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Contributed to Economist on the Internship Economy
I contributed to the article “Generation i” in the Economist Magazine:
“For universities it’s really cheap money,” says Gina Neff, a professor of communication at the University of Washington. “They are getting tuition dollars and not having to spend instructional dollars.” Some internships are valuable, she says, citing one she oversees in which students work on local newspapers with support from teachers. But some are not: she vetoed a Hollywood PR-internship after it turned out to be little more than an unpaid job promoting films on campus. Some universities might have pocketed the fees and looked the other way.
Book Review: Venture Labor in Contemporary Sociology
Thank you Michael Indergaard for the scholarly review of Venture Labor in Contemporary Sociology.
What advice do you give to young folks about jobs? I could tell them I made some investments in my employability, but it is equally true that I mostly muddled through the uncertain career paths of our times. In Frank Knight’s classic formulation, efforts to manage “uncertainty” turn it into “risk.” This idea is the starting point for Venture Labor, Gina Neff’s rich study of New York internet workers who embraced risk during the dot-com boom. This internet cluster, known as Silicon Alley, became the site of new forms of media and work. Neff seeks lessons from this first wave of digital start-ups even as a new wave tries to capitalize on social media, big data and the like. She wants to understand why such workers came to accept the idea that they are individually responsible for managing employment uncertainties. She offers a synthetic account of agency that contributes to debates about the role of calculation in economic action—a position usually in tension with established claims about action’s structurally-embedded or culturally-constituted nature.
Read more in Contemporary Sociology:
Cornell: Information at Work – Heuristics for Failing Technologies
Dr. Gina Neff gives a Colloquium Talk at Cornell University’s School of Information Science in November 2013 on Vimeo. This talk is about the nature of technological failure, especially in the workplaces where software solutions have been introduced to help overcome differences in organizational culture.