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Book Review: Venture Labor in Accounts
Thanks to William Finlay at the University of Georgia for his review in Accounts, the newsletter of the Economic Sociology section of the American Sociological Association.
As a sociologist who went to graduate school in the late 1970s to study work and organizations— back then the term “economic sociology” was not in widespread use as a label and it was well before an ASA section on Economic Sociology had been formed—it is hard to avoid the feeling that the ensuing thirty-plus years have largely upended much of what we thought we knew about economic behavior and institutions. In graduate school we learned about a world dominated by large, stable corporations who provided careers for their white-collar employees (the much-analyzed “internal labor markets”) and negotiated with their blue-collar employers who were organized into relatively powerful unions (although they were not quite as strong as their European counterparts). Of course, we also knew that not everyone enjoyed the benefits of a secure career, good wages, or a guaranteed pension—theliterature on the dual economy or dual labor markets pointed out that workers in the periphery sector of the economy, who were disproportionately female, minority, and immigrant, did not share equally in the long post- World War II boom. But today it makes little sense to speak of privileged workers in the core sector, when so many of their erstwhile privileges have apparently vanished along with the terms core and periphery.
Continue reading at accounts:
Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries
In the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, employees of Internet startups took risks–left well-paying jobs for the chance of striking it rich through stock options (only to end up unemployed a year later), relocated to areas that were epicenters of a booming industry (that shortly went bust), chose the opportunity to be creative over the stability of a set schedule. In Venture Labor, Gina Neff investigates choices like these made by high-tech workers in New York City’s “Silicon Alley” in the 1990s. Why did these workers exhibit entrepreneurial behavior in their jobs–investing time, energy, and other personal resources that Neff terms “venture labor”–when they themselves were employees and not entrepreneurs? Neff argues that this behavior was part of a broader shift in society in which economic risk shifted away from collective responsibility toward individual responsibility. In the new economy, risk and reward took the place of job loyalty, and the dot-com boom helped glorify risks. Company flexibility was gained at the expense of employee security. Through extensive interviews, Neff finds not the triumph of the entrepreneurial spirit but a mixture of motivations and strategies, informed variously by bravado, naïveté, and cold calculation. She connects these individual choices with larger social and economic structures, making it clear that understanding venture labor is of paramount importance for encouraging innovation and, even more important, for creating sustainable work environments that support workers.
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