Venture Labor―Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries

In the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, employees of Internet startups tookrisks--left well-paying jobs for the chance of striking it rich through stock options (only to endup unemployed a year later), relocated to areas that were epicenters of a booming industry (thatshortly went bust), chose the opportunity to be creative over the stability of a set schedule. InVenture Labor, Gina Neff investigates choices like these made by high-techworkers in New York City's "Silicon Alley" in the 1990s. Why did these workers exhibitentrepreneurial behavior in their jobs--investing time, energy, and other personal resources thatNeff 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 shiftedaway from collective responsibility toward individual responsibility. In the new economy, risk andreward took the place of job loyalty, and the dot-com boom helped glorify risks. Company flexibilitywas gained at the expense of employee security. Through extensive interviews, Neff finds not thetriumph of the entrepreneurial spirit but a mixture of motivations and strategies, informedvariously by bravado, naivete, and cold calculation. She connects these individual choices withlarger social and economic structures, making it clear that understanding venture labor is ofparamount importance for encouraging innovation and, even more important, for creating sustainablework environments that support workers.

Gina Neff is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Washington and the coeditor of the book Surviving the New Economy.