Anita and Me: constructing

identity with a corporate icon

Ann Rippin
Department of Management
Graduate School of Education 14 October
2009
 Introduction
•  Began with the question, ‘where are
organisations?’

•  Where do they live?

•  Can they be said to live in us?

•  What part do they form of our identities?

Body Shop International
•  Took as my case The Body Shop International

•  Long relationship with it beginning as

impressionable adolescent in the 1970s

•  Decided to trace my relationship with it at three

biographical points
Anita and Me
•  In my
impressionable
adolescence

•  In my ‘middle
period’ in the 1990s

•  In my mature period
in the 2000s
•  Project begins to spiral out of control early on

•  Original intent was that there would be no paper but an

interlocking set of mini projects aimed at representing
the complexity of locating and (re)presenting
organisation

•  Uncontrollable amount of material generated

•  Like therapy?
 Our post-modern starting point

•  As organisations are shifting, fluid, fragmentary,

temporary, transitory, contingent, incomplete etc…

•  Representations of them must also be shifting, fluid,

fragmentary, temporary, transitory, contingent,
incomplete etc…

•  Approach is to use arts-based methods to a large extent

 Arts-based approaches

‘The research self is not separable from the lived self. Who
we are and what we can be, what we study are all tied to how
a knowledge system disciplines its members and claims
authority over knowledge. We need concrete practices
through which we can construct ourselves as ethical subjects
engaged in ethical research even if that means challenging
the authority of a discipline’s cherished models of
representation.’
Laurel Richardson (2003) ‘Poetic Representation of Interviews’ in J. Gubrium & J. Holstein
(eds) Postmodern Interviewing, Thousand Oaks/London, Sage: 187-201, 197.
•  Bound together loosely around themes of
communion, pilgrimage, shrines, devotion,
sainthood and veneration, relics

•  The love affair

 Auto/biography – Duo/biography
•  Writing critical biography of Anita through my
own relationship with her
(eg My Judy Garland Life, Susie Boyt, 2008)

•  Major confusion over terms – Liz Stanley

•  Relationship that of a love affair

 Anita and Me again
•  Infatuation stage – worship
from afar, growing up green,
idealism, activism

•  Meeting the love object –

working through difficulties
of actually being together and
making it work; picking up
socks from the bedroom
floor, loving despite the
faults, the split

•  Meeting again years later,

inspecting the damage to the
old lover.
From ‘Marcel Proust’

But one whiff of kiwi-fruit lip-balm from Anita Roddick’s Body Shop
and wham! I’m back in the midst of the storm and stress
of over a decade ago. I’m bewildered! Bewitched!
anhedonia’s bone-cold hand clutching my throat
like a mugger – in the toils of the bed, believing I’m Marcel Proust
giving birth to the bright-white labour of life-lived…

Leontia Flynn (2008) Drives, London: Jonathon Cape: 26.

 My own effort

There is a temple in our hearts to

the girls we were and the women
we might have become
a temple stained dark pine green
to hide black mould
 Relics
•  Do I carry the original values of the BSI within
me?

•  Am I a keeper of the sliver of the true cross?

•  Am I a reliquary?
 The shrines
•  Encountered bell shrines
in National Museum of
Scotland when on
pilgrimage to Tracy
Emin retrospective, 2008

•  Early-medieval
marketing campaign to
whip up tourist/
pilgrimage trade
 Shrines for iconic products
•  Carrot moisturiser
•  Banana conditioner
•  Peppermint foot lotion
•  Dewberry perfume

•  The goddess herself

•  The BVM prototype
‘Artists expand both the interpretation of the altar
for women and its visual aesthetic by transforming
aspects of its history, sometimes by appropriating
ancient symbols and giving them a very
contemporary slant, or by inventing new symbols
which are sacralized by enclosing them in the altar’s
frame.’
Kay Turner (1999) Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women’s Altars, London: Thames
and Hudson
 Making sense of all this
•  Fascinated by Tim Ingold’s work
on lines, traces, paths, ‘zones of
entanglement’

•  Possibility that my own identity is

constituted and continues to be
constituted in part by my
continuing ‘enmeshments’ with BSI

•  Corporate identity – like individual

identity – is product of threads
coming together

•  Approach fits the textile re-

presentation
…the tissue is a texture
formed of myriad fine
threads tightly interlaced,
presenting all the
appearance, to a casual
observer, of a coherent
continuous surface.
Ingold, T. (2008) ‘Bindings against boundaries:
entanglements of life in an open world’,
Environment and Planning, 40, 1796-1810:
1806
It is not, then, that organisms [or
organisations?] are entangled in
relations. Rather every organism
– indeed every thing – is in itself
an entanglement, a tissue of knots
whose constituent strands, as they
become tied up with other strands,
in other bundles, make up the
meshwork.
Ingold, T. (2008) ‘Bindings against
boundaries: entanglements of life in an open
world’, Environment and Planning, 40,
1796-1810: 1806
The Santa Anita Quilt/altar piece
•  Decided to make an enormous baroque
altarpiece

•  Incorporating the themes of place, traces, lines

of flight, zones of entanglement, enmeshment
etc.

•  Work in progress
End with a rhetorical sweep…
Within this tangle of interlaced trails,
continually ravelling here and
unravelling there, beings grow or ‘issue
forth’ along the lines of their
relationships. This tangle is the texture
of the world. (p. 1807)

…embodied we may be, but that body, I

contend, is not confined or bounded but
rather extends as it grows along the
multiple paths of its entanglements in
the textured world. (p. 1808)
I’ve got you under my skin…