What We Leave on the Windowsill

Written by Marie Brand, PhD Candidate at WU Vienna

A study at the museum

Picture this: mid-December 2016. Trump's first presidency, no ChatGPT, and a global pandemic still the stuff of dystopian fiction. In full Christmas spirit, you are visiting the Museum of Applied Arts for the exhibition about “handiCRAFT Traditional Skills in the Digital Age”. Inbetween historical objects featuring traditional skills, you notice a table where people are folding paper angels. You sit down, and under the quiet guidance of Ulrike Kaiser (Uli), Associate Professor at WU Vienna, you carefully craft your angel and proudly sign your name. Only afterwards do you learn you participated in a research study, one conceived specifically for this occasion.

Some weeks earlier, the Museum of Applied Arts had approached the WU research team, asking if they wanted to contribute to the exhibition. Not one to turn down an opportunity for a museum exhibit, they picked up a thread from a previous project exploring how consumers react when workers sign their products. This time around, participants stepped into the shoes of the worker. Some were asked to sign their angels. Some were not. The question: would signing make them care more, and would that show in the quality of what they made?

It did matter and this was the first step toward what would become their paper a decade later: “Signatures and de-objectification: How asking individual producers to sign their work increases work performance and work satisfaction”. What stayed with Uli was something hard to measure. Museum goers wanted to talk – about the hypotheses, the findings, the logic behind it all. Things that aren't obvious to people outside academia. It was, she reflects, a moment of genuine exchange when both the research and the researchers behind it were visible. Seeing and being seen — both the participants, and the researchers.

Sight unseen

Making a paper angel or a sheep drawing (another study module where participants were asked to draw a sheep) might sound like a charming afternoon activity, but behind this task lies a question that shapes entire industries. In gig economies, think hotel cleaning staff, MTurk workers, Fiverr freelancers, people perform flexible, on-demand work. Firm often rely on these workers to provide cheap labor but with little fuss about benefits, job satisfaction or appreciation. Visibility is not part of the deal; anonymity is. Workers are a pair of hands, a unit of output, an interchangeable cog in a machine that turns whether anyone notices or not.

But being seen shifts something. Not for the consumer but for the producer.

A signature, when visible to the end consumer, does something deceptively simple: it puts a person where before there was only a worker ID number. Uli and her co-authors call this deobjectification. Where there was invisibility, suddenly there is acknowledgment. Where there was drudgery, pride. Where there was frustration, satisfaction. And it shows. Independent raters rated products made by workers who signed their work as higher quality than their unsigned counterparts.

Academics know this dynamic intimately, even if we rarely name it. We sign everything. Our name is on the paper, front and center. We are not invisible, but we are not always seen either. Rejections pile up. Studies get killed in review. Years of work disappear into a desk drawer. What would it mean to take away the possibility of being seen for what you made?

Heavy lifting

The museum angels never made it into the final paper. They now live on Uli's windowsill instead, folded and faded. This is the reality of heavy lifting research, the kind that gets done in the field rather than through surveys on Qualtrics.

For another study, Uli wanted to look at workers in a pizza restaurant, asking cooks to sign the food they produced. Big restaurants were hard to recruit, so they tried it with small businesses. They are usually easier to enlist in research, but only three cooks meant data would be insufficient to draw meaningful conclusions. The study was never run, since the project ultimately focused on gig work and microjobs.

Such research adventures are painful because good ideas should survive the journey from field to published page. Often, they do not.

"I'm still excited about these heavy lifting studies, even though it hurts a lot if they get killed in the review process. They are fun, but often I also find them more trustworthy. And you get to interact a lot more with your participants, which can be rewarding in itself."

- Uli Kaiser

For Uli, trustworthiness is worth the downstream risk. When you ask someone to make something — fold an angel, draw a sheep, sign a pizza — you move closer to the phenomenon you are trying to understand.

Walking the tightrope

The road to publication was a long one. After years of drawings of sheep and snow globes, pizza restaurants and binned studies, the empirical work was finally in place, but the review journey brought a different kind of challenge. The effect itself had been clear from the start. What proved harder to settle was where it belonged.

Across several rounds of revision, editors and reviewers kept pushing for more: more studies, more industries, more task types beyond the creative. A natural instinct, perhaps, but it created its own tension. Too narrow a focus and the contribution feels modest. Cast the net too wide, and the empirical ground gets shaky. This is the tightrope that many papers need to walk.

On top of this, a more pointed question kept emerging: why is this marketing? It's a challenge a surprising number of submissions to the IJRM face.

"We wanted to speak to a marketing audience — get exposure to that audience. We still think it's a marketing topic. It's expanding the definition of marketing a bit, blurred lines between consumers and producers."

- Uli Kaiser

In the end, IJRM's ask was to focus not expand — focus on gig workers, a clean contribution, a sturdy theoretical frame. It was the right call. The angels have been nearly a decade on the windowsill now. Getting the work out into the world took almost as long — but like the angels, it found its place in the end.

Read the paper

Interested in reading all the details about how narcissism prevents self-indulgence? Read the full paper here.

Want to cite the paper?

Ulrike Kaiser, Benedikt Schnurr, Christoph Fuchs, Martin Schreier & Stijn M.J. van Osselaer, (2025). “Signatures, de-objectification, and work-related outcomes: How asking individual producers to sign their work can lead to a Win-Win-Win”, International Journal of Research in Marketing.

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Meet Uli Kaiser

What do you like to do to decompress?

I like cooking. My go-to dish is Käsknöpfle, a sort of dumpling with cheese. It does need a specific cheese for it to work, so that’s sometimes a bit difficult to get here in Vienna. But I like making something by hand after the workweek of mainly cognitive work. It allows me to go slow and de-stress.  

What would you do if you were not in academia?

Along a similar line, I would probably be a chef in my own restaurant. I would not make my staff sign the food they make though, since in that life I would not read any marketing journals. But honestly, the grass is always greener on the other side. Sure, there are positive aspects of a career as a cook, but academia also has its upsides.

Who would you invite to a dinner party?

Oh, I would want to make it a mosaic of interesting women, like Patti Smith and Michele Obama.  What are the lessons they learned when looking back on their life, that would be fascinating to listen to.

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This article was written by

Marie Brand

Ph.D. candidate at the WU, Vienna