Benjamin Shestakofsky (University of Pennsylvania)

Venture Capitalism: Startups, Technology, and the Future of Work

Social scientists have countered deterministic narratives about the future of work by demonstrating that the implementation and effects of algorithmic systems are likely to vary along with the social contexts in which they appear. However, although scholars have accounted for how technology outcomes diverge across social settings, existing research frequently overlooks dimensions of social context that may be shared by—and lead to convergent outcomes across—a broad range of organizations. In this talk, I propose a framework for examining how venture capital investors’ demand for rapid growth shapes the evolving relationship between work and technology in entrepreneurial firms. Drawing on 19 months of participant-observation research inside a venture-backed firm that ran a digital platform connecting buyers and sellers of local services, I examine the consequences of breakneck, high-risk organizational change for a tech startup’s workers. I find that managers’ attempts to meet investors’ expectations generated interdependent work practices and divergent workplace cultures across the company’s three divisions located in San Francisco, the Philippines, and Las Vegas. I show that when the imperatives of financiers drive continual technological change, workers’ degrees of exposure to and control over that change become important axes of organizational inequality. I conclude by arguing that when we observe the deployment and reception of algorithmic systems in the workplace without keeping capital firmly in view, we neglect an important influence on the relationship between work and technology while limiting our imagination of how it might be organized.

Please email jviator@fas.harvard.edu for the Zoom link. You can also join the mailing list to automatically receive all Zoom invites.