Talking About Business: Occupational Communities and Democratization of Labor in Startup Companies

• In Event: Disrupting Algorithms: Innovating Work and Life in the Digital Economy - I

Abstract

This research investigates to which extent informal meetings of tech workers and creative practitioners can promote collective actions, lead to political mobilization and overcome the limits of flexible capitalism, such as lack of social security, individualization of risk and the normalization precarious forms of employment. We therefore study the potential of “occupational communities”, i.e. grassroots organizations connecting workers with similar competences and professional interests, as sites of tactical resistance, in opposition to the strategic organization of labor informed by the ‘Agile ideology’, which constitutes the ontological and epistemological reality of many creative practitioners, hi-tech workers and startup employees. The research was conducted in one of the highest rated startup ecosystems/creative hubs in North America. For the exploration of the field we relied on “platform ethnography”, a combination of online data analysis and classic ethnographic practices. Through the analysis of publicly available data about tech-related events, we identified and mapped formal and informal communities of tech-professionals operating in the city. The outcomes informed the subsequent ethnographic investigation of startup/tech workers’ community. The results collected through interviews with software engineers, freelancers and creative practitioners emphasize the ambivalent nature of occupational communities. If on the one hand they counteract the losses that workers experienced in the passage from industrial to flexible capitalism, on the other hand they promote individualistic approaches to social problem thus reinforcing current hegemonic forms of managerial power and control.

Author

• Alberto Lusoli, Simon Fraser University