- Email: [email protected]
Silicon Valley reinvents the company town
Futures 32 (2000) 759–766 www.elsevier.com/locate/futures
Silicon Valley reinvents the company town J.A. English-Lueck
1,*
Department of Anthropology, San Jose State University, San Jose, CA 05192-0113, USA
Abstract California’s Silicon Valley, famous for its innovative high-technology corporations, makes an ideal laboratory for exploring certain cultural inventions. It is a bellwether for a particular kind of social order—one dominated by work. In anthropology we encounter many frameworks through which life is organized—kinship, religion, and politics. Work is another lens through which life can be filtered. People may move to California for the weather, but they go to Silicon Valley to work. High-technology work draws on a global pool of talent and shifting skills that creates a culturally complex community. Migrants to Silicon Valley bring and enact an image of a place to do cutting-edge work. Leaders and pundits in the region consciously market the idea that the Valley can reinvent itself to continue to dominate its distinctive economic niche. Out of this reinvention a novel version of the company town has emerged, a twenty-first century reworking of a community where work penetrates and dominates the lives of its inhabitants. 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction In 1940 no one would have looked at Santa Clara County, the core of the modern Silicon Valley, and called it, even stretching the concept to its limits, a company town. The classic portrait of a company town by historical archaeologists and historians describes a single company, often geographically isolated, that owns the land, builds housing, service facilities, public utilities and dominates the business life of the community even though private enterprises may exist [1]. Acting through benev* Tel.: +1-408-924-5347; fax: +1-408-924-5348. E-mail address: [email protected] (J.A. English-Lueck). 1 Jan English-Lueck is the author of Health in the new age: a study in California holistic practices and Chinese intellectuals on the world frontier: blazing the black path. She is currently conducting research on Silicon Valley cultures with her colleagues Charles Darrah and James M. Freeman. Funding for that research is provided by the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Institute for the Future. More information can be found on the Web site www.sjsu.edu/depts/anthropology/svcp/. 0016-3287/00/$ - see front matter 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 0 1 6 - 3 2 8 7 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 0 2 6 - 4
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J.A. English-Lueck / Futures 32 (2000) 759–766
olent self-interest, the company provides and shapes the infrastructure of community life. The American West and significant portions of the coal-mining East are dotted with such former lumber and mining communities. Geography dominated the decisions that gave birth to company towns. Proximity to resources and distance from other towns mandated the construction of Western company towns. Company towns display a focus not found in more diverse communities. Direct or indirect control is extended into the realms of local government, housing, schools, health facilities, churches, utilities, recreation, police and fire protection and local media [2]. Company towns are administered communities, not representative of the residents’ interests but of the company’s need to succeed in a given industry [3].
2. Evolution of a company town The Silicon Valley region is dominated by a handful of industry clusters, such as defense, semiconductors, computers/communications, software, environmental and biotechnologies. The companies in the cluster exchange personnel, develop, manufacture, buy and sell components to each other so that it becomes difficult to know where one company begins and another ends. In the last decade the fundamental relationship between industry and government has shifted in response to intermittent economic recessions as industry coalitions have made a concerted effort to have a dominant voice in governmental regulation, housing markets, and schools. Individual workers are subject to increased expectations. They must contribute more time, more “value added” creativity and constantly employ their friendship and kin connections to increase their knowledge capital in exchange for short-term economic security. Incursions by work organizations into both political and private realms of community life echo and rework the dynamics of the company town. Silicon Valley’s resources are less tangible than copper deposits. Several factors combine to make the Silicon Valley a prototype for a postmodern company town. The density of knowledge work, the fluidity of corporate boundaries and the job mobility of knowledge workers shape an environment in which high-technology work dominates the regional economy, and workism eclipses the lives of individuals.
3. In the beginning was Terman The standard historiography of the Valley nearly always begins with Stanford University’s Frederick Terman, a native of Palo Alto. Hired by Stanford in 1925 he decried the state of American electrical engineering. As he gained power within the institution, he hoped to create “a community of technical scholars” that would link industry with academia [4]. In the 1950s, he created the Stanford Industrial Park, now known as the Stanford Research Park. Two of his earliest students were a stunning success—William Hewlett and David Packard, whose garage, now a historic landmark, saw the birth of an audio oscillator Walt Disney used for Fantasia. Lobbying in 1930 for the Moffett Naval Air Base provided a focus for military
J.A. English-Lueck / Futures 32 (2000) 759–766
761
research. The klystron tube—foundation of modern radar and microwave communications—set the Varian brothers, two of the early key players, on the military industrial track. Defense spending continued to support high-risk industries after WWII. The role of federal spending in the development of the semiconductor industry was critical. Research and development sites proliferated. In 1956 William Shockley coinvented the transistor at Bell Laboratories. He moved back to Palo Alto to begin the Shockley Transistor Company, which begat Fairchild Semiconductor that in turned spawned fifty new companies between 1959 and 1979, including Intel, National Semiconductor and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). In addition, NASA’s Ames Research Center, Xerox, IBM, Westinghouse, Philco-Ford, General Electric Tempo, Sylvania, ITT and Lockheed all established research and development facilities in the area [5,6]. During the 1970s, the birth of personal computing redefined Silicon Valley. In yet another “Garage Myth”, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak began Apple. Atari, Osborne and Tandem broke ground in defining new directions in computing. A new player arrived to bankroll the risky start-ups: the venture capitalist. Drawing on the nearby capital center of San Francisco and other transnational sources, the venture capitalists pushed tech work in a new commercial direction. It was in this decade that Silicon Valley received its well-known appellation. In the 1980s an estimated 8000 technology corporations proliferated and a new strategy emerged. Japanese competition placed the self-contained megacompany at risk and by the end of the decade an increasing number of companies began to diversify and produce custom semiconductors, computers and components. Buying and vending components between companies blurred organizational boundaries. The workforce shifted as “contractors,” often former employees of recently downsized megafirms, worked on a project-by-project basis. A new generation of corporations emerged: Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics are examples. In addition, new manufacturers began to abandon closed protocols. An open protocol systems may expose technical secrets, but it allows many players to quickly develop custom hardware and a plethora of software applications [7]. The latter approach encourages intellectual networking and relatively free exchange of information and contributed to the “tradition” of network building and cooperation between firms [8]. This historical path set up the necessary conditions for reinventing the company town. A complex ecosystem of companies flourished as deeply interdependent workers exchanged information, migrated in and out of organizations, and created new niches as old ones decayed. The ephemerality of technological knowledge forced workers to stay alert and mobile as economic booms and busts cycled through the decades.
4. The primacy of work Work in Silicon Valley has become a framework for social organization at every level from community design to family life. At the most macroscopic level, political
762
J.A. English-Lueck / Futures 32 (2000) 759–766
life reflects the dominance of work. Joint Venture Silicon Valley is an exemplar case study. This nonprofit organization is a partnership of regional governmental officials and industry leaders trying to, in their own words, “reinvent the Valley that invented the future.” It has been a landmark heralding a new era in industrial involvement with the community. Job loss, diminished defense spending, and declining quality of life appeared to be taking a toll on the Valley in the early 1990s. In 1992 Joint Venture highlighted growing regional and international competition and painted a dramatic picture of future decline. Production would be gone, research greatly diminished and only corporate headquarters would tower above a crowded, poor, decaying community [9]. The suggested solution to avoiding this dismal fate would be to create a partnership of business leaders and local government officials, usually referred to as “the community,” that would ease regulatory problems, create networks to encourage start-ups, transform education, and augment the existing infrastructure with new technology. Business visionaries insisted that the efforts in various domains should be “innovative and paradigm-breaking”—symbolically charged adjectives in the Valley. For example, schools could be transformed into workforce factories that would produce skilled workers with industry academies as the model, so that high schools would be set up into clusters (health, electronics, computers) and run like industries. In early 1995 Hewlett-Packard and Silicon Graphics unveiled a twentymillion-dollar incentive plan through Joint Venture in which businesses would donate equipment and expertise to create “renaissance teams” that would help educators “abandon the outdated mass production model.” Joint Venture can work across district boundaries to implement the organization changes used in corporate culture to “reengineer” pedagogical process and curriculum development. Across a number of issues Joint Venture Silicon Valley has successfully redefined the concept of a company town. A new lobbying Council on Tax and Fiscal Policy was formed to engineer “one-stop shopping” to make it easier for business to negotiate local governmental regulations, especially environmental regulations. Corporate Chief Executive Officers formed the Health Care Task Force Advisory Board to create strategies to contain health care costs and develop an inventory of regional health care resources. Using lobbying, government partnerships and “innovative initiatives,” companies have reached out to redesign the governance, schools, utilities and even health care facilities of the community to make it “a better place for business.”
5. Penetrating daily life The primacy of work is not purely a political phenomenon, but reaches deeply into the lives of workers. High-tech professionals expect to work over eighty hours per week as projects peak, and to place the company at the center of their universe— becoming psychologically and physically fit to serve their work [10]. For example, one high-tech worker, who had a repetitive stress disorder, told me how she had transformed her life, stopping nearly all her recreational activities, so she could “save her hands” for her company.
J.A. English-Lueck / Futures 32 (2000) 759–766
763
In a traditional company town social control was imposed by the work organization. Companies created the infrastructure and people were imported to fill in the niches. Silicon Valley’s reinvented company town is more subtly spontaneous and deeply individualized. Various domains of life are not simply controlled by the company, they are integrated into lives that are dominated by work. Individuals, bouncing between organizations, put work first, rather than employment for a specific organization. Work transcends employment for a particular company, incorporating training, self-marketing, and network maintenance, as well as entrepreneurial and volunteer activities. Job mobility, made possible by the density of high-tech companies, permits individuals to see themselves as doing a particular kind of work, rather than being workers for a particular company. In the words of one worker, if the manager “is a cretin,” quit and find another job. If laid off, he opines it is no problem, another job will be there, perhaps after a period of “independent consulting.” This flexibility fosters an attitude that the individual is the locus for responsibility for successful work. Resume´s and training portfolios must be kept up to date, even if decades of previous employment exist. The burden of job fitness lies with the employee. As work extends beyond the employment site into other venues—homes, cars, restaurants, playgrounds—it becomes increasingly integrated with other facets of life. Parents juggle home, work and day-care using elaborate schedules, layering midday calls to fellow soccer parents at work with late-night calls to colleagues in Australia with nursing infant in arms. Responsibility for that integration lies not with the work organization but with individuals who view themselves as bundles of skills that must constantly be reinvented to function in a changing workplace. Individuals recreate themselves with organizations acting as midwife to that process. Several factors allow people to restructure their work and nonwork lives. The sense of a workplace is eroded. Work is not something that is done at a workplace, but a bundle of activities that is done in multiple places. Home too is distributed across the landscape as people interact with friends and family in many places. Home is not merely one address, but anyplace you “do family.” The workplace has introduced devices that have become integrated into life—personal computers, on-line services, voice mail, pagers and cell phones, making work a “24 and 7” proposition, all day every day. At the same time the devices allow people’s personal networks, their social capital, to become increasingly accessible. These communication support networks allow the necessary integration of work and personal life. As work activities—planning, communicating, creating and reflecting—are enacted in nonwork venues, a variety of personal activities and relationships can be harnessed for work purposes. People use their integrated work/nonwork activities instrumentally to serve a variety of purposes. Two high-tech workers, taking their small children to a Gymboree play class, exchange business cards as they sing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” The intermeshing of work and nonwork activities doesn’t simply mean that work coexists with many other functions, but that work becomes the filter through which relationships and activities are processed (see Table 1). Silicon Valley is undergoing a political restructuring to allow it to “succeed in a given industry,” to use the old definition of a company town, rethinking a wide number of social institutions to make them business user friendly. This is being done
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Table 1 Features of the new company town Individual
Community
Work dominates life Harness friends/family for work Continually upgrading own “bundle of skills” Information technologies fuel constant access, blur work/home Business/tech metaphors describe relationships
Industry dominates community Public–private partnerships Education becomes workforce preparation Technology and mobility blur company and municipal boundaries Business/tech metaphors define community identity
by the use of public–private partnerships and the reworking of high-tech business discourse into the body politic. More significantly for the worker of the future, the continually changing and demanding work practices of high tech have fostered a self-morphing worker that has extended and integrated the activities of work into the rest of life so that no matter what the time or place, it is another day in the company town.
6. Company town 2005 As ethnographers who “discover the future,” we listened closely to the scenarios that would spontaneously emerge in conversation and public discourse. We asked teachers, technologists and technocrats to project their own versions of Silicon Valley’s near future. How would they describe the best plausible future? What would happen in the worst plausible one? What did they think was likely to happen? As expected, over the course of the 1990s, the optimism ebbed and flowed with the economy. The recession of the early 1990s fueled a pessimism that Silicon Valley would be overshadowed by other silicon places. The near-millennial economic boom supported a much more buoyant vision. However, the values underlying the visions were remarkably coherent and painted a picture of life increasingly dominated by work and industry. The pattern of increasing access would lead to a work life of “24 and 7,” referring to hours and days of availability, dominating daily life. There would be fewer opportunities to separate work and home life and that merger would accelerate. Information technologies would become even more ubiquitous and facilitate the takeover of work. The community would be well on its way to reform, business providing guidance and funding to education. Ironically, the very success of Silicon Valley posed dangers. A spiraling cost of living would create a community of high-living professionals, with service providers living increasingly impoverished lives. Young people, teachers, and janitors would commute long distances into the area, or simply leave. A service gap would grow and manufacturing would fade. Several tacit assumptions were imbedded in these visions. First, it was never questioned that technology would continue to dominate the community in economy and passion. No one postulated the rejection or rethinking of technology, but only mused
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that it did make the takeover of work more inevitable. Few people questioned the penetration of industry into education, housing, and health care. The only debate is whether professionals in those fields would maintain some autonomy in setting their own agenda or whether industry should make it clear what it wants and the community would adjust. The idea that the community was a platform for industry remained virtually unquestioned. If Silicon Valley is truly a bell-wether for the future, implications surface that beg discussion. Some features of Silicon Valley are widely shared—such as the penetration of information technologies and the restructuring of work into interdependent global networks. However, Silicon Valley does have distinctive features which may not reflect other communities. Silicon Valley is a community of producers, a feature which amplifies their lives as consumers. Not everyone shares the passion for technology which is the raison d’eˆtre for Silicon Valley. “Technolust,” to cite our interviewees term, does color the perception that technology reigns supreme. High technology fuels short production cycles that shape the preoccupation with time and work. The characteristic job mobility of the region—managers look askance at people who spend “years” in one company—accentuates the feeling that the area is one big undefined company. Sojourners from the Midwest or Bangalore move to the area to work and partake in the “Silicon Valley lifestyle,” so that the pace of life and focus on work are ultimately self-selecting and self-perpetuating. When international visitors come to the region to find “the secret of Silicon Valley” to replicate back home, they are disturbed by the unquestioned primacy of work that is essential to the postmodern company town. While such global elite may want the prosperity that comes with the company town, they may not want the values and constraints it also delivers. One such person, an Australian industry leader, reflected on his visit to Silicon Valley and his discussion with our team of ethnographers about the emerging cultural reality. He reflected that Silicon Valley may not be a model, but “a timely reality check on where we are all heading”, and he asks the question, “is this the kind of world we want to live in?” [11].
References [1] Allen J. The company town in the American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966. [2] Graham SB. Community, conformity, and career: patterns of social interaction in two Arizona mining towns. Urban Anthropology 1980;9(1):4. [3] Graham SB. Social networks and community administration: a comparative study of two mining towns. In: Messerschmidt D, editor. Anthropologists at home in North America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981: 110–111. [4] Winner L. Silicon Valley mystery house. In: Sorkin M, editor. Variations on a theme park: the new American city and the end of public space. New York: Noonday Press, 1992: 37–40. [5] Rogers E, Larsen J. Silicon Valley fever: growth of high-technology culture. New York: Basic Books, 1984. [6] Saxenian A. The genesis of Silicon Valley. In: Hall P, Markusen A, editors. Silicon landscapes. Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1985: 24. [7] Saxenian A. Regional advantage: culture and competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1994.
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[8] Ignoffo MJ. Sunnyvale: from the “City of Destiny” to the “Heart of Silicon Valley.” Unpublished thesis, Department of History, San Jose State University, 1991, p. 67. [9] SRI International Center for Economic Competitiveness. Joint Venture Silicon Valley: an economy at risk. Phase 1 diagnostic report, San Jose Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, 1993, p. 61. [10] Hayes D. Behind the silicon curtain: The seductions of work in a lonely era. Boston: South End Press, 1989. [11] Coroneos P. Study of US developments. The Canberra Connection. Internet Industry Newsletter, September 1998. http:www.iia.net.au/news/980902.html.
Silicon Valley reinvents the company town J.A. English-Lueck
1,*
Department of Anthropology, San Jose State University, San Jose, CA 05192-0113, USA
Abstract California’s Silicon Valley, famous for its innovative high-technology corporations, makes an ideal laboratory for exploring certain cultural inventions. It is a bellwether for a particular kind of social order—one dominated by work. In anthropology we encounter many frameworks through which life is organized—kinship, religion, and politics. Work is another lens through which life can be filtered. People may move to California for the weather, but they go to Silicon Valley to work. High-technology work draws on a global pool of talent and shifting skills that creates a culturally complex community. Migrants to Silicon Valley bring and enact an image of a place to do cutting-edge work. Leaders and pundits in the region consciously market the idea that the Valley can reinvent itself to continue to dominate its distinctive economic niche. Out of this reinvention a novel version of the company town has emerged, a twenty-first century reworking of a community where work penetrates and dominates the lives of its inhabitants. 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction In 1940 no one would have looked at Santa Clara County, the core of the modern Silicon Valley, and called it, even stretching the concept to its limits, a company town. The classic portrait of a company town by historical archaeologists and historians describes a single company, often geographically isolated, that owns the land, builds housing, service facilities, public utilities and dominates the business life of the community even though private enterprises may exist [1]. Acting through benev* Tel.: +1-408-924-5347; fax: +1-408-924-5348. E-mail address: [email protected] (J.A. English-Lueck). 1 Jan English-Lueck is the author of Health in the new age: a study in California holistic practices and Chinese intellectuals on the world frontier: blazing the black path. She is currently conducting research on Silicon Valley cultures with her colleagues Charles Darrah and James M. Freeman. Funding for that research is provided by the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Institute for the Future. More information can be found on the Web site www.sjsu.edu/depts/anthropology/svcp/. 0016-3287/00/$ - see front matter 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 0 1 6 - 3 2 8 7 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 0 2 6 - 4
760
J.A. English-Lueck / Futures 32 (2000) 759–766
olent self-interest, the company provides and shapes the infrastructure of community life. The American West and significant portions of the coal-mining East are dotted with such former lumber and mining communities. Geography dominated the decisions that gave birth to company towns. Proximity to resources and distance from other towns mandated the construction of Western company towns. Company towns display a focus not found in more diverse communities. Direct or indirect control is extended into the realms of local government, housing, schools, health facilities, churches, utilities, recreation, police and fire protection and local media [2]. Company towns are administered communities, not representative of the residents’ interests but of the company’s need to succeed in a given industry [3].
2. Evolution of a company town The Silicon Valley region is dominated by a handful of industry clusters, such as defense, semiconductors, computers/communications, software, environmental and biotechnologies. The companies in the cluster exchange personnel, develop, manufacture, buy and sell components to each other so that it becomes difficult to know where one company begins and another ends. In the last decade the fundamental relationship between industry and government has shifted in response to intermittent economic recessions as industry coalitions have made a concerted effort to have a dominant voice in governmental regulation, housing markets, and schools. Individual workers are subject to increased expectations. They must contribute more time, more “value added” creativity and constantly employ their friendship and kin connections to increase their knowledge capital in exchange for short-term economic security. Incursions by work organizations into both political and private realms of community life echo and rework the dynamics of the company town. Silicon Valley’s resources are less tangible than copper deposits. Several factors combine to make the Silicon Valley a prototype for a postmodern company town. The density of knowledge work, the fluidity of corporate boundaries and the job mobility of knowledge workers shape an environment in which high-technology work dominates the regional economy, and workism eclipses the lives of individuals.
3. In the beginning was Terman The standard historiography of the Valley nearly always begins with Stanford University’s Frederick Terman, a native of Palo Alto. Hired by Stanford in 1925 he decried the state of American electrical engineering. As he gained power within the institution, he hoped to create “a community of technical scholars” that would link industry with academia [4]. In the 1950s, he created the Stanford Industrial Park, now known as the Stanford Research Park. Two of his earliest students were a stunning success—William Hewlett and David Packard, whose garage, now a historic landmark, saw the birth of an audio oscillator Walt Disney used for Fantasia. Lobbying in 1930 for the Moffett Naval Air Base provided a focus for military
J.A. English-Lueck / Futures 32 (2000) 759–766
761
research. The klystron tube—foundation of modern radar and microwave communications—set the Varian brothers, two of the early key players, on the military industrial track. Defense spending continued to support high-risk industries after WWII. The role of federal spending in the development of the semiconductor industry was critical. Research and development sites proliferated. In 1956 William Shockley coinvented the transistor at Bell Laboratories. He moved back to Palo Alto to begin the Shockley Transistor Company, which begat Fairchild Semiconductor that in turned spawned fifty new companies between 1959 and 1979, including Intel, National Semiconductor and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). In addition, NASA’s Ames Research Center, Xerox, IBM, Westinghouse, Philco-Ford, General Electric Tempo, Sylvania, ITT and Lockheed all established research and development facilities in the area [5,6]. During the 1970s, the birth of personal computing redefined Silicon Valley. In yet another “Garage Myth”, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak began Apple. Atari, Osborne and Tandem broke ground in defining new directions in computing. A new player arrived to bankroll the risky start-ups: the venture capitalist. Drawing on the nearby capital center of San Francisco and other transnational sources, the venture capitalists pushed tech work in a new commercial direction. It was in this decade that Silicon Valley received its well-known appellation. In the 1980s an estimated 8000 technology corporations proliferated and a new strategy emerged. Japanese competition placed the self-contained megacompany at risk and by the end of the decade an increasing number of companies began to diversify and produce custom semiconductors, computers and components. Buying and vending components between companies blurred organizational boundaries. The workforce shifted as “contractors,” often former employees of recently downsized megafirms, worked on a project-by-project basis. A new generation of corporations emerged: Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics are examples. In addition, new manufacturers began to abandon closed protocols. An open protocol systems may expose technical secrets, but it allows many players to quickly develop custom hardware and a plethora of software applications [7]. The latter approach encourages intellectual networking and relatively free exchange of information and contributed to the “tradition” of network building and cooperation between firms [8]. This historical path set up the necessary conditions for reinventing the company town. A complex ecosystem of companies flourished as deeply interdependent workers exchanged information, migrated in and out of organizations, and created new niches as old ones decayed. The ephemerality of technological knowledge forced workers to stay alert and mobile as economic booms and busts cycled through the decades.
4. The primacy of work Work in Silicon Valley has become a framework for social organization at every level from community design to family life. At the most macroscopic level, political
762
J.A. English-Lueck / Futures 32 (2000) 759–766
life reflects the dominance of work. Joint Venture Silicon Valley is an exemplar case study. This nonprofit organization is a partnership of regional governmental officials and industry leaders trying to, in their own words, “reinvent the Valley that invented the future.” It has been a landmark heralding a new era in industrial involvement with the community. Job loss, diminished defense spending, and declining quality of life appeared to be taking a toll on the Valley in the early 1990s. In 1992 Joint Venture highlighted growing regional and international competition and painted a dramatic picture of future decline. Production would be gone, research greatly diminished and only corporate headquarters would tower above a crowded, poor, decaying community [9]. The suggested solution to avoiding this dismal fate would be to create a partnership of business leaders and local government officials, usually referred to as “the community,” that would ease regulatory problems, create networks to encourage start-ups, transform education, and augment the existing infrastructure with new technology. Business visionaries insisted that the efforts in various domains should be “innovative and paradigm-breaking”—symbolically charged adjectives in the Valley. For example, schools could be transformed into workforce factories that would produce skilled workers with industry academies as the model, so that high schools would be set up into clusters (health, electronics, computers) and run like industries. In early 1995 Hewlett-Packard and Silicon Graphics unveiled a twentymillion-dollar incentive plan through Joint Venture in which businesses would donate equipment and expertise to create “renaissance teams” that would help educators “abandon the outdated mass production model.” Joint Venture can work across district boundaries to implement the organization changes used in corporate culture to “reengineer” pedagogical process and curriculum development. Across a number of issues Joint Venture Silicon Valley has successfully redefined the concept of a company town. A new lobbying Council on Tax and Fiscal Policy was formed to engineer “one-stop shopping” to make it easier for business to negotiate local governmental regulations, especially environmental regulations. Corporate Chief Executive Officers formed the Health Care Task Force Advisory Board to create strategies to contain health care costs and develop an inventory of regional health care resources. Using lobbying, government partnerships and “innovative initiatives,” companies have reached out to redesign the governance, schools, utilities and even health care facilities of the community to make it “a better place for business.”
5. Penetrating daily life The primacy of work is not purely a political phenomenon, but reaches deeply into the lives of workers. High-tech professionals expect to work over eighty hours per week as projects peak, and to place the company at the center of their universe— becoming psychologically and physically fit to serve their work [10]. For example, one high-tech worker, who had a repetitive stress disorder, told me how she had transformed her life, stopping nearly all her recreational activities, so she could “save her hands” for her company.
J.A. English-Lueck / Futures 32 (2000) 759–766
763
In a traditional company town social control was imposed by the work organization. Companies created the infrastructure and people were imported to fill in the niches. Silicon Valley’s reinvented company town is more subtly spontaneous and deeply individualized. Various domains of life are not simply controlled by the company, they are integrated into lives that are dominated by work. Individuals, bouncing between organizations, put work first, rather than employment for a specific organization. Work transcends employment for a particular company, incorporating training, self-marketing, and network maintenance, as well as entrepreneurial and volunteer activities. Job mobility, made possible by the density of high-tech companies, permits individuals to see themselves as doing a particular kind of work, rather than being workers for a particular company. In the words of one worker, if the manager “is a cretin,” quit and find another job. If laid off, he opines it is no problem, another job will be there, perhaps after a period of “independent consulting.” This flexibility fosters an attitude that the individual is the locus for responsibility for successful work. Resume´s and training portfolios must be kept up to date, even if decades of previous employment exist. The burden of job fitness lies with the employee. As work extends beyond the employment site into other venues—homes, cars, restaurants, playgrounds—it becomes increasingly integrated with other facets of life. Parents juggle home, work and day-care using elaborate schedules, layering midday calls to fellow soccer parents at work with late-night calls to colleagues in Australia with nursing infant in arms. Responsibility for that integration lies not with the work organization but with individuals who view themselves as bundles of skills that must constantly be reinvented to function in a changing workplace. Individuals recreate themselves with organizations acting as midwife to that process. Several factors allow people to restructure their work and nonwork lives. The sense of a workplace is eroded. Work is not something that is done at a workplace, but a bundle of activities that is done in multiple places. Home too is distributed across the landscape as people interact with friends and family in many places. Home is not merely one address, but anyplace you “do family.” The workplace has introduced devices that have become integrated into life—personal computers, on-line services, voice mail, pagers and cell phones, making work a “24 and 7” proposition, all day every day. At the same time the devices allow people’s personal networks, their social capital, to become increasingly accessible. These communication support networks allow the necessary integration of work and personal life. As work activities—planning, communicating, creating and reflecting—are enacted in nonwork venues, a variety of personal activities and relationships can be harnessed for work purposes. People use their integrated work/nonwork activities instrumentally to serve a variety of purposes. Two high-tech workers, taking their small children to a Gymboree play class, exchange business cards as they sing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” The intermeshing of work and nonwork activities doesn’t simply mean that work coexists with many other functions, but that work becomes the filter through which relationships and activities are processed (see Table 1). Silicon Valley is undergoing a political restructuring to allow it to “succeed in a given industry,” to use the old definition of a company town, rethinking a wide number of social institutions to make them business user friendly. This is being done
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Table 1 Features of the new company town Individual
Community
Work dominates life Harness friends/family for work Continually upgrading own “bundle of skills” Information technologies fuel constant access, blur work/home Business/tech metaphors describe relationships
Industry dominates community Public–private partnerships Education becomes workforce preparation Technology and mobility blur company and municipal boundaries Business/tech metaphors define community identity
by the use of public–private partnerships and the reworking of high-tech business discourse into the body politic. More significantly for the worker of the future, the continually changing and demanding work practices of high tech have fostered a self-morphing worker that has extended and integrated the activities of work into the rest of life so that no matter what the time or place, it is another day in the company town.
6. Company town 2005 As ethnographers who “discover the future,” we listened closely to the scenarios that would spontaneously emerge in conversation and public discourse. We asked teachers, technologists and technocrats to project their own versions of Silicon Valley’s near future. How would they describe the best plausible future? What would happen in the worst plausible one? What did they think was likely to happen? As expected, over the course of the 1990s, the optimism ebbed and flowed with the economy. The recession of the early 1990s fueled a pessimism that Silicon Valley would be overshadowed by other silicon places. The near-millennial economic boom supported a much more buoyant vision. However, the values underlying the visions were remarkably coherent and painted a picture of life increasingly dominated by work and industry. The pattern of increasing access would lead to a work life of “24 and 7,” referring to hours and days of availability, dominating daily life. There would be fewer opportunities to separate work and home life and that merger would accelerate. Information technologies would become even more ubiquitous and facilitate the takeover of work. The community would be well on its way to reform, business providing guidance and funding to education. Ironically, the very success of Silicon Valley posed dangers. A spiraling cost of living would create a community of high-living professionals, with service providers living increasingly impoverished lives. Young people, teachers, and janitors would commute long distances into the area, or simply leave. A service gap would grow and manufacturing would fade. Several tacit assumptions were imbedded in these visions. First, it was never questioned that technology would continue to dominate the community in economy and passion. No one postulated the rejection or rethinking of technology, but only mused
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that it did make the takeover of work more inevitable. Few people questioned the penetration of industry into education, housing, and health care. The only debate is whether professionals in those fields would maintain some autonomy in setting their own agenda or whether industry should make it clear what it wants and the community would adjust. The idea that the community was a platform for industry remained virtually unquestioned. If Silicon Valley is truly a bell-wether for the future, implications surface that beg discussion. Some features of Silicon Valley are widely shared—such as the penetration of information technologies and the restructuring of work into interdependent global networks. However, Silicon Valley does have distinctive features which may not reflect other communities. Silicon Valley is a community of producers, a feature which amplifies their lives as consumers. Not everyone shares the passion for technology which is the raison d’eˆtre for Silicon Valley. “Technolust,” to cite our interviewees term, does color the perception that technology reigns supreme. High technology fuels short production cycles that shape the preoccupation with time and work. The characteristic job mobility of the region—managers look askance at people who spend “years” in one company—accentuates the feeling that the area is one big undefined company. Sojourners from the Midwest or Bangalore move to the area to work and partake in the “Silicon Valley lifestyle,” so that the pace of life and focus on work are ultimately self-selecting and self-perpetuating. When international visitors come to the region to find “the secret of Silicon Valley” to replicate back home, they are disturbed by the unquestioned primacy of work that is essential to the postmodern company town. While such global elite may want the prosperity that comes with the company town, they may not want the values and constraints it also delivers. One such person, an Australian industry leader, reflected on his visit to Silicon Valley and his discussion with our team of ethnographers about the emerging cultural reality. He reflected that Silicon Valley may not be a model, but “a timely reality check on where we are all heading”, and he asks the question, “is this the kind of world we want to live in?” [11].
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[8] Ignoffo MJ. Sunnyvale: from the “City of Destiny” to the “Heart of Silicon Valley.” Unpublished thesis, Department of History, San Jose State University, 1991, p. 67. [9] SRI International Center for Economic Competitiveness. Joint Venture Silicon Valley: an economy at risk. Phase 1 diagnostic report, San Jose Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, 1993, p. 61. [10] Hayes D. Behind the silicon curtain: The seductions of work in a lonely era. Boston: South End Press, 1989. [11] Coroneos P. Study of US developments. The Canberra Connection. Internet Industry Newsletter, September 1998. http:www.iia.net.au/news/980902.html.