Article
Intensifying Work and Chasing Innovation: Incorporating Care in Silicon Valley
Anthropology of Work Review
(2017)
Abstract
The struggle for labor rights is often one of asserting embodied care. Workers negotiate for rest and safe physical conditions. In the United States, further embodied care is translated into health care and family leave benefits. In Silicon Valley, while labor still struggles in the service and manufacturing sectors, professional high-tech work constitutes another set of challenges and expectations. Startup culture draws on the university-student lifestyle—where institutionalized care includes a broad palette of wellness care, cafeterias, and structured recreation. So it is not surprising that yoga, massage, food, and managed fun made their way into high-tech workplaces of the late twentieth century. Increasingly, however, that corporate care is a requirement, not a perquisite, of progressive companies recruiting elite workers. Effective care requires personal awareness and corporate surveillance in order to be effective. Corporate responsibility in Silicon Valley workplaces embraces discourses in which worker productivity and care intertwine. This care is not evenly distributed or available to all workers, but still points to an emerging set of corporate care practices. Knowledge workers are expected to work more intensively, and employers sustain them by providing care. That logic of care shaped the social experience of both care providers, such as chefs and concierges, and workers, who learn to be the subjects of such care. Based on two decades of fieldwork in companies from Apple to Yahoo, this article outlines the uneven evolution of Silicon Valley's corporate care.
Disciplines
Publication Date
June 1, 2017
DOI
10.1111/awr.12111
Publisher Statement
Copyright © 2017 American Anthropological Association. This is a post print of an article published in Anthropology of Work Review. The published version of the article may be found online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/awr.12111
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Citation Information
Jan English-Lueck and Miriam L Avery. "Intensifying Work and Chasing Innovation: Incorporating Care in Silicon Valley" Anthropology of Work Review Vol. 38 Iss. 1 (2017) p. 40 - 49 ISSN: 0883-024X Available at: http://works.bepress.com/jan_english-lueck/30/