aesthetic by transforming aspects of its history, sometimes by appropriating ancient symbols and giving them a very contemporary slant, or by inventing new symbols which are sacralized by enclosing them in the altar’s frame.’ Kay Turner (1999) Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women’s Altars, London: Thames and Hudson

Making sense of all this •  Fascinated by Tim Ingold’s work on lines, traces, paths, ‘zones of entanglement’ •  Possibility that my own identity is constituted and continues to be constituted in part by my continuing ‘enmeshments’ with BSI •  Corporate identity – like individual identity – is product of threads coming together •  Approach fits the textile representation

…the tissue is a texture formed of myriad fine threads tightly interlaced, presenting all the appearance, to a casual observer, of a coherent continuous surface. Ingold, T. (2008) ‘Bindings against boundaries: entanglements of life in an open world’, Environment and Planning, 40, 1796-1810: 1806

It is not, then, that organisms [or organisations?] are entangled in relations. Rather every organism – indeed every thing – is in itself an entanglement, a tissue of knots whose constituent strands, as they become tied up with other strands, in other bundles, make up the meshwork. Ingold, T. (2008) ‘Bindings against boundaries: entanglements of life in an open world’, Environment and Planning, 40, 1796-1810: 1806

The Santa Anita Quilt/altar piece •  Decided to make an enormous baroque altarpiece •  Incorporating the themes of place, traces, lines of flight, zones of entanglement, enmeshment etc. •  Work in progress

End with a rhetorical sweep… Within this tangle of interlaced trails, continually ravelling here and unravelling there, beings grow or ‘issue forth’ along the lines of their relationships. This tangle is the texture of the world. (p. 1807)

…embodied we may be, but that body, I contend, is not confined or bounded but rather extends as it grows along the multiple paths of its entanglements in the textured world. (p. 1808)

I’ve got you under my skin…