Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries by Gina Neff
研究了1990年代末纽约硅巷互联网初创企业员工，他们自愿接受不稳定工作以换取创业机会，最终在泡沫破裂后失业却自责，作者提出“风险劳动”概念描述这种员工像企业家一样承担风险的行为。
Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries , by Gina Neff . 2012 . Series: Acting with Technology . Cambridge , Massachusetts : MIT Press . 195 + xiii . ISBN 978-0-262-01748-0 , $30 . The decline of the manufacturing-industrial society has meant enormous changes in all parts of society. Not only is the economy's growth now based on other industries. Not only is this new growth often located in other regions than those that dominated the growth of the manufacturing economy. Social norms, values, and attitudes have also undergone massive changes. This latter circumstance is at the center of Gina Neff's study of employees of Internet startups in New York City's “Silicon Alley” during the late 1990s. The employees she studies are ones who chose the opportunity of insecure creativity instead of stable employment and work schedules. Many of them left well-paid jobs in established firms for the chance to get rich through stock options in the startups, and ended up unemployed a few years later when the bubble burst, but, as she shows, mainly blamed themselves for their unfortunate destiny. Neff coins the term “venture labor” for various activities of this group of workers who were employees but acted like risk-taking entrepreneurs. According to Neff, their behavior was a reflection of a transformation of society in which the responsibility for economic risk moved away from collective toward individual responsibility, something that has also been stressed by among others the German sociologist Ulrich Beck. However, in contrast to Beck, who considers this individualization of risk as something entirely bad—forced upon citizens—the employees of Silicon Alley had a positive attitude towards it. This, Neff argues, is perhaps the single most important lesson that can be learned from Silicon Alley: “the extent to which people's notions of job security have been radically transformed as more and more people willingly accept or actively welcome risk” (p. 156). The Silicon Alley employees developed a set of strategies to manage the risk of their work. These strategies are part of “venture labor”; the term refers to employees’ investments of leisure time, knowledge, skills, and often also money in their firms. Venture labor was spurred by regarding the choice of job as like a stock investment. It resulted in employees behaving as if they had ownership in their companies even when they did not. An important component part of the strategy was building social capital: making interpersonal connections in off-hours networking events that were designed to benefit employees and employers alike. Being connected to these networks was considered insurance against unemployment: if the worker's own firm closed down, the social capital would ensure employment in another firm. However, this “insurance” could not handle the situation when the whole dot-com bubble collapsed … . Neff's book consists of six chapters. In the first, she introduces the research problem, gives definitions, and describes her methods, and in the second she describes the rise of Silicon Alley in the historical context of the postindustrial economic changes in the U.S., in which the so called “new economy” was such a popular concept. In chapter 3 she deals with the set of strategies the employees developed for managing the economic risks they perceived. Neff finds three coherent strategies: creative strategies, focused on project success, similar to strategies in other creative industries; financial strategies, seeing one's job as an investment with a potential payoff; and actuarial strategies that aimed at having as many options as possible and not putting all eggs in one basket. Chapter 4 is on how those strategies failed, with a focus on the social-capital building that was an important component in all three of them, and chapter 5 is on the stock market crash beginning in 2000 and how so much of the venture labor investments became worthless as a result. In the concluding chapter Neff draws lessons from this first wave of the Internet boom. Many predictions made by the cocky pioneers of the 1990s have been realized—but most often not by them and their vanished companies. Here she also suggests ways to apply the venture labor concept to work outside the Internet-related industries. Venture Labor is a book based in sociological theory and methods, which are fairly peripheral to the core of regional science. The only regional perspective comes from dealing with a spatially demarcated industry, the Silicon Alley of Manhattan. The strength of the book is the combination of strong empirics and contemporary sociological theory, and the placing of the findings in a broader societal context. However, it is in this latter respect that the author could have enlarged the discussion. She points out that the concept of venture labor as a model of employee entrepreneurship can be applied in many other industries, but the examples are vague and undeveloped. It would have been interesting to relate Silicon Alley's venture labor to, for example, “intraprenueurship” or the Japanese company culture that received so much attention in the 1980s and early 1990s. Notwithstanding these comments, Gina Neff has written an interesting case study of a pioneering industry that showed us the future, and in more than just one way.