Underperformative economies: Discrimination and gendered ideas of workplace culture in San Francisco’s digital media sector

Culture, the “merely cultural” economy, and digital media work

In her 1997 paper “Merely cultural,” Butler examines two major claims of scholarship at the time. The first claim is an objection made by Marxists to the perceived reduction of Marxism to a form of cultural studies; the second claim is the dismissal by Marxists of social movements and activist politics as concerns that are “merely cultural,” against the supposed more serious economic interests of class-based collective action. Butler examines how culture and economy are consistently constructed therein as separate spheres and how economy is rendered more important and more material than the “merely” cultural sphere. Butler reflects on how the intellectual hubris that subordinates culture to economy in these claims results in the marginalization of sexism and homophobia as legitimate concerns. In response she argues that ideas of culture and economy are materially and discursively produced, and that these products are not neutral but serve a political function.

I contend that Butler’s observations apply more broadly than to debates within contemporary Marxism alone. For example, Mitchell (1995) argues that geographers often (and perhaps inadvertently) ontologize culture and economy as separate and distinct objects of study that can then be discretely examined (see also Barnett, 1998; Castree, 2003). He argues instead that culture and economy are ideas that have particular discursive and material effects, and that unduly ontologizing these categories hides the power relations that might be reproduced, resisted, or reified through their use. I apply this critique in the rest of this subsection to discuss how ideas of culture are mobilized in descriptions of economic transition. I develop this further in the sections before the conclusion to discuss how ideas of workplace culture are reproduced in the context of digital media work in San Francisco.

In describing economic transition, academic writers often describe certain kinds of work and economic activity as cultural, but typically without examining how particular ideas of culture and economy are (re)produced in that description (Ettlinger, 2010). For example, in the case of the cultural industries discourse—inherited from Horkeimer and Adorno (2002)—culture is used to designate the production of supposed cultural commodities, such as movies, advertisements, radio programs (Banks and Deuze, 2009; Grabher, 2002; Hesmondalgh and Baker, 2008) and—pertinent for this study—digital media products such as websites and mobile applications (Girard and Stark, 2003; Ross, 2003). For Hesmondalgh (2013: 16), the cultural industries are associated with “the production of social meaning,” in which “the primary aim […] is to communicate to an audience, to create texts.” This idea of culture, in focusing on commodities that circulate as texts, elides the cultural lives of commodities that are less obviously textual but no less socially meaningful or affectively charged—an obvious example being automobiles. Enforcing these separations through this strictly outlined idea of culture forecloses the possibility of analysis that might usefully connect up the cultural with the presumed non-cultural (Pratt, 1997). A cultural industries framework may occlude the relation between Apple and Foxconn in a global production network situated between, yet dependent upon, for example, the supposed uncultural work of tin extraction in Indonesia and the cultural work of digital media development in California (Chan et al, 2013). This idea of culture in the cultural industries discourse is one that therefore ignores the appropriative, violent, and racialized processes that characterize the production of consumer electronics.

The cultural industries have to some extent been assimilated into a host of other terms that include cultural economy, ⁴ creative economy, new economy, and knowledge economy (Florida, 2002; Neilson and Coté, 2014). Here, culture refers to a kind of work in tertiary and quaternary sectors that may include “high levels of human capital in regard to functions such as analytical thinking, judgement and decision-making, fluency of ideas, social perceptiveness, capacities for interaction with others, and imaginative” (Scott, 2010: 115), often including emotional and affective labor (Hardt and Negri, 2000), and that is often used to characterize a shift from Fordist to post-Fordist kinds of work (see Gibson and Kong, 2005). Here, culture is used as a description of work that depends upon characteristics such as cooperation and emotional and embodied interaction. In using culture to describe a particular kind of work—as is often done to describe digital media work—attention is directed away from how those characteristics are also present in other kinds of work. There is an implicit assumption that primary and secondary economic sectors are somehow less cultural, inter-personal, or knowledge-based than tertiary and quaternary sectors. As Pini et al.’s (2010) analysis has identified in terms of mining communities, ideas of culture and economy that are gendered, embodied, and dependent on emotional labor are also dynamically constructed in the non-cultural economy, and not just in tertiary and quaternary sector roles (see also Beer, 2018; Smith 2015). Cultural and creative economy narratives not only exclude certain groups in their designation of culture and creativity, but also ignore how the material and discursive construction of these categories is a process that is itself already exclusionary (Batnitzky and McDowell, 2011).

Although important in their attempt to designate real differences in working practices, these ideas of culture too quickly reproduce the notion that certain kinds of commodities, working practices, or periods of economic history are straightforwardly cultural and that others are not, occluding more than they reveal through a too abrupt and general narration of economic transition and categorization (Gill and Pratt, 2008; McDowell and Christopherson, 2009). As others have noted, the economy is always and already embedded within social and cultural systems (Granovetter, 1985; Peck, 2013; Polanyi, 1957), and thus the critical task becomes one of examining how different ideas of culture and economy are dynamically deployed as relations of power across these different systems (Mitchell, 1995). The ideas of culture produced in the cultural industries and cultural economies discourses are ones in which “cultural” remains an unmarked and unexamined category, a neutral adjective that merely describes an attribute of the noun-subject “economy,” yet one that somehow also functions objectively to delineate a distinct form of new work. If in Crang’s (1997: 4) critical assessment of how ideas of culture may be reified through cultural economy discourses, “culture is seen as materialized in the economic,” the implication is both that culture was not material before, and that it is dependent upon (and therefore subordinate to) the economy in order to render it material. While perhaps attempting to elevate culture as a category worthy of investigation in line with Butler’s challenge above, these distinctions reproduce an idea of culture in which primary and secondary sectors are less cultural, and in which the economic remains the foundational category. As Ettlinger (2009) notes through a discussion of the emotion–rationality dualism, the resulting (re)orientation of economy and culture organizes each term as once again separate, with the latter subordinate to the former.

Against those who strive to retain the concept of culture (Duncan and Duncan, 2004) I suggest that, in the context of work, we must examine how particular ideas of culture and economy are materially and discursively produced (Barnett 2001; Mitchell, 1998; Schoenberger, 1997). In this conceptualization, culture does not refer - it is not something with a capacity to act—instead is that which is referred to. Ideas of culture are produced and reified through their enactment, reproduction, and performance. This poststructuralist account of culture situates the deed before the doer, questions the temporality of the subject with respect to their acts, and pushes the idea of culture from a quasi-transcendental to an immanent register (Butler, 1990). By viewing culture as produced rather than pre-existent, we can see how ideas of culture function to examine the power relations therein. In the next subsection, I develop this line of thought alongside queer and affect theory to give an account of how this kind of production functions—through emotional investments in particular ideas of culture.

Confidence and underperformativity

The task here then is to articulate how different ideas of culture and economy are produced, circulate, and function in a given working setting. The point is not to find a more authentic definition of culture, but to examine what kinds of ideas about economy and culture are reproduced and reified. I theorize this through Ngai’s concept of confidence as the tone of capitalism and Berlant’s concept of underperformativity. These concepts both suggest that part of the work of producing ideas of culture and economy is conferred through the emotional labors and investments in these terms that are characterized by our unfeeling of them. In this section, I situate the ideological resonance of normative and gendered ideas of culture as an underperformed confidence in particular kinds of work around which both emotional and financial investments are made. The culture–economy dualism and—as I discuss below—interviewees’ accounts of it are one expression of this reification.

To emphasize that accumulation is accompanied by particular sets of bodily dispositions, behaviors, and affects that are not incidental to the mode of production, but that form some of its defining and constitutive components, Ngai (2005: 71) has described confidence as “the seemingly neutral tone of capitalism itself.” She describes the subtlety of confidence as the “feeling that cannot be felt and whose power to lubricate nonaffective exchanges rests precisely on its resistance to being psychically registered” (p. 76). Confidence in productive and financial systems is confirmed not by a psychic or somatic feeling, but by an unfeeling relation to them. Confidence describes a structure of unfeeling in which the absence of felt resonance consummates the “natural” qualities of markets, exchange, and flows of trust in these systems. Building on characterizations of market relations in terms of performativity (Christophers, 2014), I suggest that Ngai’s reading relates closely to Berlant’s (2015) concept of underperformativity, which she uses to point to the unreadability of overdetermined affect. Inscrutable or reticent affect cannot be equated with an absence of feeling toward – for example – a job or a system of accumulation. This underperformance of overdetermined affect may in fact confirm rather than deny the consistency of such attachments, precisely through our inability to acknowledge them.

Sociologists like Hochschild (1983) write about the relationship between emotion and service sector work in which emotions cannot be faked since surplus value must be procured through the manufacture of authentic feeling. For Hochschild, it is not feeling itself, but the conferral of its authenticity that connotes a successful working performance. That authenticity is actually a contrived production of emotional labor must be hidden or underperformed in order to mask the production of authenticity itself, so as to retain confidence in authenticity as something unfelt. Ahmed (2004: 12, original emphasis) notes that “attention to emotions allows us to address the question of how subjects become invested in particular structures.” The right working feeling, or unfeeling, is the set of subtle conferrals that we are appropriately invested in or oriented toward those right working objects, subjectivities, and structures. Emotion and feeling are “not ‘in’ either the individual or the social, but produce the very surfaces and boundaries that allow the individual and the social to be delineated as if they are objects” (Ahmed, 2004: 10). Emotional orientations and disorientations in this context contribute to a repetition of some of the dominant dualisms—culture and economy, home and work, emotion and rationality (Ettlinger, 2009; Massey, 1995)—that structure working life. In consonance with Ngai’s points above, the successful work product is not the right feeling, but the confirmation that the right feeling is a real one through our inability to detect that the feeling is manufactured in the first place. A successful manufacture of authentic feeling is precisely unfelt and underperformed.

Capitalism in this way offers a feeling of supposed community that is often more alluring than democratic society, familial kinship, or alternative relations of belonging, and that resonates ambivalently with subjects that seek reciprocity from somewhere, especially given the increasing absence of economic, social, and emotional forms of support from the state (Berlant, 2011; Joseph, 2002; Povinelli, 2011). From these points of view, more than demonstrating that the economy is an emotional system toward which we are materially and psychically attached (which it certainly is), the task is to show how this subjective system of attachment is covered over by the framing of those feelings as authentic, objective, and invisible, that is, by also attempting to account for how psychic attachments are unfelt or unreadable in terms of feeling, and thus how these systems are reified as natural expressions of the normal way of working and living. I suggest that an affective reading of the economic can be situated ambivalently in this middle ground between feeing and unfeeling, characterized as an underperformativity in which attachments that we do not necessarily feel confirm rather than deny our confidence in capitalist efficacy, and contributes to its reproduction. Though often unfelt, this underperformativity nevertheless has real discursive and material effects, that in this paper I conceptualize primarily in terms of the gendered and discriminatory ideas of culture that include cultural fit in hiring practices and the diagnoses of certain firms as having cultural problems.

In the analysis that follows I situate the particularly gendered ideas of the culture–economy dualism as the application of this conceptual framework—as what is confidently unfelt and underperformed in the workplace. Interviewees responded to these ideas of culture in different ways. Yet, the success of capitalism’s unfelt naturalness as outlined in this section was counfounded by interviewees in two ways that relate to the complexity of the relationality between feeling and the subject. First, not all interviewees demonstrated an unfeeling relation to the confident reiteration of established ideas of culture, or to working norms and practices more broadly. As Ngai (2005) notes in the quote above, capitalism’s confident tone resists psychic registration, but does not block it wholesale. Thus, the unfelt and underperformative character of these ideas of culture were never certain in all cases, and for many, discriminatory ideas of culture were very keenly and directly felt. For example, some interviewees questioned and rejected these confident ideas of culture and economy, while others self-consciously celebrated them. Second, the subject’s psychic and affective representations of these confident and only-sometimes-unfelt ideas of culture are complex and ambivalent since “affective qualities are revealed or ‘read’ by our own feelings (sentiments) but are not identical to them” (Ngai, 2005: 47). As I discuss next, this presents something as a methodological problem given the lack of relational clarity around the researcher’s reading of a subject’s felt, expressed, and discussed representation of a given affective structure.

Firm culture, hiring practices, and “cultural fit”

In a fairly common outlining of how culture is understood in the sense of a firm’s culture, one interview subject, Adrian, noted that, “the combination or sum of those people [at your company] is essentially your culture, […] things that you can do as the leaders and managers to establish that, in terms of some norms and things that you might do to influence that.” In this rendition, culture was a paradoxically democratic and hierarchical logic, both immanent to the dispositions of the set of already-hired individuals, but also directed and guided by managers.

Another interviewee, Louise, emphasized that culture referred to the “silent agreements” that percolated into a firm or working milieu that intersected with national and local culture and shared languages and norms, leading her to ask, “what are the silent agreements of our [working] culture?” And, “how do we create this kind of implicit rules inside of the company?” In asking these questions, Louise emphasized how much goes unsaid in the workplace, how work actually undertaken may exceed tasks outlined in job descriptions (if they’re even formally outlined to begin with), and how certain expectations and conventions are tacit. I conceptualize these silent agreements as an underperformative confidence in a firm’s existing working system, since they are often, in Louise’s framing, unspoken aspects of working practice. Like Dyer et al.’s (2008) discussion of hidden work, Louise’s silent agreements implied circumstances in which work was not formally recorded and functioned to further rationalize some kinds of work as necessarily hidden, uncountable, or unpayable.

When discussing hiring practices, interviewees talked about cultural fit as a way to assess if someone was right for a firm’s culture, often irrespective of their formal qualifications (Rivera, 2012). Cultural fit was framed alongside concerns around when in a firm’s development certain kinds of hiring could take place. For example, Adrian said that cultural fit was about “bringing in the right kind of people,” but also that in the context of his own relatively early stage firm that it was “too early to worry about diversity.” By explicitly divesting diversity from definitions of cultural fit Adrian implied an association between the “right kind of people” and those that replicated the characteristics of existing founders, investors, and other early-stage employees. By stating that diversity and hiring the right kind of people were incompatible, and as I discuss further in the next section, cultural fit functioned as a silent agreement, an underperformed aspect of this idea of culture, to replicate sameness over difference and become a euphemism or excuse for hiring predominantly white male workers.

The silent agreements of cultural fit also coincided with an expectation that those who would best fit with the culture of a firm were those willing to work more or harder, or to perform tasks outside of their job description. Adrian stated,

there’s a guy been here every morning at like 5:30, 6am, and he would take care of any dishes that were left out, you know, he would help out with IT stuff, […] it wasn’t his job you know, but all this extra stuff, we were having a BBQ, and he would have a chef mock-up on, and would be flipping burgers, […] he would always volunteer, that kind of person. You know, who really cared more, it wasn’t just a job that you show up to every day, you know it was, about providing a really great experience for people around you.

In this case, the “right kind of person” was someone who would volunteer, who “really cared,” and who undertook office tasks like cleaning and cooking that remain stereotypically woman-gendered, domestic, and unpaid forms of work (McDowell, 2015). Reified here are a set of circumstances that “construct care as symbolically outside the economic” (Dyer et al., 2008: 2031). Here, the underperformed assumptions in the office were based on normative understandings of gendered work and how certain kinds of tasks are (under)valued. Assessing cultural fit was predicated on an employee’s willingness to enthusiastically undertake additional roles beyond their formal job at a firm. For Adrian, someone who was a cultural fit was someone who would work more for less.

Discussing how his firm assessed cultural fit, Craig said, “whenever we interviewed somebody, the final step of the interview was a five- to ten-minute presentation in front of the entire company by the interviewee, on something they were passionate about.” He continued, “that was just a way of ensuring, oh ‘is this guy [sic] gonna add to this culture, is he going to fit in?’ Yes, he has the technical skills, but does he have the cultural ones?” When I pressed Craig on what precisely he meant by cultural skills, he sought to clarify,

I don’t think anyone should discriminate based off of how buddy buddy they could be with someone after work. […] The number one priority was can this person help the company excel, and are they, hopefully they’re not combative, if they can communicate well and they’re good at their gig, that was all that mattered.

By shifting emphasis Craig introduced ambiguity in this idea of culture. He first described evidence of a candidate’s cultural fit through exclusively male-gendered pronouns in the context of appropriately passionate presentations of the self. He then avoided discussing how a performance in front of the whole firm might exclude those who were unable to produce those passionate performances—those who might disturb the unfelt confidence in the system—which as Vijaya et al. (2015) note may be a way to reproduce a firm’s maleness and whiteness. Craig then assured me that this was less a question of personal compatibility than of aligning the prospective hire’s disposition with that of the firm’s to ensure that employees are compliant and “not combative.” Finally, Craig claimed that communication and qualifications were all that really mattered, leaving the definition of cultural fit and the purposes of the firm-wide presentation ambiguous. By the end of Craig’s description, there is no clear sense of what idea of culture was being conveyed, perhaps pointing to the absence of a clear concept of culture beneath the practical performance of hiring practices. Though ambiguous with regards to an idea of culture, Craig does outline a situation in which the hiring practices at his firm were an attempt to reproduce the confident agreement in the given system around only particular and masculine working bodies.

This sentiment was repeated by Eric who said that a big part of hiring was a function of, “how dedicated are these people, you know? […] It’s all like Stanford students and kids, they’ll come in, they’re not really dedicated, […], they’re not willing to sacrifice anything, like all of us at this company has.” For Eric, working for his firm didn’t appear first and foremost to be about qualification or skill at all, but was described as a form of self-sacrificial dedication. Discussing his disappointment with many prospective hires, he said, “their hearts’ not in it […] they don’t really want it, because, […] really putting the time, and going through all the shit and putting up with it, almost every one of them washes out, it gets really tough.” Eric made more explicit what went unspoken and perhaps unfelt in earlier accounts of cultural fit, that is, that cultural fit was about finding the kind of person who would exchange their labor time not for a wage, the possibility of career advancement, to provide for their family, or to be able to pay into a health or pension fund, but in order to appeal to a sense of self-sacrificial, passionate, and loving deference to the firm itself, or, in Eric’s framing, for the sake of “their heart.” Rather than a kind of unfelt confidence that Ngai (2005) describes, Eric’s description was far more emphatic, less a reticent underperformativity, and more an explicit and excessive reification of some of the ideas of culture others described. He said, “we want people who really understand the collaboration process and selfless collaboration.” Financially Eric’s allusion was to taking equity over a wage as a form of payment. He said,

I don’t pay any rent, the company takes care of that, and then, I’ll maybe get a check for $1,000 a month, and everything [else] comes out of personal savings or whatever. If I really need some expense or something we can talk about it, but we all try and live as cheap as we can. And obviously, we all have equity, and there’s […] the vesting schedule, it’s the same as everybody else, everybody gets the same deal, there’s four years, one year cliff, obviously different amounts of equity.

In this case, the unacknowledged and inarticulable elitism implicit in previous descriptions of cultural fit was clearer in Eric’s framing—what was to be prioritized in terms of hiring was a male body privileged enough to able to live without a wage or other systems of employer-provided support through the use of personal resources.

Cultural problems

Another of my interviewees, Michael, highlighted the demand for emotional labor at work. He attributed his being asked to leave to his lack of enthusiasm. Commenting on the difficulty he had finding a job in the first place he said, “I didn’t really find anything that I felt I could get excited about, because most startups around here that I’ve talked to, they really want their employees to be excited about the mission of the company and the vision, and they believe in it themselves.” Michael implies that a prerequisite for working in San Francisco digital media startups is a certain enthusiastic disposition toward one’s work. He situated the demand to reproduce the underperformed confidence in particular ways of working as a kind of emotional labor represented through enthusiastic performances of the self, which he framed as more primary than qualifications. I asked Michael why he was laid off from his most recent position. He replied,

no specific reasons were stated; they told me that I was an excellent engineer, but I’m pretty sure it was because I just wasn’t excited about it. […] They were pushing me to lead an engineering team, which I didn’t want to do, because there wasn’t any more money in it, and I didn’t want the extra responsibility and stress.

Michael suggests that his employers were unable to articulate their reason for firing him, but that, in his interpretation, he was fired for refusing to accept additional work and responsibilities without a corresponding rise in pay. The inarticuability of his employers’ reason suggests both an underperformative and unfelt aspect of work that could not be spoken of but that functioned as a disciplinary mechanism in this setting. Michael’s refusal to represent confidence in this existing unspoken system through an enthusiastic manufacture of emotional labor presented a threat to the consistency of that structure of unfeeling.

Another interviewee, Amanda, relayed how her firm had received a diagnosis from their investors as having culture problems. Her firm, attempting to build a social media platform, had encountered difficulties around user-retention and were having trouble monetizing user activity. “I had the sense that it might be a sinking ship,” she said, “a product like [ours], that people didn’t really take very seriously.” These issues resulted in the firm’s investors flying in from Israel in an attempt to remedy the situation so that their investment might not be squandered. Part of their diagnosis was that the firm had a culture problem, related to, Amanda noted, “internal drama […], people were unhappy with the abilities of the CEO as a leader.” The response from the CEO, following recommendations from the investors, was to mandate a compulsory firm-wide retreat the following week to encourage team building and collegiality. “I felt especially frustrated by that retreat because I felt like […] it wasn’t an option, […] I felt like it was a waste of my time,” Amanda said, “when we were there trying to have some productive discussions around mission and stuff, they just didn’t go well.”

More than feeling that the retreat was a waste of her time Amanda said that afterwards she was “pulled aside by my new manager,” who told her, “some people felt like you weren’t really a team player on the retreat.” In this instance, not being a team player was a reference to Amanda’s decision to spend some of her time reading, which appeared to her managers’ as a less-than-enthusiastic endorsement of the retreat. Amanda emphasized how she was specifically singled out. “When other people went to their room […] or needed time to relax, they weren’t considered ‘not a team player.’” Her manager said, “I needed you to be going along with everything.” Yet, as she emphasized to me, “I’m not responsible for making this retreat successful, […] I felt like he was reprimanding me like I was in school, and I felt it was weird, like, ‘am I not doing my job?’ And then he was like, ‘no you are,’ so I was like, ‘well… what’s the problem?’” Her manager, Amanda relayed, was unable to answer her. Here again, the inarticulability of a response to Amanda’s question points to those silent agreements that are successful precisely because they remain unfelt. By refusing to be a “team player”—to display unconditional enthusiasm and to go along with everything—Amanda’s actions were met with confusion. By making felt a problematic around those usually unfelt and confident working performances Amanda become the source of the problem itself (Ahmed, 2010).

Amy emphasized how her nonparticipation in particular kinds of jokes and apparently optional social events at and after work marked her conduct as problematic. “I felt isolated in my own way, I kind of exhibited some kind of isolating behavior. I sat at a different end of the table, when they were having conversations, kind of like their boy talk. […] I get to a point, when I lose respect, it’s very visible and I just have to get out.” Amy noted a “crass humor, like woman jokes, racist jokes,” adding, “I was really honestly kind of surprised, with someone who represents those two groups present [i.e., herself as a woman of color] people felt it was okay to just joke like that.” Amy’s double adverbial and quasi-exclamatory narration of her own surprise (“really honestly”) that racist and sexist jokes would circulate even in her presence at work is testimony to the sanctity of white masculinity in the workplace, and the aestheticization of racial difference, endemic to this and other working contexts (Ahmed, 2012; Joshi et al., 2015). In being isolated and excluded both by and from the shared comfort of discriminatory and racist speech (Berlant, 2008), Amy physically removed herself from the table, and thereby became a target for further isolation by some of her co-workers. Her irritation marked Amy as different from the established idea of culture that normalized discrimination and harassment.