‘Don’t forget to post it on LinkedIn’: Identity regulation and the assetization of employees’ online selves

Abstract

What happens to employees’ sense of who they are online when their organization tells them how to present themselves on LinkedIn? Companies increasingly intervene in employees’ professional social media presence through training programs and internal policies, encouraging them to treat their profile as an asset to be cultivated for future return. Drawing on a 2-year digital ethnography of an in-company LinkedIn training program in a French state-owned enterprise, this article shows how the training regulates participants’ sense of their online selves by first denying that their profile has anything to do with who they are, and only then inviting them to reinvest it with personal meaning within the frame this denial has established. Regulation here operates on the identity stakes of the profile itself: on how much of themselves participants take it to carry. The uneven ways participants took up this invitation point to the entanglement of identity regulation and assetization, and to the capacity of an online self, once assetized, to keep generating value for the organization long after the person behind it has disengaged.