Navigating tensions between care and surveillance: marketers’ ethical subjectivity in personalised marketing

Abstract

Personalisation is widely celebrated for delivering relevance and efficiency, yet critiqued as a vehicle of surveillance and control. This study challenges both views by exploring how marketers construct ethical subjectivity within personalisation practices. Drawing on interviews with SME marketers and inspired by Foucault’s concept of ethical self-formation, we identify four discursive subject positions: masters of data; friends and sources of inspiration; artists; and compliance-based ethical subjects. These positions reveal how personalisation is morally justified, negotiated, and at times problematised through accounts of performance, care, creativity, and compliance. Rather than simply enacting data-driven logics, marketers draw on these repertoires in situated and sometimes contradictory ways to make sense of their practices and ethical responsibilities. By foregrounding this ambivalence, the study offers a nuanced understanding of ethical subjectivity in personalisation and highlights tensions between surveillance, care, data, and professional identity.