Abstract
The dynamic and turbulent software industry is, it turns out, a lot like the sleepy world of Lake Wobegon immortalized by Garrison Keillor. It is a world where everybody is above average, and where this is central to everyone’s identity. Daniel Marschall provides a lively ethnographic tour through such a world.
Based on five years of ethnographic research at a small software development company in Washington DC and the surrounding region, The Company We Keep tells the story of a number of linked software companies. Working primarily through his contacts with the founders of a company he appropriately calls IntenSivity, Marschall takes us from the origin of the firm in a previous company through the dot.com boom and onward into the demise of the firm in the dot.bomb era. The ethnographic account focuses on organizational culture and processes, rather than on the work of software itself—exploring the forms of community that emerge across these companies, from the interactions around work to the enduring ties among workers within the industry.
Among the various ethnographies of software and other high-tech companies, Marschall’s stands out for its longitudinal perspective and its ability to track the various phases of the firm, in the process documenting one of the more dramatic eras in the high-tech industry. He achieves this primarily through tracking the fortunes of the company’s founders—the ethnography provides a fascinating account of their trajectories as well as those of their companies. Following their origins in a previous DC-area firm, he documents the early emergence of a start-up company, its consolidation over time, and the tensions around the start-up “going corporate.” One of the more interesting features of the ethnography is that, while a commercial and customer focus was always significant within the firm and was rarely contested by the software developers, the increasing bureaucratic control over finance and technology that came with growth and consolidation created significant tensions and dissatisfaction. While software workers seem willing to tolerate the pressures and insecurities of the market, they guard their autonomy from hierarchy closely.
This is a fascinating study of what Chris Benner described in Work in the New Economy (2002) as the combination of socialized work and individualized employment that is so characteristic of software companies. It adds significantly to the body of case studies that are already shedding light on high-tech work. In addition to the longitudinal and founder-based perspective, the book provides telling descriptions and analyses of a number of other issues.
The role of customers in defining the firm receives significantly more attention than in most similar ethnographies. Throughout the history of the firm, corporate customers loom large—from the dealings of the company in its early days with other start-ups to often difficult negotiations with large firms as the company grows. Incorporating code and even developers from larger firms spark something of a cultural crisis within IntenSivity as, from the developers’ perspective, a software company is defined mainly by its code and developers rather than its finances and intellectual property.
The subtitle of the book refers to the importance of occupational community in high-tech industry and there is much here that sheds light on that community. The ethnography reveals the ongoing fusion of the communal and the corporate within software’s occupational community. Developer autonomy, often loudly declared and closely protected, is nonetheless combined with the strong role of charismatic founder managers. Even more intriguingly, these contradictions are often made explicit in the regular stream of communication and discussion regarding the culture of the software firm itself—with language serving as a crucial element of this community, defining principles of action (Nurture the Hurt!) as well as providing occasional declarations of love for software and the community that makes up its industry.
The usual masculine ethos of high-tech communities is no different here and is obvious in this language of the industry, which draws heavily on competitive idioms, team and (especially) adventure sports, and values “intensity” and a lifestyle centered almost exclusively on work. In an intriguing but underdeveloped section, Marschall argues that this macho atmosphere did not underpin a culture that was hostile or demeaning to women. Instead, it co-existed with a “geek feminism,” which recognized the masculine character of the culture while also experiencing its brash, combative style as containing a meritocratic core. However, the fact remained that the vast bulk of developers were male and that “geek feminism” appeared to be the only femininity that was compatible with the cultural and time demands of the organization of software workplaces. The treatment of selection mechanisms within the occupational community could be further elaborated.
The Company We Keep is a lively ethnography that brings us along on the wild ride IntenSivity followed during these years of boom and bubble. However the full potential of the book is not quite realized, as some of the most fascinating elements of the analyses—including the role of customers and the definition and characteristics of occupational community—are only partly evaluated. Strangely, given the author’s background in organizing and the rich material he has provided, the analysis of control and power is only weakly developed, both in terms of gender and of precarity and class. There are intriguing analyses here of the tensions between individualism and community, and between corporate culture and solidarities within occupations, but these are not fully conceptualized. Nonetheless, this is a sharply written ethnography with significant insights in every chapter into the ongoing puzzle that is occupational community in the high-tech network society.