Recent neglect of the concept of belonging may be traced to its subsumption under matters of locality or kinship (concepts that have left its theorising rather static and underdeveloped), as well as to theoretical understandings which try to keep distinct a logic of belonging from a logic of the market. In reworking a sociological tradition that formerly associated the work of managers with a specific responsibility to induce conditions of belonging, at least within bureaucratic organisations, the present study examines closely the rhetoric deployed in a large private sector organisation alongside its invention of ‘internal’ markets. Adopting a consumption perspective, the paper argues that a ‘rubbishing’ of the past within organisations may be being aimed at undermining aspects of members' belonging, especially matters of tradition, loyalty and custom. In so much as these aspects once offered themselves as ‘resources’ for managers' accounts (to themselves, their colleagues and their superiors), their effacement as resources can be understood as helping reframe accounts in ways that not only colonise the present and characterise the future, but sustain ambiguities vital to the imposition of pseudo-market relations, such as those between ‘purchasers’ and ‘providers’.
