Abstract
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.
Chapter One outlines research on risk, work, and technology by showing how managing uncertainty has become a material necessity: government and corporations reduced supports for workers as the economy was being roiled by financialization, unstable demand, and the spread of flexible organization. What Neff wants to probe are cultural factors that have abetted and shaped the taking on of risk. While previous studies have documented broad cultural attitudes glorifying risk, she wants to explore the understandings of new media workers themselves—”narratives, discourses, ways of talking about risk” (p. 12). Neff’s novel claim is that Silicon Alley workers actively embraced risk in their quest for a measure of control and autonomy. Her reasoning is that “risk and risk-taking in economic life now imply active choices while uncertainty connotes economic passivity and forces beyond one’s own control [emphasis in original]” (p. 15). Neff labels this sort of risk-taking “venture labor”—”the investment of time, energy, human capital, and other personal resources that ordinary employees make in the companies where they work” (p. 16). She uses an array of methods to study venture labor in Silicon Alley from 1996 to 2002: participatory fieldwork, interviews with 54 individuals (e.g., owners and workers), and network mapping of participants in industry social events (over 8,000 participants at some 900 events). Neff also used trade publications to examine how the local industry talked about itself and studied how the mainstream news framed the industry.
The heart of the book is two chapters which analyze how workers sought to manage risk through their narratives and networks. Chapter Three taps Boltanski and Thévenot’s work (2006) on the economies of worth to theorize narratives that surfaced in the interviews. In explaining their employment decisions, individual workers drew on different justifications—”personal ways of evaluating the world” (p. 69). Based on what they esteemed in their jobs and careers, they developed different strategies for managing risk. Neff’s interviews revealed three strategies for managing risk: “creative, financial, and actuarial” (p. 69). The creative types had liberal arts and fine arts backgrounds while the other two groups were from a mix of content, software and business occupations. The creative strategy (40 percent of interviewees) saw that the creative projects warrant risk taking because success “could lead to further work and career reputations” (p. 83). One interviewee remarked that projects were all she “had to fall back on” if she lost her job (p. 84). A portfolio should express a unique “look” or “voice”; the risk was putting in time for projects that “suck” (p. 85). Many creative types, who typically came to Silicon Alley before the boom began, felt they had “nothing to lose”: jobs there often were more secure and paid better—and they offered a chance to do something new. The second group wielded a “financial strategy” that evaluated firms “for their potential as lucrative investments” (p. 73). Most of these interviewees, the smallest group (25 percent), arrived in Silicon Alley after the stock market heated up. Their tone was rather macho. One, for example, dismissed “worker bees”—people in conventional jobs who needed to be told what to do (pp. 77–8). Conversely, if one had stock options in a start-up, “the things that you did could affect the company and could affect the value of your holdings. So it gives you a sense of power” (p. 78). Another, in the manner of a venture capitalist, evaluated potential employers in terms of their business models. The third approach to risk was an “actuarial strategy” which entailed “calculating a degree of riskiness for each position, project, and company” with the aim of finding a “safe haven” (p. 88). This group (35 percent of interviewees) sought growing sectors of the industry and did not want to work for—or own—a firm that was dependent on venture capital. As one put it, “stock options were meaningless to me. That was Vegas roulette” (p. 90).
Chapter Four confirms previous findings about the value of networks for accessing skills, jobs and credibility in Silicon Alley. More novel are insights gained from mapping social events. Neff found that the nature of networking changed over time. While earlier events had diverse mixes of participants from across sectors and occupations, later events became specialized to particular segments. This homogeneity reduced network access to new ideas and opportunities. Lastly, the centrality of networks in the industry heightened a particular form of inequality—social exclusion based on gender, age, and race.
The penultimate chapter analyzes a last wave of interviews completed after the 2000 crash. They revealed that unemployed workers blamed their own choices. Neff’s interpretation is that the culture of risk which formed during the dot-com period survived its end. Her conception of this cultural process is that individual “justifications collectively functioned as an emergent social structure to support risk-taking” (p. 145). Neff advises that choices of these workers can be seen as rational, given these new cultural frameworks and job opportunities.
The book’s great contribution is revealing how skilled workers associated good jobs with risk. Neff supplies rich data on their subcultures and networks, including their limitations. She usefully links Silicon Alley to long-standing templates in cultural industries (e.g., entertainment) where skilled workers exposed to risk rely on projects, portfolios and socializing. More problematically, Neff flirts with methodological individualism by claiming that individual values congeal into structure. In addition, the path that she illuminated so ably up to 2002 has taken turns she did not anticipate. Many Silicon Alley veterans eventually caught the Web 2.0 wave (especially if they were in technology which now overshadows content). Moreover, there are more supports for such workers given the creation of a Freelancers Union and the fact that city hall is seeking ways to spark New York’s innovative industries—reliance on finance does not seem a good bet anymore. Since the 2008 crash, most everybody is muddling through things.