3 Niche Marketing and the Production of Flexible Bodies It was a beautiful spring day in 1996, nearly four years after Gerber had bought A]ima. I stood in line outside the factory along with a crowd of Al-ima-Gerber employees and distributors, waiting to board the bus that would take us to an elegant theater in downtown Rzeszow. The AG employees— all white-collar workers from the office building—and I fidgeted and whispered to one another nervously. This was show time: we were about to launch the product that would make or break Alima-Gerber. Once seated in the auditorium, we listened to the Polish head of the marketing division as he proudly displayed the firm's new line of fruit juices. Surprisingly, the bright, colorful drinks in large glass bottles with a jazzy black label were not for babies. "Frugo!" announced the marketer, who showed us that the brand came in four colors, not flavors. He explained that red, orange, green, and yellow Frugo juices were destined to be the hit product of the year: they were developed on the basis of niche marketing, a form of marketing that had never been used in Poland before. "A product for everybody is a product for nobody. Nobody identifies with it," he said. "That's why Frugo is aimed especially at youth. Frugo will be a part of the young world like no other brand. It will be a fragment of their culture." The lights dimmed, and we sat anxiously as a giant movie screen dropped from the ceiling. All at once, there was an explosion of noise and color. "Frugo!" intoned a disembodied voice speaking Polish. Then, set against a dynamic background of color and noise, a young kid dressed like a Los Angeles gang member appeared, wearing fashionably baggy clothes and spray painting graffiti. In the background, a voice whispered the Frugo slogan, "Frugo without boundaries" (Frugo hez ogmniczeri). Suddenly, there was a rupture: the commercial became quiet, and the scene jump-cut to a moil " notonous, drab setting. In each of the four versions of the commercial, the i ad presented a stereotypical adult, fat and unmoving, who began to speak. In the commercial for red Frugo, for example, the hated adult was a fat woman in black clothes and a beret, sitting against a red background. She said, aggressively, "Fruit? They want fruit? When I was young, we often lacked beets! And they're asking for fruit!" In the orange ad, a dumpy older woman with dyed orange hair and long orange fingernails sat at a table decorated with fussy lace doilies. She said, tremulously, "Fruit? Fruit is good for decorating tables. But of course, plastic fruit can be aesthetic, too." In all of the ads, as soon as the repellent adult finished speaking, the scene began to expand like a bubble. As it became wider and shorter, the audience saw a Frugo bottle, with a hand on it, pushing down on the scene until it exploded. The hand belonged to the main character, the cool kid, who was using the bottle to squash and rupture the hated adults and their whole settings. The loud drum music resumed, the bright colors began wheeling around, and the audience saw the cool kid spray painting out of view of the camera. The ads ended with a recitation of the product's punnish slogan, "So, drink up!"—or, as it was in Polish, "No, to Frugof The audience roared with delight, and the employees grinned with a mixture of enthusiasm and relief. The commercials were a hit with the distributors, which boded well for their reception by a wider Polish audience. I had a difficult time participating in the festivity, though. What did these ads mean? Why did everyone squeal with laughter when the dumpy adults appeared? What was so funny about these commercials, anyway? After employees explained to me the symbolism of the ads, I soon began to notice similar images in other places: in the sartorial habits of Polish managers, in the talk of American managers, and, accompanied by biting commentary, in discussions on the shop floor. These images of movement and stasis, flexibility and rigidity, age and youth, resonated strongly with employees as well as consumers. What I came to discover was while niche marketing is ostensibly about structuring consumer markets by identifying and proposing new social identities, it also helps commodify labor and segment labor markets by constituting new social identities and reconfiguring old ones. The images deployed so brilliantly and humorously in the Frugo ads were part of a larger process in which some people were categorized as "flexible," "rational," and I "individualist," while others were being labeled "passive," "collectivist," and "rigid," hence a priori incapable of playing a leading role in the economic "transition." Niche marketing linked marketization and personhood not only to transform the economy from one constrained by supply to one con-Niche Marketing and the Production of Flexible Bodies 59 strained by demand but also to reconstruct desire, identity, class, and occupation. Making Postsocialist Niche Markets: The Birth of a Strategy The general atmosphere of nervousness and tension among employees at the Frugo launch was easily understandable. Gerber executives assuaged employees' fears during privatization in 1992 by painting a picture of a prosperous future. They promised that the new Alima-Gerber would be the center of Gerber's expansion efforts in European markets. They said Alima's employees would all be making good salaries while making food for Russian, Czech, Hungarian, French, and maybe even Middle Eastern babies. But by 1996, it was clear that the situation was not as rosy as both Alima and Ger-i ber had hoped. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the economic i downturn across the Eastern Bloc, exports had dropped dramatically. The Polish baby food market was not expanding as quickly as AG hoped, and the machines that Gerber had paid so dearly to move into AG's baby food division sat idle roughly half of the time, not even counting nights and weekends.1 The factory was covering costs by selling Bobo Frut domestically, but sales were dropping. The firm had no other products to take up capacity on the line. People were being laid off, jobs were being outsourced, and salaries were not keeping pace with rampant inflation. People on the production floor and in the office building were worried; the threat of unemployment hung over their heads. Employees waited and watched to find out how San-doz would respond to AG's travails, fearful that the pharmaceutical giant might decide simply to shut the company down. In response to this dilemma, AG devised another strategy. While growth in the baby food market was slow, growth in the beverage market was skyrocketing. Poles consumed 197 percent more juice in 1995 than in 1992. Although 1995 per capita consumption had reached 7.9 liters, AG officials believed that as Poles obtained more disposable income, their consumption could reach average Western European levels (15 liters per capita per year) or even German levels (38 liters per capita).2 AG had long experience in making juices for children. The juice market for small children, however, had low growth potential because AG already controlled about So percent of the market. The beverage market for adults was crowded and highly competitive. So, instead of focusing on either young children or adults, AG decided to attempt to resegment the domestic market in order to sell a new product. Frugo, the new juice drink, was aimed at thirteen- to eighteen-year-olds—the age group with the lowest per capita consumption of juices. The Frugo strategy was a classic use of niche marketing. Marketers define a specific group or "target market," list the qualities of the group's members and outline their particular needs, and then develop and advertise a product that meets those specific needs. Often, this group is carved out of an existing market. In this way, a new social group—perhaps one that heretofore had not recognized itself or had not been recognized as having special "needs"—is created through advertising and marketing strategies. As anthropologist Sidney Mintz points out in reference to American advertising strategies, TV treatment of foods is intended to encourage consumption. As such, it is differentiated in order to reach many different (and segmented, but sometimes overlapping) populations, such as little boys and girls, adolescent males and females, adult singles, both male and female, families eating out, couples eating out... and so on. This design aims at reaching the widest possible variety of audiences, each on its ownterms, but also leaving room for continuous redifferentiation by subdivision (for instance black male basketball players and white male basketball players) .. .in order to perpetuate the sensation of innovation and of participatory membership upon which heightened consumption battens. Making the product "right" for the consumer requires continuous redefmition and division of the groups in which he, as an individual consumer, defines himself. The deliberate postulation of new groups—often divisions between already familiar categories, as "pre-teens," were created between "teenagers" and younger children—helps to impart reality to what are supposedly new needs (Mintz 19S2,158; see also Schrum 1998). In essence, marketers deliberately fragment the market into smaller segments by using two techniques: contrived product differentiation and contrived social differentiation (Samuelson 1976; Dickson and Ginter 1987). Niche marketing is a strategy commonly pursued by post-Fordist capitalist industries throughout the world. Flexible production systems rest on the idea of small-batch production for quickly changing niche markets (Harvey 1989,156). In contrast to the Fordist era, when stable product lines were designed for mass markets, competition in the post-Fordist era depends on specialized and differentiated products and a rapid rate of change in production design and product mix (Schoenberger 1988, 252; Piore and Sabel 1984). 60 Privatizing Poland Niche Marketing and the Production of Flexible Bodies 61 As common as these techniques have become in the capitalist world, the niche marketing strategies that AG pursued were almost completely new in j Poland. Socialism was based on the Fordist idea of mass consumption: economies of scale could be obtained by consolidating producers and product lines. Because of socialism's focus on mass production, because of the chronic shortages that plagued the economy, and because of the underground exchanges of gifts and favors, there were no niche markets. Everyone wanted everything. Even if one did not have a child, for example, Bobo Frut was a valuable commodity because it could be traded for something else through the extensive networks of personal connections that typified state socialism. True, the socialist state went to great lengths to differentiate groups of ■; people (mothers, children, pensioners, and so on) and to give them access p to valued goods. Socialist states created different documents (e.g., the "child health book," which proved one had a child) and different purchase points (e.g., stores for party members) to classify groups of people by age, gender, occupation, class status, ethnicity, and party membership. These classifications gave some people access to particular kinds or quantities of goods that others could not get. Anderson (1996) calls these differentiations "citizenship regimes." The regimes determined not only what goods one could get, but by reifying differences with documents and privileges, they also determined what kind of citizen one was. Citizenship regimes are not the same as niche markets, however. Citizenship regimes are necessary only when desire is generalized—when everybody wants everything, and a product for everybody is a product for anybody: Socialism ... which rested not on devising infinite kinds of things to sell people but on claiming to meet people's basic needs, had a very unadorned definition of them—in keeping with socialist egalitarian-ism. ... As long as the food offered was edible or the clothes available covered you and kept you warm, that should be sufficient. If you had trouble finding even these, that just meant you weren't looking hard i enough. No planner presumed to investigate what kinds of goods people : wanted, or worked to name new needs for newly created products and newly developed markets. (Verdery 1996,28) Niche markets, in contrast, are about creating groups with specialized desire and products that precisely match the minute differences in those groups' wants. In this system, products that don't meet specialized wants don't sell—and that means a product for everybody is a product for nobody. Niche marketing therefore contributes to the transformation of the supply- 62 Privatizing Poland constrained economy into a demand-constrained one. More important, it is part of the restructuring of desire and social personhood. Now a consumer has to be a particular sort to want a certain product—or, perhaps, finds that wanting a certain product is enough to become a particular kind of person. The introduction of niche marketing meant that AG was not only discovering "the market," it was learning to create and make use of multiple markets that could be resegmented and redefined in order to boost consumption via the practice of marketing. It was precisely socialism's inattention to consumption and the dearth of technologies, habits, and traditions in that domain that made it so possible and so fruitful to import Western marketing techniques. Alima-Gerber was one of the first companies in Poland to aim a product at a narrowly defined target market. This marked a major change in the way Polish enterprises approached markets. Rather than being fixed entities that passively absorbed product, markets and consumers became objects that could be subjected to technologies of government; they could be studied, classified, created, destroyed, and manipulated. Both AG's Polish advertising and marketing staff and the staff of Grey and Associates, the New York-based advertising agency hired for the Frugo campaign, described the genesis of the Frugo strategy as if there were a well-defined group with an unfulfilled need. However, it was not at all clear that either the group or the need existed prior to the product. That was why the advertisements had to define the "teen" target group as a distinct social entity in order to sell the product (see also Schrum 1998,158).3 Making teens distinct from babies and toddlers was easily done. AG removed all traces of the Gerber name from the product, with the exception of the company name and address, in small type on the back of the label. When the product was put in stores, AG ensured that it was placed on shelves next to soft drinks and juices for adults rather than on the Gerber racks. Making teens distinct from adults was a more difficult problem. The Frugo advertisements did this by contrasting not only socialist and capitalist lifeworlds but also socialist and capitalist persons. On the one hand, the adult lifeworld was a stereotype of the socialist era. The first adult in the commercials—the woman set against a red background who complained that youngsters didn't know about beet shortages—represented the Party, with its emphasis on the nobility of sacrifice and struggle. The second woman represented a person trying to create elegance in the face of a shortage of material goods. In both cases, the stereotypes were tongue-in-cheek. While the orange woman clearly believed plastic fruit has aesthetic value, for example, the audience was expected to realize it is horrible and ugly. Niche Marketing and the Production of Flexible Bodies 63 Table 1. Ideas of socialism and capit alism Socialism Capitalism Backwardness Modernity, civilization Stasis Dynamism, movement Rigidity Flexibility Age Youth Drabness Colorf ulness Deprivation Satisfaction of desire Obedience Critical self-reflection Collectivism Individualism Personalized "connections" Impersonal relations based on rational calculation Gifts Sales Isolation within boundaries Transcendence of boundaries On the other hand, the ads showed the teenager rejecting the entire socialist lifeworld—not just the Communist Party, but the entire experience of the socialist era—in favor of another, new form of being. These adults, the ad implies, just could not change with the times. Such images indexed and mocked socialist ideas of noble suffering and sacrifices for the radiant future.4 They also indexed qualities such as drabness, passivity, immobility, and unresponsiveness to needs and desires, all of which are imputed to the socialist system. In contrast, the teenaged boy (and Frugo) was associated with dynamism, foreignness, color, noise, and the gratification of desire. This strategy, of course, rested on the creation of difference: if both the product and the targeted consumer were not somehow "different" from others, there would be no need for this specialized product. The idea of creating new differences in personal identity using socialism as a foil was not unique to Alima. A similar process was going on across the Eastern Bloc. Ads often sorted images and personal characteristics into categories of "socialist" and "capitalist" and associated their products with one or the other. "Businessman" cigarettes and "Business Centre Club"beer were blatant examples of domestically produced products that marketed themselves by conjuring an image of capitalist personhood.5 In an analysis of Czechoslovak political imagery, Holy (1992) found that the planned economy was associated with highly negative characteristics, whereas the market economy was associated with a wealth of positive qualities. Table 1 illustrates some of these dichotomies. Part of the drive to create new social identities through consumption may have been a reaction to socialism's demand that people be the same and to its dislike of social differentiation. As the Czech president and former dissident Vaclav Havel explained, 64 Privatizing Poland The fall of communism destroyed this shroud of sameness, and the world was caught napping by an outburst of the many unanticipated differences concealed beneath it, each of which—after such a long time in the shadows—felt a natural need to draw attention to itself, to emphasize its uniqueness, and its difference from others. (t993,8) The accusation that people under state socialism were all alike is, of course, exaggerated. Ethnographic work conducted during the late 1980s showed that people set themselves apart from others and marked themselves as participants in subcultures by doing everything from adopting particular fashions, to becoming deeply involved in reenactments of American Indian powwows (Rayport 1995), to struggling to preserve regional identities. But socialist mass production gave people reason to feel that the socialist state was pushing for sameness and discouraging people from differentiating themselves through consumption. For many Poles, consumption became a way of rejecting socialist egabtarianism. Producing black market goods, making one's own (more stylish) clothing, and acquiring Western goods on the black market was a way for socialist citizens to show they could have things the regime said they didn't need. As Verdery notes, it was a way to "differentiate yourself as an individual in the face of relentless pressures to homogenize everyone's capacities and tastes into an undifferentiated collectivity. Acquiring objects became a way of constituting your selfhood against a deeply unpopular regime" (1996,29). It is no wonder, then, that in the immediate aftermath of socialism, Eastern Europeans reacted with a flurry of pent-up consumerist desire. Socialism had engendered the desire to create oneself as a different kind of person through consumption, but the economy of shortage had by and large denied people the means to do so. While the pump was primed for niche marketing, then, the social differences that niche marketing depends on were not necessarily "naturally" present and waiting to leap out once the lid of Communist oppression was lifted. Rather, new and different kinds of person-hood were actively created through a variety of means: advertisements and fashion magazines, identity politics, redefined occupational hierarchies, and leisure-time activities (Sampson 1996,92), Companies like AG were primed to step in to meet the desire for differentiation and to help create new identities—including the identity of the flip, hip, rebellious teen. With the aid of Western advertising agencies like Grey and Associates, AG was ready to help school Poles in the art of assembling themselves as they assembled products to consume. Niche Marketing and the Production of Flexible Bodies 65 Postsocialism, Postfordlsm, and Flexibility By gambling so heavily on Frugo, AG bet the company's survival on its i ability to differentiate consumers and to elicit in them the "need" for new products to define their own identities. But why did AG choose these particular images to differentiate groups? Why portray socialism as dumpy, drab, immobile, and rigid, and why portray the hip capitalist teen as hyper-mobile, agile, and colorful? Oddly enough, the Frugo images of mobility, agility, and flexibility echoed a wave of similar advertising in the United States. In her study of American popular culture, Emily Martin found ads for baby shoes with "flexible soles" that promised to make children more "agile." She also found ads for bank cards that billed themselves as "your flexible friend" and offered consumers flexible payment schedules. Advertisements for management seminars promised to help executives gain "flexibility—the most important leadership tool of this decade," while an ad for a temporary services agency used Gumby, the iconic rubber cartoon character, to demonstrate how much flexibility temporary workers could give a firm (Martin 1994,150-54). Martin argues that by vaunting flexibility and nimbleness, the ads rejected the "rigidity" that was the hallmark of Fordist production (Harvey 1989,142) and instead embraced post-Fordist flexible accumulation, an aesthetic style associated with a particular kind of capitalism (Piore and Sabel 1984; Schqenberger 1997; Jameson 1991). By using similar images of "flexibility" to reject socialism, AGs simple commercial made a strong statement about socialism's ills and postsocial-ist people. By portraying socialism as "rigid," the commercial presented a broader narrative that portrayed the centrally planned economy as "stagnant" (Sachs 1993,3), "ossified" (Csaba 1995,35,) and incapable of changing without collapsing (Kornai 1992,383). This echoed the fundamental critique of Fordism: More generally, the period from 1965 to 1973 was one in which the inability of Fordism ... to contain the inherent contradictions of capitalism became more and more apparent. On the surface, these difficulties could best be captured by one word: rigidity. There were problems with the rigidity of long-term and large-scale fixed capital investments in mass-production systems that precluded much flexibility of design and assumed stable growth in invariant consumer markets. There were problems of rigidity in labor markets, labor allocation and in labor contracts. ... Behind all these specific rigidities lay a rather unwieldy and seemingly fixed configuration of political power and reciprocal relations that bound big labor, big capital, and big government into what increasingly appeared as a dysfunctional embrace. (Harvey 1989,142) Others have made the equivalence between Fordism and state socialism more explicit, portraying socialism as a kind of Fordism, complete with heavy industry and mass production. Zygmunt Bauman argues that socialism failed because it was too rigid to give up the modernist dream, even when the West had moved on to a more flexible, postmodern economy: The communist state, in its own admittedly unprepossessing way, seemed to serve the same ideals of the modern era which even its capitalist haters readily recognized as their own. In these now uncannily distant times the audacious communist project seemed to make a lot of sense and was taken quite seriously by its friends and foes alike. Communism promised ... to do what everyone else was doing, only... the real doubts appeared when the others stopped doing it, while communism went on chasing now abandoned targets; partly through inertia, but mostly because of the fact that—being communism in action—it could not do anything else. In its practical implementation, communism was a system one-sidedly adapted to the task of mobilizing social and natural resources in the name of modernization—the nineteenth-century, steam-and-iron ideal of modern plenty. It could—at least in its own conviction—compete with capitalists but solely with capitalists engaged in the same pursuits. What it could not do and did not brace itself to do was to match the performance of the capitalist, market-centered-society once that society abandoned its steel mills and coal mines and moved into the postmodern age. (Bauman 1992,169) Of course, making state socialism into a kind of Fordism meant ignoring that, in practice, socialism diverged significantly from the Fordist ideal. The advantage of making Fordism and socialism into equivalents, though, was that it gave economists and managers—Americans as well as Polish "converts"—a set of ready-made tools with which to change the planned economy. At the macroeconomic level, that meant using neoliberal techniques for undoing the Keynesian welfare state to dismantle the socialist welfare state. At the level of the firm, it meant engaging in massive processes of "reengineering," which changed the organization of the firm and the daily practices of its inhabitants. The fad for "reengineering" Fordist companies' internal organizations came from the idea that they were "inefficient in the face of a turbulent environment" and "unable to accommodate the need for rapid and continual 66 Privatizing Poland Niche Marketing and the Production of Flexible Bodies 67 change by virtue of their structure" (Schoenberger 1997, 84). Fordist firms were organized with a central authority—the CEO—who made multiyear plans, aggregated the firm's resources, and then distributed them to subordinate divisions. Each division then disaggregated the budget and the production quota, handing down production targets and money to buy raw materials to their subordinate divisions. This division of labor inside the company made design, manufacturing, and marketing into separate departments with little communication among them, supposedly delayed the pace of innovation, and hampered the firm's ability to respond to the market: The extreme compartmentalization of the information characteristic of an advanced division of labor undermines the organization's ability to recognize and respond to significant disruptions that do not present themselves in the established categories. Often the left hand truly does i not know what the right hand is doing, so tfye organization can end up working at cross-purposes with itself. (Schoenberger 1987, 84) When American managers came to Poland and began to hear about how the central planning system was supposed to work, they immediately found it familiar. Because socialist firms were supposed to work like Fordist firms (although, thanks to shortages, they rarely did), and their formal organizational structures looked like those of Fordist firms (although, because of labor shortages, power was distributed Cjiiite differently inside the company). Thus, American managers saw state-owned enterprises as analogues of the Fordist companies they had been working to transform for more than a decade. At AG, Gerber managers immediately focused on the command-and-control organization of management, which was organized as a pyramid with Maria Czartoryska at the top. John [ones was aghast at the vertically organized bureaucracy in the firm: Maria Czartoryska had this little pad on her desk stamped "REGULATION," and anything she wrote on it was assigned a number and became law in the company, just like that, without consulting with any of the other managers. Although neither of them used terms like lCFordism" both Jones and his colleague John Turnock immediately identified Alima's internal organization as a source of "rigidity" that would keep the firm from responding "flexibly" to market demand. In keeping with post-Fordist management practices used in the United States, they rushed to break down what they saw as the compartmentalization of knowledge in the firm, John Jones was absolutely floored by what he saw as barriers to the free flow of information 68 Privatizing Poland inside the company. "Can you believe the fax, the telephones, and the Xerox machine were all under lock and key when I arrived? "asked Jones. "You had to fill out a form in triplicate just to make a photocopy." Unlocking the Xerox machine took on great symbolism for Jones, who saw it as a way to "empower" employees and to encourage them to communicate with one another across departmental lines.6 Applying post-Fordist remedies to make the firm more flexible didn't stop at unlocking the Xerox or reorganizing the chain of command (al-1 though Gerber did both those things). One of the great innovations of post-\ Fordist management was a set of techniques to make individual workers, not ' just firms, more flexible and adaptable. In the United States, firms sent individual workers through Outward Bound-type programs, to stand on teetering poles and jump off cliffs with only a climbing rope to prevent them from plummeting to the ground. The programs were supposed to instill |^ agility and an appreciation for risk into workers' psyches via their bodies: The bodily experiences of fear and excitement deliberately aroused on the zip line and the pole are meant to serve as models for what workers will feel in unpredictable work situations. (Martin 1994, 213) In Poland, few people rushed out to dangle offbelay ropes. Nonetheless, Poles rushed to incorporate metaphors of flexibility into their physical selves. In the postsocialist atmosphere of intense consumer demand, It is not surprising they chose to redefine themselves as "flexible bodies" by consuming products like Frugo. Products that conferred flexibility did more than create niche consumer markets, however. They contributed to making niche labor markets. Like the American employees who went on Outward Bound courses, many of the Poles who consumed "flexible" products were employees who sought to keep their jobs by exhibiting their "flexible capitalist dispositions" on their bodies and through their presentation of self. In so doing, they were to prove that their labor was a valuable asset to the corporation and that they were inherently suited to positions of power in the new economic order. But the opportunity to become "flexible" and to gain status in the new economic order was not open to everyone. Other groups of people were remade into the embodiment of socialism, which naturalized their increasing powerlessness and impoverishment. From Kierownikin Menadzer: Managing the Self As foreign investment rushed into Poland in the 1990s, white-collar Poles came under enormous pressure to transform themselves and to differentiate Niche Marketing and the Production of Flexible Bodies 69 themselves as a class. Much of this pressure came from the way foreign in vestments were structured. Whether foreign investors were purchasing state-owned enterprises (e.g., using the trade sale method of privatization) or setting up new subsidiaries, most of them came to Eastern Europe with a strategy to transform themselves from foreign to local entities. Although they initially staffed management positions with expatriates, they had strong incentives to train local executives to run the company. This was not only because expatriate managers are costly—a two-year tour of duty can cost more than $1 million—but because rapid turnover in management jobs as expatriates come and go creates unwanted turnover in the firrn( Rather than rotate expatriates through jobs, it made more sense to attempt to transfer knowledge of capitalist business practices to local Eastern European executives (McDonald 1993). Having received this knowledge, Eastern European managers were supposed to diffuse it to other firms, thereby making the economy as a whole more flexible. Gerber employed this strategy from the time it took control of Alima. Gerber wanted personnel from Fremont to retrain existing management at Alima. However, when Alima's managers proved recalcitrant, Gerber fired them and hired new managers who, it hoped, would be more able to adapt and to adopt Western management practices. Gerber was not alone in this strategy. In many other companies whose managers I interviewed, foreign management made decisions about which employees were capable of adapting to new conditions and which were not. On what basis did foreign managers decide who received the all-important knowledge of foreign business practices and who would be fired? Most American managers I interviewed told me that the most important criterion they used was "attitude." Sam Kendall, an American manager for Transco, told me that some experienced managers in the Polish SOE that his firm acquired would soon be fired.7 "These people want an eight-to-five job, but those are the people who won't be joining us," he said. Instead, he planned to evaluate each of the firm's managers, looking for people who "had the ability to adapt and change" and who were "willing to take responsibility." He said that Polish managers who gained experience under socialism "may not have the same attitude toward career advancement" as he would like and therefore "might not have the right attitude." We might summarize the difference between the "right attitude" and the "wrong" one with the distinction between two Polish words for enterprise managers: the Polish word kkrownik, and the newly popular polonization of the English term "manager," menadzer? Kierownik refers to a stereotypical socialist manager, an inflexible paper-pushing bureaucrat. This kind.of 70 Privatizing Poland manager, as American consultant Bob Murphy told me, is always trying to build his own power while escaping responsibility. Kierownicywere also portrayed as relying too much on personal or social ties with employees in order to manage them. Because the kierownicy are supposedly enmeshed in these ties, they are said to be ineffective. In the words of another American manager, "They can't swing the ax." In contrast, people used the term menadzer to refer to the stereotype of a manager who is highly flexible and eager to change. He might not have much experience. In fact, inexperience is an asset rather than a liability, since he is therefore autonomous and not enmeshed in messy social ties with ministries and workers.9 However, he has the inner qualities that allow him to learn new managerial techniques, to apply them rationally and impersonally, and therefore to succeed. These qualities would get him a job in privatizing companies. As an article in the Harvard Business Review put it, In seeking [Eastern European] general managers, Western partners look for self-confidence, initiative, and sophistication as well as work experience. They pay attention to their own first impressions and instinctive likes and dislikes. . .. They tease out underlying beliefs about business ethics, profits, labor relations and political institutions. (Lawrence and Vlachoutsicos 1993, 49) To attract the attention of a Western manager, land a managerial j ob, and gain access to Western business knowledge, Polish managers had to demonstrate the right personality characteristics: attitude, beliefs, flexibility, receptivity, and initiative. But how did they go about demonstrating these very personal, "inner" characteristics? Unlike their Western counterparts, Polish managers could not rely heavily on resumes listing their past achievements. For many Poles, job histories and track records were of little value because of their ties to the socialist past.10 Instead, they had to rely on the idea that the outer self signals changes in the inner self. They used changes in dress, personal possessions, and personal space to display their supposed transformations from a socialist being—a kierownik—to a capitalist being—a menadzer. By signaling this inner transformation from socialism, managers hoped to demonstrate that they had the "right attitude" and were ready and willing to learn new Western management ideas. A look at some of the glossy Polish-language business magazines showed that Polish businessmen saw this recreation of self—of both the interior, knowing self atndrthe exterior facade—as a crucial part of doing business. The first half of the July W93 issue of Businessman magazine, for example, had articles on Interpreting economic indicators, buying computers for a Niche Marketing and the Production of Flexible Bodies 71 more efficient office, and motivating employees. In the second half of the magazine, however, were articles seemingly not about business: an article on the history and rules of tennis, a piece on how to buy and drink fine port wine, and a photo essay on the new men's fashions from Milan. The magazines presumed little prior familiarity with either business or tennis or port. But what was interesting about them was not just their primer-like quality but their emphasis on acquiring knowledge about Western business culture, including leisure habits, dress, and consumption practices, as a means to 1' : self-transformation. Like a Western business journal, the magazines showed the equation between knowledge, power, and money. Like a Western women's magazine, however, they stressed changing one's inner and outer being to become pleasing to another. These magazines were how-to guides for Poles who wished to acquire the selves that they imagine Western executives possess by acquiring the habitus of the Western businessman.11 I saw one striking example of this one Saturday night in Warsaw in r993, at a restaurant across from the new IKEA and the second Warsaw McDonald's. Billed as "an American restaurant," the Falcon Inn offered high prices, foods fried in no-cholesterol vegetable oil, and tall blond waitresses in t-shirts and short, cut-off jeans. It was rumored to be where the American businessmen went to eat. But on the Saturday night I was there, no American businessmen were to be seen. It was about eleven-thirty at night, certainly outside of regular business hours. As I sat on the sidewalk terrace, waiting for my drink, a group of Polish men arrived. They seated themselves at a cafe' table. Then each one bent over, rummaged in his briefcase, and to ok out a cellular telephone. Carefully—almost reverently—each man placed his phone upright against the umbrella pole in the center of the table, so that the phones made a circle. None of the phones rang while the men were at the table, and none of the men made any calls. The point of having the cell phones went far beyond making calls. By adopting the dress, leisure habits, and consumption practices of Western businessmen, Polish managers signal their desire for membership inthe imagined community of fee transnational market economy. The men at the Falcon Inn carried their cellular phones at midnight on a Saturday night because cell phones have potent symbolic value: they represent membership in a network of people who are important enough that they must be able to be reached at any time. Because the cellular networks bypass the antiquated and often impossible-to-use Polish telephone system, they also represent membership in a community that transcends both national borders and the national infrastructure. The men at the Falcon Inn wished to signal that they were new, modern, and European. They attempted to show that they pos- 72 Privatizing Poland sessed advanced technology and instantaneous links to the rest of the world, that they were ready to do business in a capitalist economy. In many ways, they and their cell phones symbolized the same thing as the Frugo advertisements: an existence without borders and without limits, based on instant adaptability and moved by continuous change. One of the top-level managers at AG was a negative example of the same phenomenon. He was one of the only executives at AG who had neither lived abroad nor had much previous experience with foreign firms. He was a painful example of the importance of symbolism in becoming a menadzer. He struggled mightily to acquire all the prestige goods (a Ford Taurus, two cellular telephones, imported skis, a Franklin Planner, and so on) that would legitimize his fragile status. Yet his lack of knowledge often tripped him up. His symbolic errors, like hiring a stripper to entertain at the company party, wearing striped ties with checked jackets, and making off-color remarks, were the subject of endless gossip. He often appeared ignorant or uncouth, and he knew it. Finally, he hired an elegant assistant who had lived in New York. A large part of her job was managing his personal appearance and arranging for him to acquire the necessary prestige goods. Regardless of how much this man knew about industrial management, he had to "manage" his own social personhood as well, and he knew his rise to the top was blocked by his ignorance of these matters. The experiences of the cellular-phone-toting, Ford-driving Polish middle manager might be dismissed as simple cultural imperialism. There is nothing particularly unique about an influx of American (or French or German) cultural, commercial, and technological forms following American (or French or German) corporations abroad. Nor is it unique for foreign business and governmental organizations to create a local elite partly assimilated to foreign culture. But it appears that in this case, more was at work than simple cultural imperialism. When Polish managers acquired the habitus of the Western businessman, thereby making the leap from kierow-nik to menadzer, they literally embodied the idea of the transition from socialism to capitalism. The way magazines and my corporate informants portrayed kierownicy and menadzerowie illuminates the manner in which Poles, Western Europeans, and North Americans conceived of what socialism was and what capitalism would be. Just as in Frugo advertisements, images of flexible, dynamic capitalist people were juxtaposed with caricatures of people from the socialist era in order to highlight the novelty and implied superiority of the new system. The transition bomjdesmmkjomenodieris an important aspect of the privatization of persons. In turn, this aspect is a critical element in the trans-Niche Marketing and the Production of Flexible Bodies 73 formation of the socialist economy into a capitalist one, because it promotes an ideology of individualism. The corporate managers I spoke with labeled kierownicy inflexible because they see kierownicy as tied down by extensive \ personalized social relations with both subordinates and superiors. This fits well with their critique of socialism, which they also see as inflexible and in- / efficient (Wedel 1986; Kornai 1992; Bauman 1992). The kierownikbecomes 'an icon of this entire system and its problems: he represents both the person to blame for socialism and the person shaped by it. The menadzer, as an ideal image from the pages of Businessman magazine, represents the other side of the coin. He is supposed to be flexible precisely because he has no experiences of socialism and was not shaped by that system. He represents a free-floating and autonomous person who can shape and reshape himself. In the view of both the foreign and Polish managers I interviewed, the menadzer is the representation of the system to come: a system in which the impersonal logic of the market rather than personal ties dictates the rational and efficient allocation of goods. The transition from kierownik to menadzer represents not just a transition from socialism to capitalism but also a transition from an orderly, bounded, and rigid system to a fluid, flexible, and global one. The foreign managers' conflation of socialism and Fordism, on the one hand, and post-socialism and flexible accumulation, on the other, determined the kind of managers they sought to hire or retain. Polish managers were therefore forced to demonstrate certain attributes. This was certainly the case at AG, where the managers Gerber hired were almost all Enghsh-speaking Poles highly familiar with the world of international business. In essence, then, a particular niche within the labor market was quickly built in the years after 1989. There was a labor surplus in the Polish economy, but the kinds of managerial jobs that required a symbolic presentation of self as a menadzer-were initially quite hard to fill. As the economic transformation continued, more and more Poles became trained and qualified for these jobs. By 1995, the only jobs that were hard to fill were in specialties like finance and strategic planning. Marketing, sales, and human resource management—three disciplines that did not exist under socialism—were all suddenly booming job markets.12 Although they don't say so explicitly, executives who aspire to become menadzerowie are pursuing essentially the same strategy that Frugo marketers did:^hey_seek toJ^jugenj^he market by associating "cajTJtalisf^or "post-Fordist" valuesjalluhciipriMlucK Private or privatizing companies become their market niche, as they caricature "socialist" persons in order to show the distinction between the lifestyle they wish to have associated with 74 Privatizing Poland their products and the habits and values of the past. The difference between menadzerowie and Frugo marketers, of course, is that the product the menadzerowie market is themselves. Because their experience is of little value (unless it was acquired outside Poland), the quality of their labor can only be specified in reference to their internal qualities. To commodity their labor and to portray themselves as desirable assets, they must learn to manipulate images and to change their own habitus (cf. Schoenberger 1998). Slick Salesmen and Simple People The new breed of manager could contrast himself to a stereotype of an old-style kierownik in order to show his rejection of sociahsm and to appropriate the qualities of flexible capitalism. He could do that precisely because there were managers before 1989, ready-made "others" against whom he could define himself. People in occupations that did not exist under socialism were not the same type of "other" and therefore had to seek to define themselves and their niche in the labor market. This was particularly true for sales representatives, who worked in a department that did not exist before 1993. Like managers, they gained value by associating themselves and their labor with flexible capitalism. To highlight their flexibility (and all the related qualities of flexible capitalism), they had to constitute an "other" against which to contrast themselves. At AG, the "other" opposed to the sales force was the workforce in the production halls. This opposition between sales representatives and shop floor workers was constantly repeated throughout the plant, even though the sales representatives were rarely there and the two groups almost never met. The redefinition and division of groups within the firm began from the moment sales representatives were hired. Sales representatives were believed to have special qualities that made them different from other employees (especially shop floor workers) and similar to the product they sold: they were supposedly dynamic, agile, and assertive. These qualities were also supposed to make them fit for a new department and a new kind of firm. I saw how this "sales representative" identity was created when I sat in on a full day of job interviews for a vacancy in Lublin. All of the nine candidates for the position were men and, with one exception, all under thirty years of age. The interviewing team, which included the district manager and the director of sales, was led by Iwona, a psychologist in her late twenties who worked as the firm's recruitment specialist.13 Iwona began by asking the candidates what they were looking for in a job and what they imagined a day's work might be like. Without exception, all Niche Marketing and the Production of Flexible Bodies 75 /^K' ,/ .■ > - ' \ n nine candidates responded that they wanted to be sales representatives be- ^ > cause they liked "ruck," movement or circulation, and abhorred the idea of -s sitting behind a desk. Then, Iwona asked them about their job experience. J Most of them had already been in four or five jobs, even though they had 1 only been out of university for four or five years. Short job tenure didn't bother Iwona, however. She told me later that people typically worked six months here and five months there, and she really never expected sales representatives to stay long, anyway. Keeping the one hundred sales-rep jobs ; filled was a full-time job for her. After the last candidate left, the four of us 1 discussed, analyzed, and compared the job seekers. Iwona was partial to a man she called "the rugby player." In her opinion, his athleticism made him ^ a desirable candidate, since he had the strength, aggression, and dynamism needed in a sales representative. She dismissed another candidate because he was too quiet and still; she said he was "hiding something." The interview process was designed to allow Iwona to make these kinds of judgments about the personality and predisposition of the candidates. According to her, experience in this type of work was less important than predisposition. "You can train someone to sell," she said, "but you can't train them to have more energy, to move faster, or to be extroverted." The key theme in all of these discussions was movement. Movement, rather than beingasignof instability, failure, or flight iness, was seen as bold ■<. and innovative. Most important, the images in our conversation after the job interview transformed the idea of movement from an activitymto a personality trait. TJies^erjualities o£moy^^^trrMr@g^Ji]^.[s^mbe- * liev^w^.ejiesir.aHeJ,n_an economic system (flexibility, circulation, change) became-aspe^te-of-people^s personalities: TheTnterview- procesEwaFcle-signe