Reading:: The conversational firm

 The Conversational Firm: Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social Media

by Catherine J. Turco

In this 2016 ethnography, Catherine Turco explores a fast-growing social media marketing company. This company attempted “radical openness” with its employees (p.2), a postbureaucratic vision of how such a company should work. After 10 months at the company, Turco characterized it as a new organizational form, “the conversational firm”: not an open, democratic decision-making environment, but one with radically more open communication and a more adaptive organization (p.8). “The firm ends up deconstructing our notion of bureaucratic control quite profoundly,” she adds. “We will see that communicative empowerment and decision-making empowerment are distinct, that distributing information can be used to improve centralized decision making, that workers do not always want decision rights delegated to them, and that a stable decision-making hierarchy can support the delegation of voice” (p.9).

Throughout the book, Turco examines different aspects of this conversational firm. In Chapter 2, she examines the idea of open communication, which involves two things: (1) “radical transparency,” in which management shared detailed and sometimes confidential information about their decision-making with employees, and “internal voting rights” extended to everyone in the organization, providing all employees with an avenue for sharing their information, ideas, and opinions with management (p.30). Among the company’s mechanisms for encouraging radical transparency were “mystery dinners” in which new employees met people outside their immediate workgroup (similar to the “taco club” I noted in a 2010 article on a search marketing firm!). Yet although these measures subverted the firm’s communicative hierarchy, they did not transcend it: local power dynamics still played their part (p.55). Open dialogue did not mean open democracy (p.62).

In Chapter 3, Turco examines open control. Decision rights and voice rights were not the same thing (p.68), with employees being able to voice opinions and concerns openly, but management reserving the right to make decisions (p.73). One example is the mantra “Use good judgment” (UGJ), which was frequently invoked as a principle (p.74), but made inequality visible, since decision rights were loaned rather than given to employees (p.79), and relied on common warrants that didn’t actually exist (p.82). UCJ led to self-censoring (p.100). 

In Chapter 5, Turco tackles “open culture,” described in a “culture deck” (p.105). Yet employees perceived a gap between their lived culture and the culture described by executives, as well as the fact that executives were the ones defining the culture (p.115). Ultimately, the deck was reframed as “aspirational” and valued because it sparked debate (p.125). 

Chapter 6 reveals the surprising news that the company initially did not have a Human Resources department, shunning it as too bureaucratic, only to eventually institute one (p.127). The lack of HR became a hindrance because the company didn’t have standardized performance reviews and terminations; internal job changes were handled on an ad hoc basis; and the company didn’t have a consistent maternity leave policy (p.130). This led to crisis. But Turco argues that rather than a nonbureaucratic firm, management had created a conversational firm, one that helped them navigate this crisis (p.137). 

Chapter 7 examines the conversational spaces set up by the firm, including its open-plan environment (p.142). 

Chapter 8 examines implications for theory. Turco argues that prior attempts to rethink the bureaucratic firm lacked conversational tools and expectations and were too narrow about their assumptions about authority (p.167). In the 1990s, for instance, people assumed that distributing communication entailed distributing authority (p.169). In contrast, she argues, the conversational firm works “because, even as the organization retains a conventional, hierarchical decision-making structure, the decisions themselves are shaped and shifted by the conversational environment and the employee voices within it” (p.171). 

Chapter 9 ends with advice for conversational firms.

Overall, I really liked this book. Turco did a great job of drawing on different stories throughout her 10 months with the firm. It resonated with many of my own experiences, even as Turco goes into further depth about differences between (for instance) communication style and control. If you’re interested in how organizations work, and postbureaucratic organizations in particular, I highly recommend it. 

Reading :: Launching from the lab

 Launching from the Lab: Building a Deep-Tech Startup

By Lita Nelsen, Maureen Stancik Boyce, and Sophie Hagerty 

I’ve read many practitioner-oriented books on launching startups, books that mainly focus on customer discovery and pitching. This book is different. It focuses on deep-tech startups, “new companies developing groundbreaking science and technology into new products, often for new markets” (p.1). For that reason, it seems mainly pitched to IP owners who are considering commercializing their technologies — especially PhDs and graduate students working in a university research environment. For that reason, it is very light on customer discovery, instead emphasizing intellectual property (Ch.3), licensing patents (Ch.4), creating equity (Ch.6), building the company (Ch.7), financial modeling (Ch.9), raising capital (Ch.10-12), negotiating with investors (Ch.13), and exiting the company (Ch.14). Yes, it also covers business models (Ch.2, 5) and pitch decks (Ch.8), but the main focus is explaining business details to sci/tech researchers. This is an important niche, and if I were starting a startup, I would be consulting this book often.

Not only is the book important, it’s very accessible. The authors have advised many startups, and they dip into this deep well of expertise to illustrate their points. I really appreciated how they described the thorny details — especially financial modeling, which I know from interviews is a real concern among sci/tech researchers — and walked readers through them. 

I also appreciated how they examined the motivations for becoming an entrepreneur: “If your only motive is to get rich, it’s probably a losing ambition” (p.5). 

I’m fairly well versed in how startups ideate, develop business models, try out MVPs through the build-measure-learn loop, and pitch. But I learned a lot about other topics. 

For instance, their explainer on founder equity (p.95) was valuable for understanding how founders must strategize their equity holdings. 

Similarly, the authors clearly discuss financial projections (p.137), whose “assumptions will become more accurate” over time (p.139), and they note that “for many research-based emerging technologies, a decade or more may pass before the first product is ready for full release and commercialization” (p.142). 

They also clearly describe the difference between dilutive capital (in which the founder gives equity to the investor) and nondilutive capital (in which they don’t — think in terms of financing and loans, such as SBIR/STTR, I-Corps, tax incentives, and academic incubators) (p.154). They discuss how to get advice from volunteer mentors and business plan competitions, and they wisely warn against “bad apples” such as predatory advisors who demand equity (pp.160-161). They describe various mechanisms for raising capital such as SAFEs and notes, equity rounds, lead investors, and syndicates of investors involved in a given round (Ch.11). And they list stages of fundraising, from initial friends-and-family funding to preseed, seed, series funding, down rounds, the round before an IPO, and mezzanine rounds (pp.179-182). They also emphasize selling to people who share your vision (p.188).

Overall, I learned a lot from this book. It would make a great companion to my upcoming book on entrepreneurship communication, since both books cover early-stage startups, but are nearly orthogonal in terms of what topics they cover. If you’re interested in how startups work, or you want to start your own startup, definitely check it out.

Reading :: The promise and peril of entrepreneurship

 The Promise and Peril of Entrepreneurship: Job Creation and Survival among US Startups 

By Robert W. Fairlie, Zachary Kroff, Javier Miranda, and Nikolas Zolas

In this book, written by economists who study startup job creation, the authors report results based on their dataset, the Comprehensive Startup Panel: A dataset that tracks job creation and startup survival. The authors created this new dataset because current Census Bureau data don’t do a good job of tracking startups. Although startups may eventually become employers, most startups begin life as nonemployer firms, so they had to reach across data for both nonemployer firms (NEFs) and employer firms to create a more comprehensive picture of startups (p.2). They investigated three questions:

• “How many jobs are created by the average entrepreneur?” (p.2) — and, related, “is entrepreneurship about creating jobs or about creating a job?” (p.3). 
• “Do these created jobs last or do they disappear quickly?”
• “How many entrepreneurial firms survive each year after startup?” (p.2). 

“The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) defines entrepreneurs as new employer establishments” (p.3), but NEFs represent both the majority of startups and the majority of total firms in the US (pp.3-4). Once the authors account for this by creating a new dataset, one that unites NEFs and EFs and defines a business as an entity that has revenue tax liability (p.16), they find that 

• After one year, 59% of startups survive
• After two years, 47%
• After 5 years, 33% (p.11; p.65)
• After 7 years, only 29% (p.65)

compared to the official statistics of EFs, which claim a 50% survival rate after five years — a figure that ignores startups’ previous existence as NEFs (p.27).

Many startups also have quick exits:

• Year 0, any given year, starts with about 4.1m startups 
• Year 1, only 2.4m of these survive
• Year 2, only 1.9m survive
• Year 5, 1.2m survive (p.63)

Including NEFs is important because nonemployer businesses have a startup rate of 35%, which is three times that of employer businesses (p.97). 

They use a broad definition of entrepreneur: Did someone create a job for themselves (p.100)? 

Finally, they examine startup owners: Who owns startups? Their statistics here reflect what we already know about startup owners: They are disproportionately white and male, with a college degree (p.143). 

Overall, I really appreciated this book. I am no economist, but I appreciated the authors’ clear methodological assumptions and their accounting for how they got the numbers they did. The results helped me to better understand the startup landscape. If you’re similarly interested in startups, definitely check it out.

Reading :: An Ethnography of Global Landscapes and Corridors

An Ethnography of Global Landscapes and Corridors

Edited by Loshini Naidoo

I forget how I ran across this book, but I think I downloaded the PDF through UT Libraries. And although I’m glad I did download and read it, it’s a little far afield of my work, so I’m not sure I will use it a lot.

The book is an edited collection that considers the methodology of ethnography as it has been picked up in various fields and disciplines, both in traditional and digital settings. Across 14 chapters, the contributors consider field notes, fieldwork, focus groups, material culture, food, and visual mapping, among other topics.

For me, a few chapters stood out. 

I appreciated Naidoo’s introduction to ethnography as method; for me, this overview helped me understand the sweep of ethnography and its many permutations, and it set up the rest of the collection well. For someone who wants to understand ethnography in broad terms, this seems like a good beginning.

I also liked Demant’s chapter on focus groups. By understanding a focus group as an artificial situation, Demant explores using focus groups as social experiments, providing different data than what observations or individual interviews would produce. 

And Vinck’s chapter “Accessing Material Culture by Following Intermediary Objects” was intriguing in that it is mobilized within science and technology studies, using the concept of intermediary objects to explore how they stabilize practice across networks of linked activities. The particular case is that of scientific cooperation networks.

These chapters are very different, highlighting both the strength (diversity) and weakness (the possibility of incoherence) in a collection like this. Still, I thought the collection held together pretty well, and I think I’ll come back to it as I think through methodological questions in my own work. If you similarly want to think through ethnography as a method, definitely pick it up. 

Reading:: Appropriating Technology

Appropriating Technology: How We Make Digital Tools Our Own

By Pierre Tchounikine

I won’t go into too much detail on this review, since I had the good fortune to review the manuscript and blurb the book — but if the book’s premise interests you, follow the link and click on “Open Access” to download it as a free PDF!

In the preface, Tchounikine explains: "Appropriation is the process by which technologies become instruments for us—that is, basic means, basic resources that we use without any conscious explicit effort in the course of our personal and professional activities." (p.vii). He understands appropriation as a "constructive and developmental process" that involves an interplay among "psychological, social, and technical dimensions." Although he draws on established concepts such as affordances, he mainly relates three frameworks: structuration, activity theory, and genre theory (pp.20-21). In relating these, he takes an emancipatory perspective (p.30). 

In doing so, he considers what it means to work with technology from a social and cognitive perspective and with multiple mediators.

For those who conduct research using these frameworks, Chapters 3 and 4 are of special interest. In Ch.3, he reviews activity theory and specifically considers mediation by an ecology of artifacts. In Ch.4, he considers users in terms of individual development, bringing in genre and ZOPED. 

The book is very HCI-ish in the same sense that Kaptelinin & Nardi's joint work is — it sets up a larger question, draws on different frameworks, then moves to accessible research accounts to illustrate and deepen the points. I personally like this style quite a bit. I also appreciated how the book focused on individual development — although many of us have tended to push for a more collective perspective on technology use, especially those of us influenced by Yrjo Engestrom’s work, individual development is still important, especially in thinking through how people appropriate a technology that they use across encounters, organizations, and activities. 

If you’re interested in how we use technologies, or just in how people pick up new time management tools, definitely pick up (or download) this book. 

Reading :: Cultural Entrepreneurship

 Cultural Entrepreneurship: A New Agenda for the Study of Entrepreneurial Processes and Possibilities

By Michael Lounsbury and Mary Ann Glynn

I have been aware of Lounsbury and Glynn’s work, but seeing a cite to this book in a professional communication manuscript spurred me to finally get a copy of this book. The book is an “elements” book, just 87 pages with references, and I ended up reading it in one sitting. It was worth it, and I’ll be returning to it as I continue to think through entrepreneurship.

The book overviews cultural entrepreneurship scholarship. In doing so, it pulls together diverse scholars’ works, helping us to see a larger body of scholarship emerging. In this scholarship’s understanding, “all forms of entrepreneurial action are fundamentally constituted by similar kinds of cultural processes” and “at the core of all entrepreneurial initiatives is a process of meaning-making” to construct organizational identity (p.1, their emphasis). This view of entrepreneurship is shared by scholars from various fields — they mention rhetoric among others — and they worry about fragmentation of scholarship, so they hope this book will yield a “more synthetic conversation” (p.3). They now define cultural entrepreneurship as “the processes by which actors draw upon cultural resources … to advance entrepreneurship or to facilitate organizational or institutional innovation” (p.3). 

They point out three biases in entrepreneurship scholarship: (1) the start-up bias (which equates entrepreneurship solely with new ventures), (2) the opportunity-discovery bias (“the overly narrow explanatory focus on the psychological or cognitive aspects of opportunity discovery”), and (3) the sole-individual bias (the focus on individuals rather than teams) (p.5). And they approve of shifts toward institutional logics, practice theories, and process approaches, all of which involve make culture more central and use flatter ontologies (p.9). Later in the book, they approve of relational ontologies for exploring identity dynamics in organizations (p.26).

Studying entrepreneurial possibilities from a cultural perspective, they say, provides a way forward for those who have argued about entrepreneurial opportunities: Are they discovered (existing in the world, waiting to be found) or created (endogenously, by the entrepreneurs themselves) (p.37)? The authors see this divide as reproducing “the unhelpful structure-versus-agency dualism” (p.38). Seeing this as a false choice, they propose “a cultural ecology of entrepreneurial possibilities, i.e., a system of interconnected options generated by the interaction of a community with its environment” (pp.38-39). They propose that “possibilities for entrepreneurial action exist at the interstices of distinct identity positions in and around institutional fields where novel entrepreneurial identities and practices may be constructed” (p.39). 

Overall, I found this book very helpful. As an overview, it does the work of a really good bibliographic essay: Drawing different scholars’ work into a larger conversation so that latecomers like myself can understand the conversation, players, and stakes. If you’re interested in entrepreneurship as a cultural practice, definitely pick it up. 

Reading :: Anthropology and Social Theory

Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject

By Sherry B. Ortner

I’m not an anthropologist, so I’m not familiar with Sherry Ortner, but she is evidently well-known and well-cited in anthropological circles. When I picked this book up used, probably five years ago, I was interested in an anthropological take on culture, especially from a practice theory perspective. Ortner has spent a lot of time thinking about this connection, and in the introduction and six essay chapters, she brings together a wide range of citations to think through this relationship.

In the introduction, Ortner meditates on her history in the field as she wrestled with the concept of culture in terms of practice theory. She reviews this development within historical shifts in anthropology, including power theory, the historic turn, and perhaps most importantly, “the reinterpretation(s) of culture” — her focus in this volume (p.3). The problem with “culture” is that in illiberal hands, it can be reduced to stereotyping. In reaction, many anthropologists turned away from the concept of culture altogether, but outside anthropology, others picked it up in inventive ways (p.12). These ways take power into account while loosening relations between culture and specific groups (p.13). The Birmingham school, for instance, embedded the concept of culture in “narratives of power and inequality,” and in doing so, make the old concept of culture do new work (pp.13-14). Culture is reclaimed through practice theory.

In subsequent chapters, Ortner explores different aspects of this reclamation, focusing on American culture: ethnographic refusal (Ch.2), class (Ch.3), Gen X (Ch.4), and subjectivity (Ch.5). These were interesting enough, and allowed Ortner to draw these themes into concrete cases, but they did not hold my attention as much as the introduction did.

Still, if you’re interested in the relationship between culture and practice theory, and its intellectual history, this book is well worth reading.