When large organizations encounter fewer competitive spurs toward efficiency, competition among their employees for promotions and career advancement tends to likewise drift toward being image-based. This can leave people with more traditional performance-based values and standards feeling frustrated and disoriented.

Moreover, as the drive toward corporate gigantism and “consolidation” leaves fewer and fewer business entities standing, more and more people are ultimately forced by job considerations to relocate away from the family, friends, and communities that once gave them a sense of identity, grounding, and self-worth.  

The need to continually establish and re-establish ourselves among strangers tends to make us all more concerned with the sort of image we ourselves project—which in turn creates an additional incentive to buy goods based on the image they project, and thus feeds back into the cycle.