Respectable experts? Sartorial aesthetics and the production of trust
Type de matériel :
56
Considered as “intellectual”, management consultancy is rarely approached from the angle of bodily mediation, nor of the incarnation work that is entails. From the beginning, starting consultants learn to take into account a number of expectations that are historically and socially constructed to produce a convincing personal facade and to pass as an expert. The controlled production of this expert figure centrally stages clothing. The article underlines how much contemporary clothing norms in this profession are influenced by professional figures that were historically constructed. It testifies to persistent gendered aesthetics, despite the important influx of women in this ancient male bastion. It then analyses complex clothing experiments of female consultants : their permanent vigilance not to break the dress code, the very shared fear of making an aesthetic and symbolic mistake. By focusing on problematic clothing situations, the article offers a heuristic approach to the social and symbolic functions of working clothes, to symbolic violence and to power relations they could support.
Réseaux sociaux