The other day, while travelling, I found myself staring at the lanyard hanging from the neck of a fellow passenger. Not in a threatening way, you understand. More in the way bored people develop an unhealthy fascination with things that have absolutely nothing to do with them. I squinted to see the logo. Who did they work for? Or perhaps more accurately, who owned them?
There is, of course, a practical reason for lanyards. It is far easier to wave a plastic rectangle at a security gate than to rummage through bags, pockets and yesterday’s shopping receipts every time a barrier demands proof that you are one of the chosen few. A lanyard is convenience hanging around your neck. But it is also something else. It is a statement. A declaration. A wearable certificate that says: I belong somewhere. Somebody knows who I am.
That thought sent me spiralling back to my policing days. My warrant card was the closest thing we had to a corporate lanyard, although thankfully it remained tucked away most of the time. It emerged primarily when I worked in plain clothes, which was rare. Not because I was some undercover maestro. More because I possessed all the sartorial subtlety of a traffic cone.
I never had any fashion sense and always looked “copper-ish”, according to one persistent offender whom I’d nicked more times than either of us could comfortably remember. The warrant card also appeared whenever I was cadging free travel. A perk that felt delightfully rebellious despite being entirely legitimate (I think).
Yet the greatest moment of organisational validation came not from the warrant card. It came when I was issued with a pager. A fucking pager!
For younger readers, a pager was a small electronic device that essentially announced to the world that somebody, somewhere, might need you at a moment’s notice.
I nearly climaxed. God, how important was I? Here was tangible evidence that I mattered. That decisions could not proceed without my glorious input. That civilisation itself might wobble off its axis were I unavailable for three hours. The reality, of course, was somewhat different. I wasn’t important. I was available. Always available.
Big Brother may not have been watching me then, but he certainly had speed dial directly to my waist and, if we’re being honest, owned my ass.
This reflection, and my recent lanyard spotting, got me thinking. Are we owned? More importantly, do we actually want to be owned? Or is something rather more sinister going on? Time to pull on the research hiking boots.
The science of belonging
The first thing the academics tell us is that belonging is not a weakness. It is hardwired into us.
Psychologists Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary famously argued that human beings possess a fundamental “need to belong“. They concluded that forming stable social connections is one of our most basic motivations, sitting alongside many other essential human drives.
In simple terms, we want to be part of something. A family. A football club. A police force. A company with a logo large enough to be seen from space. The lanyard, therefore, may not simply identify us to others. It reassures us that we have a tribe.
That perhaps explains why so many people proudly wear company-branded fleeces in public despite looking like contestants in a regional heating engineer convention.
When identity becomes ownership
The story becomes more complicated when researchers look at “organisational identification“.
Studies drawing on Social Identity Theory suggest that people often absorb their organisation into their sense of self. Employees who strongly identify with their employer frequently report higher wellbeing, trust and engagement. In other words, being part of a group feels good. It gives us purpose. It helps answer the unsettling question: “Who am I?”
The danger is that we can begin confusing who we work for with who we are. If your job disappears, gets restructured, outsourced or renamed after an expensive consultancy workshop, what remains? The answer should be “quite a lot”. Sadly, many organisations encourage us to think otherwise.
The ghost of Big Brother
Then there is the darker side.
Michel Foucault’s famous analysis of surveillance suggested that people behave differently when they think they might be watched. Over time, individuals begin policing themselves. The observer no longer needs to stand over them because the monitoring has been internalised.
Sound familiar?
Security passes. Swipe cards. Productivity dashboards. Online status indicators. The little green dot announcing your existence to colleagues. Perhaps the modern lanyard is not merely a badge of belonging. Perhaps it is a tiny wearable reminder that someone, somewhere, is counting. Not necessarily in a sinister Orwellian sense. But probably.
Do we want to be owned?
The answer appears to be both yes and no.
We crave belonging because humans are social creatures. The evidence suggests we genuinely flourish when we feel connected to groups larger than ourselves. But belonging is not the same as ownership.
Belonging says: “You are one of us.” Ownership says: “You are ours.” The difference is subtle but important. One is community. The other is a receipt. Perhaps that is why I found myself staring at that traveller’s lanyard. Not because I cared who employed them, but because the little strip of fabric represented something profoundly human.
Our desire to matter. To belong. To be recognised. To have a place in the great organisational flowchart of life.
Just so long as we remember that when the lanyard comes off, we’re still somebody.
As George Orwell wrote in 1984:
“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
The trick, perhaps, is to wear the lanyard without ever forgetting who gets to do the counting.
© Ian Kirke 2026
@ iankirke.bsky.social
Title Photograph by Logistic Hookah on Unsplash