"Being Accountable Through Customer-Based Evaluations: Sensemaking, Power and Identity at Work"

This paper aims at gaining a better understanding of the new phenomenon of ‘customer-based evaluations’, that is, the system through which suppliers of a good or service are constantly and openly judged by those who buy this good or service and monitored by the actor who designed the system. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted at eBay, we investigate how ‘business sellers’ react to the continuous flow of evaluations and power relationships that the evaluation system implies. We find that customer-based evaluations tend to damage sellers’ capacity to act and trigger discrepancies between their identity at work and the image of themselves that evaluations convey. We show that sellers engage in sensemaking processes (making sense of evaluations and power relationships) which enable them to pursue their activity, and in building a sense of coherence with their identity at work through identity work. Our findings highlight the diversity of reactions that enable individuals to continue their activity and defend their sense of who they are despite constant assaults coming from the imposed evaluation system.