Personal Identity Economics: Facebook and the Distortion of Identity Politics

This article examines Facebook’s role in the treatment of marginalized identity as currency. Recent examples of solidarity statements and corporate social responsibility rhetoric treat disenfranchised racial and gender identities as value-added competitive market quantities to boost brands. This trend also incentivizes marginalized actors to capitalize on their own disenfranchisement in pursuit of visibility and career advancement. The resulting identity politicking replaces communal care, grassroots social ties, solidarity, and interdependence with isolating market competition. This article diverges from scholars who trouble the differential value of identity—by troubling the valuation of identity itself. Facebook normalizes identity as private property in what I call a transition from identity politics to “personal identity economics.” I coin this concept and break it down into the following four factors: (1) The optimization of difference beginning in the 1970s, (2) Facebook’s algorithmic invasion of market logic into intimate aspects of life starting in the mid 2000s, (3) Ads Manager’s economization of identity into legible economic units, and (4) neoliberal corporate social responsibility rhetoric of “social good” as a profitable asset.

Predictably Irrational Hiring

The hiring process plays a key role in organisational performance, but it involves contentious judgements and decisions. Behavioural economics can help us improve hiring effectiveness and enable the development of strong cultures and successful organisations. Using three historical cases from a Big-Five accounting firm, we present counter-intuitive hiring strategies that are relevant to organisations today. The cases involve six practices related to hiring and nine scientific concepts. The practices are: reverse interview, reverse recruitment, assessment centre (AC) design, structured interviewing, salary history ban, and withdrawal and rationalisation of designations. The scientific concepts are: representativeness heuristic, anticipatory socialisation, affect heuristic, distinction bias, social facilitation (observer effect), dual-process thinking, identity economics, anchoring effect (reference dependence) and social preference (inequity aversion). Finally, we examine the relevance of these practices and concepts as they relate to four human resources (HR) functions: (a) recruitment; (b) selection; (c) compensation and rewards; and (d) culture building.

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Facebook: Updating Identity Economics

Scholars and news media generally name Facebook’s two central problems: that its data collection practices are a threat to user privacy, and that stricter regulations are required to prevent “bad actor” from spreading hate and disinformation. However separating these two concerns—personal data collection and bad actors—overlooks the way that one generates the other. First, this article builds on critical race scholarship to examine how identity politics are historically distorted and commodified into profitable vigilance and intolerance, in what I call a transition from identity politics, to personal identity economics. Facebook’s Ad Manager, for example, reveals how personal identities are itemized as advertising assets, which are cultivated through deeper, more trenchant identity politics. Second, this article theorizes about what makes such staunch, intolerant identity politics addictive. Drawing on Max Weber’s theories of the Protestant Ethic, this article explores how Facebook activism thrives on deep-rooted Christian paradigms of dogma, virtue, redemption, and piety. As dogmatic personal identity economics spread across the globe, they testify to how Facebook’s business model manufactures bad actors.

Diverging identities: a model of class formation

This paper is an application of Identity Economics. Since the literature in this field is recent, the paper begins with an extensive review of the key contributions. The current paper analyses the process and psychological costs of social polarization arising from economic inequalities. It may have some application to the current social divisions evident in the votes for Brexit and Donald Trump, and protest movements such as the gilets jaunes. In a simple model, people rationally maximize their utility from esteem, by selecting a subjective salient identity from two objective identities: nationality and job. The model shows how an increase in wages for the upper half of the population can lead those with high incomes to drop nationality as their salient identity, forming a new ‘elite’ class. This rational switch in the identity of high-income workers has efficiency and redistributive effects, reducing aggregate utility and generating regressive transfers.

Migration, Cultural Identity and Diasporas An Identity Economics Approach

Besides effects on economic well-being, migration of people with distant cultural backgrounds may also have large effects on people’s cultural identity. In this paper, the identity economics of Akerlof and Kranton (2000) is applied to migration. Accordingly, it is assumed that the utility of both the immigrants and the native population encompasses economic well-being and cultural identity. The migration effect on cultural identity depends, among others, on the distance between cultures. In a simple immigration game it is shown that immigrants may prefer to live rather in diaspora communities than to integrate into the host countries’ culture. This subgame-perfect equilibrium choice of immigrants seems the more likely the greater the cultural distance between their country of origin and the destination country is. Among the available policy instruments, restrictions on the freedom of movement and settlement of immigrants may be the most effective way to prevent the setup of large diaspora communities. For young immigrants and later generations of immigrants, integration via compulsory schooling is the most important policy. In general, cultural, religious and social institutions may support integration.