In this article I present brand-centred control as a new form of normative control and examine the ways in which it affects employees. To do so, I draw on the results of a qualitative case study of a consumer products company with a strong corporate culture and brand, and examine internal branding as an extension of culture management. The key insights of the case study show that brand-centred control – unlike traditional normative control that typically works inside the company – also engages an external audience (customers, fans, and the wider public) as an additional source of normative control. As employees internalise the brand image of this external audience, they turn into brand representatives even in absence of face-to-face interactions with others and in their private lives. Brand-centred control thus blurs the boundaries between work and employees’ private lives in unprecedented ways. I discuss the ways in which employees respond to and resist brand-centred control and point to further research on brand-centred control as a significant new form of normative control.

In this essay, I aim to complement social identity theory (SIT) concepts of identification with insights from psychoanalysis to address three problematic aspects: (a) SIT emphasizes cognition and often neglects emotions, (b) emotions—if mentioned —are primarily positive, and (c) SIT-based concepts can be used to inspire simplified ideas of identification management. I argue that psychoanalytic insights can help us attend to these problematic aspects and help us advance our understanding of identification in organizations: they add an emotional focus on identification that can better explain strong relationships than a cognitive focus alone; they add the full range of emotions (positive to negative), which means that identification can also go along with negative emotions; and they also add a distinction between identification and narcissistic attachments that involve different motivations, dynamics, and predictive potentials. I illustrate these points in an example from Pratt and highlight implications for future research.