ABSTRACT

In the last 30 years, the character of the capital accumulation process has shifted radically. With the advent of neoliberalism and post-Fordism, the production of surplus value is no longer about increasingly sophisticated efforts to determine the indeterminacy of labor, but rather about managing and exploiting the (in)determinacy of meaning and organizing (Mumby, 2016a). This suggests that the neoliberal capital accumulation process is more about managing communication processes and its concomitant construction of meanings and identities. The fulcrum of this process within neoliberal capitalism is the brand. This chapter explores how brands enable dis/organization processes and, in consequence, enable capital accumulation under neoliberalism. Using the notion of communicative capitalism (Dean, 2009, 2014; Brophy, 2017) as an organizing construct, the chapter develops the outline of a “CCC” model of organization—Communication Constitutes Capital. This model will help draw attention to the fact that while as a field we have developed a rich and sophisticated tradition that explores the (communicative) production of organization, we have done little to examine the communicative organization of (capitalist) production. The chapter will therefore contribute to the literature on communication and dis/organization by exploring the relationships among communication, (dis)organization and capital.