A book which shows how online influencers struggle to carefully manufacture and stage their image while at the same time appearing authentic, has won a prestigious award.

Influencer Creep: How Optimization, Authenticity, and Self-Branding Transform Creative Culture, by Dr Sophie Bishop, says this imperative results in a sense of precarity and nervousness for the creative worker.

Dr Bishop, of the University of Leeds, was awarded the Philip Abrams Memorial Prize for what the judges called an “elegantly written and thoroughly researched book” at the British Sociological Association’s annual conference in Manchester yesterday [April 9].

The prize, worth £1,000, is given each year by the BSA to the first and sole-authored book within the discipline of sociology. It was established in honour of the memory of Professor Abrams, whose work contributed substantially to sociology and social policy research in Britain.

The judges said that the book was a “profoundly original study that captures emerging new patterns of work and the personification of an online presence as part of their economic value and worth. A big part of an influencer’s work is relentless self-branding, intimacy and cultivating a platform-ready persona.

“Influencers must optimise their content to be favoured by the mysterious, invisible algorithms that determine whether their followers rise or fall, leading to economic success or failure.

“This image and presentation of self are carefully manufactured and staged, but to succeed, they must also be perceived as authentic. The author shows how this imperative also leads to complex forms of exclusion along the lines of class, race and sexuality.

“The book also explores how some creative workers resist influencer creep despite the algorithmic forces that insatiably drive influencers to reveal more of themselves. This tangle of manufactured artifice and authenticity results in a sense of precarity and nervousness for the creative worker.”

The judges – BSA President, Professor Les Back, and Trustees Professor Vanessa May and Dr Shoba Arun – were also impressed by the “elegance” of Influencer Creep’s readable prose, saying it was “a work of sociology that is a real page turner, like a novel.” The book is published by the University of California Press.

The runners-up were Migrants in the Digital Periphery: New Urban Frontiers of Control, by Dr Matthew Mahoudi, of the University of Cambridge, and The Personal Life of Debt: Coercion, Subjectivity and Inequality in Britain, by Dr Ryan Davey, of Cardiff University.

The judges said that Migrants in the Digital Periphery “tackles the timely topic of the digitalisation of border management. It traces the colonial roots of practices of categorisation and containment that are taking new forms as tech giants partner with governments to digitise migration governance. Ambitious in theoretical scope, the book draws on the empirical fieldwork to reveal broader trends in migration governance, notably the racialisation of mobile populations.”

They said The Personal Life of Debt was a “compelling ethnography of the personal life of debt which examines living with debt as social practice. Based on extended fieldwork on a housing estate between 2012 and 2019, it shows the working class experiences of debt, resistance and regulation. The book powerfully foregrounds how central debt is in our time, offering an original and rigorous analysis of the personal experience and consequences of indebtedness.”