LinkedIn has become inescapable. With over 800 million users, the platform has moved well beyond its origins as a recruitment tool to become a space where professional worth is performed, measured and publicly displayed. We are all familiar with the genre: the humble post about a career milestone, the team photo with a heartfelt caption, the carefully worded reflection on ‘lessons learned’. The style is so recognisable that ‘LinkedIn’ has become a shorthand for a particular brand of performative professionalism that even football managers are now mocked for embodying. But behind the parodies lies something worth taking seriously. Over the past decade, a growing industry of career coaches, recruitment consultants and personal branding experts has converged on a single injunction: your professional self must be cultivated, displayed and continuously optimised. What is less often acknowledged is what this injunction entails: that employees are increasingly being asked to treat themselves as assets.
Assetisation – the process through which things are transformed into assets capable of generating future returns – has gained traction in political economy as a concept describing new modes of capital accumulation, described as the supply-side mechanism of financialisation. Research has shown how this logic reshapes domains as diverse as land, data and natural resources, but the assetisation of workers themselves – not just their labour, but their identities, their visibility and their reputational capital – has yet to be fully examined.
Selling yourself: How LinkedIn turns professionals’ online selves into assets
Across a growing number of firms, employees’ LinkedIn profiles are no longer treated as private matters. Employees are provided with corporate banners and professional headshots taken at the office, given ‘best practices’ for writing their headlines and job descriptions, included in internal communication channels where they are regularly invited to like and share their company’s and managers’ posts, and in some cases formally trained to use the platform. The message is consistent: your online presence is a professional responsibility. What emerges from these practices is a process of assetisation applied to the self, where the employee’s online persona is gradually reframed as an asset expected to generate value for both the company and the employee.
This process works, first, through the instrumentalisation of the professional online self. LinkedIn profiles are recast as technical artefacts to be optimised for algorithmic performance. Employees learn to treat their profiles not as reflections of who they are, but as instruments designed to maximise discoverability and reach. Keywords are inserted strategically into job descriptions, skills are endorsed for their effect on rankings rather than as genuine attestations of competence, and network connections are expanded not for relational value but for algorithmic amplification. The profile ceases to function as a form of self-expression and becomes a piece of infrastructure to be engineered – a first, necessary condition for its transformation into an asset.
It works, second, through what might be called organisational capture. Once profiles have been instrumentalised, they are aligned with the employing organisation’s brand. Employees are encouraged to adopt corporate banners, reference the company prominently in their headlines and post content that makes the organisation visible to their networks. When dozens of employees display the same visual identity, each individual profile operates as a node in a distributed corporate communication network. The firm extracts reputational rent from employees’ personal digital spaces without formally owning them. Employees become, in effect, unpaid brand ambassadors.
What holds these two mechanisms together is a promissory logic of self-investment. Employees are not simply instructed to comply; they are invited to understand these practices as investments in their own professional future. A well-optimised profile, the reasoning goes, will pay off in professional exposure, peer recognition and new career prospects. Posting regularly is thus framed as self-enhancement rather than as labour performed for the organisation. This promissory framing is what distinguishes assetisation from more conventional forms of managerial prescription. It echoes what Foucault described as a form of power that works not by imposing rules from above but by shaping how individuals govern themselves.
Scholars of financialisation have observed a similar dynamic: when employees come to see themselves as investors in their own human capital, organisational discipline no longer needs to be enforced – it is embraced. On LinkedIn, employees who cultivate their online presence are simultaneously building what they perceive as their own asset and feeding the organisation’s reputational apparatus. The power of assetisation lies in this double bind: self-discipline appears as self-interest, and compliance becomes indistinguishable from personal investment.
Crucially, the digital architecture of LinkedIn reinforces this process through durability. Unlike face-to-face performances of professionalism, the artefacts placed on employees’ profiles, such as corporate banners, standardised photographs or sycophantic posts, persist independently of their ongoing actions. Even when employees stop posting, their curated profiles continue to circulate unchanged, projecting the company-approved version of the employee well beyond the moment of active engagement. Every ordinary interaction on the platform, a like, a comment, a shared article, automatically reactivates this curated identity, as the platform attaches the user’s corporate affiliation and curated profile to every interaction. The platform ensures that the asset-like quality of the online self is maintained with every click, regardless of intention.
Implications for the future of work
This creates two implications for the future of work. First, assetisation extends value extraction beyond labour into the self. When organisations encourage employees to optimise their LinkedIn presence, what is being put to work is no longer just their skills or their time – it is their image, their identity, their personal networks and reputation. These are dimensions of the self that have traditionally sat outside the employment relationship, yet they are now enrolled as sources of organisational rent. The employee who displays a corporate banner, posts about a team event or endorses a colleague’s skills is generating reputational value for the firm through aspects of themselves that no contract formally governs. If the scope of what organisations can extract value from now extends to who workers are and how they appear, then assetisation does not merely reshape workplace discipline – it redefines what counts as a productive contribution in the first place.
Second, assetisation expands the reach of legitimate organisational surveillance.
Once employees’ online selves are treated as assets, the organisation acquires what appears to be a natural interest in monitoring and managing them. LinkedIn training programmes make this dynamic visible: trainers track who has adopted a corporate banner, who posts regularly, who has completed the weekly challenge. But because this monitoring is couched in the vocabulary of personal development and career strategy, it does not register as surveillance. Employees who disengage are not disciplined in any formal sense; they are simply reminded that they are neglecting an investment in themselves. The disciplinary gaze is reframed as care, and resistance becomes legible only as self-neglect.
The LinkedIn case is just one entry point, but it reveals the logic with particular clarity: organisations now seek to capitalise on who their employees are, how they appear and the networks they inhabit, moving beyond the mere exploitation of their workforce. What we are witnessing is an extension of the domain of value extraction from what workers do, to who they are. Next time you are told to ‘invest in your personal brand’, it may be worth asking: whose portfolio are you really building?
Paul Richard is a PhD candidate at Université Paris Dauphine – PSL. His research examines how employees construct, rewrite and negotiate their digital identities through social media, and how these practices intersect with organisational control and the assetisation of the self.
Image credit: Zulfugar Karimov via Unsplash