Iterative Self-Branding: Chinese Language Teachers’ Understanding and Rationalization of Working on Online Tutoring Platforms

Online tutoring platforms (OTPs) are an increasingly popular way for learners to study languages and for teachers to earn money. On many OTPs, individual teachers are responsible for attracting potential students via self-branding. While scholarship has examined OTP teachers’ self-branding practices and identified some of the most popular self-branding strategies, little scholarship has examined whether teachers are aware of their incorporation of self-branding strategies or explored why teachers choose to adopt particular strategies rather than others. Drawing on scholarship on neoliberalism and self-branding, this article examines how Chinese language teachers make sense of, and rationalize, their own self-branding strategies. The data analyzed include the online profiles of, and interviews with, 17 Chinese language tutors from mainland China working on a popular OTP. The findings indicate that although all the teachers share an awareness of the critical importance of self-branding to their success as online tutors, they differ drastically in how they enact self-branding. Specifically, some teachers seek to enact a professional image, while others instead try to self-brand themselves as casual and friendly. We argue that the teachers’ narratives about their self-branding reflect an internalization of neoliberalism and an embrace of what we call iterative self-branding: an approach to self-branding whereby individuals repeatedly update their public-facing profiles in response to the uncertainty and competition inherent to OTPs and other forms of online labor.