The man­ager in his or her suit has become an arche­type in pro­fes­sional life around the globe. Even at inter­na­tional meet­ings, where people of vari­ous cul­tures gather, man­agers all wear the same type of cloth­ing, only dis­play­ing minor vari­ations in style and colour.

Busi­ness suits have of course no prac­tical pur­pose, but rather con­vey social mean­ing. The suit has become a sym­bol of power, a means to demarc­ate the white from the blue col­lars. Using clothes and other objects to com­mu­nic­ate mean­ing to other people is a nat­ural aspect of being human. An immut­able law of mar­ket­ing is that we don’t buy stuff for what it does, but for what it means.

Early in my career I was work­ing on a dredging site in Bangladesh, wear­ing my comfy heavy metal t-shirt and jeans. I was unex­pec­tedly asked to present to head office exec­ut­ives vis­it­ing from the Neth­er­lands. Bliss­fully unaware of my lack of appro­pri­ate attire and ignor­ing their vis­ible scep­ti­cism towards my expert­ise I was able to con­vince them of my recommendation.

It is of course not a secret that the rela­tion­ship between the clothes we wear and our actual abil­ity to be a good man­ager is not a neces­sary one. Soci­olo­gists Erving Goff­man, who ana­lysed human inter­ac­tion from a the­at­rical per­spect­ive, wrote more than half a cen­tury ago:

“People hold­ing cor­por­ate pos­i­tions are blind­ing them­selves and oth­ers to the fact that they hold their jobs partly because they look like exec­ut­ives, not because they can work like exec­ut­ives”^1.

In the field of con­sumer beha­viour, the clothes we buy are often seen as the res­ult of our life­style, demo­graph­ics and other vari­ables. Soci­olo­gists, how­ever, have a reverse logic and see the clothes we wear as the cause of beha­viour. Research has con­firmed that we use objects such as cloth­ing to com­pensate for actual abil­ity to act in a cer­tain role.

It has been found that MBA stu­dents less likely to be suc­cess­ful in pro­fes­sional life (based on grade aver­ages) are more likely to look the part.^2.

With this in mind it is inter­est­ing to note that quite often the smartest people are por­trayed in movies as eccent­ric, devi­at­ing from the expect­a­tions, but accep­ted because of their abilities.

Cloth­ing as a means to com­mu­nic­ate actual and aspired social status is part of what makes us human and after my exper­i­ence I quickly learnt to adept to the expect­a­tions of pro­fes­sional life. The best way to end this post is with the words of the bard:

“All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely play­ers; They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts …” (As You Like it).

1. Erving Goff­man (1959) The present­a­tion of self in every­day life, Pen­guin, Lon­don. [↩]
2. Solomon, Michael R.: The Role of Products as Social Stim­uli: A Sym­bolic Inter­ac­tion­ism Per­spect­ive, The Journal of Con­sumer Research 10(3), volume 10, 319–329, 1983. [↩]