Search Results

Why the Valley Went First: Aggregation and Emergence in Regional Inventor Networks

Lee Fleming, Lyra Colfer, Alexandra Marin, and Jonathan McPhie

in The Emergence of Organizations and Markets

This chapter shows the early emergence of Silicon Valley and Boston. Much has been made of the cultural differences between Silicon Valley in the Bay Area and Boston's Route 128. The chapter digs ... More

This chapter shows the early emergence of Silicon Valley and Boston. Much has been made of the cultural differences between Silicon Valley in the Bay Area and Boston's Route 128. The chapter digs beneath this surface portrait, discerning which organizations are most generative. It looks at the structural differences between two leading technology hubs. Using patent data that capture inventor networks, the chapter highlights the importance of careers. It also reveals much greater information flow and career mobility across organizations and industries in the Valley than in Boston. This movement of people and ideas was spurred by the critical intermediary roles of certain institutions which functioned like the anchor tenants that were the pollinators in the biotechnology clusters in Chapter 14. The chapter thus argues that this anchoring of diversity is central to the formation of technology clusters.Less

Myths of the Market

Neil Fligstein

in The Institutions of the Market: Organizations, Social Systems, and Governance

This chapter aims to supplement the understanding of entrepreneurship and competition by demonstrating that they cannot occur without governments and stable social structures to support them. It ... More

This chapter aims to supplement the understanding of entrepreneurship and competition by demonstrating that they cannot occur without governments and stable social structures to support them. It considers two major developments in the American economy that have been typically hailed as emblematic of the working out of free markets: the emergence of the ‘shareholder value’ conception of the firm and the rise and growth of Silicon Valley. It is shown that these phenomena were not just caused by entrepreneurial activity, but were embedded in pre-existing social relations. In both cases, the government played a pivotal role in pushing forward the conditions for ‘entrepreneurial activity’. The chapter discusses why governments sometimes do not figure in either economic or some economic sociological arguments about markets and economic growth, and suggests how an economic sociology with a view of embeddedness that includes governments, law, and supporting institutions offers a more complete picture of market evolution.Less

The International Mobility of Entrepreneurs and Regional Upgrading in India and China

AnnaLee Saxenian

in The International Mobility of Talent: Types, Causes, and Development Impact

By 2000, over one-third of Silicon Valley's high-skilled workers were foreign-born, and overwhelmingly from Asia. These US-educated engineers are transforming developmental opportunities for formerly ... More

By 2000, over one-third of Silicon Valley's high-skilled workers were foreign-born, and overwhelmingly from Asia. These US-educated engineers are transforming developmental opportunities for formerly peripheral regions as they build professional and business connections to their home countries. In a process more akin to ‘brain circulation’ than ‘brain drain’, these engineers and entrepreneurs, aided by the lowered transaction costs associated with digitization, are transferring technical and institutional know-how between distant regional economies faster and more flexibly than most large corporations. This chapter examines how Chinese and Indian-born engineers are contributing to highly localized processes of entrepreneurial experimentation in their home countries, while maintaining close ties to the technology and markets in Silicon Valley.Less

Varieties of capitalism and innovation: the Silicon Valley model

Steven Casper

in Creating Silicon Valley in Europe: Public Policy Towards New Technology Industries

What is the relationship between institutional frameworks, public policy, and the governance of innovative competencies by firms? This chapter extends the varieties of capitalism theory to examine ... More

What is the relationship between institutional frameworks, public policy, and the governance of innovative competencies by firms? This chapter extends the varieties of capitalism theory to examine how different types of economy impede the governance of new technology firms. It argues that most new technologies attempt to create radical innovations by developing competencies along a widely diffused “Silicon Valley Model” surrounding the financing, staffing, and creation of employee incentives within firms. Liberal market economies, such as those found in the US and UK, provide strong institutional supports for the Silicon Valley Model, while coordinated market economies, such as Germany or Sweden, provide a series of constraints. A theoretical framework is developed to explore this argument. How public policy might impact competitiveness within new technology industries across the two types of economies is discussed.Less

Renewal

Leslie Berlin

in The Man behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley

This chapter describes Robert Noyce's second marriage to Intel's head of personnel Anne Bowers and the failed efforts to unionize semiconductor industry employees in the 1970s and early 1980s. The ... More

This chapter describes Robert Noyce's second marriage to Intel's head of personnel Anne Bowers and the failed efforts to unionize semiconductor industry employees in the 1970s and early 1980s. The media spotlight on Noyce and the rise of Silicon Valley are also discussed.Less

“Every Youth a Start-up”: Education and Training in Silicon Valley

Elsa Davidson

in The Burdens of Aspiration: Schools, Youth, and Success in the Divided Social Worlds of Silicon Valley

This chapter examines the education and training of Latino youth within the local and national context, with particular emphasis on the emergent civic agenda around the digital divide in Silicon ... More

This chapter examines the education and training of Latino youth within the local and national context, with particular emphasis on the emergent civic agenda around the digital divide in Silicon Valley. It considers the political implications and historical context of this regional “civilizing process” and its relation to a neoliberal politics of educational reform on the national scale by focusing on the production of two kinds of disciplined “subjects” in need of saving: at-risk youth and public educational and nonprofit social-service institutions. It also explores how the realities of the tech-bust era have turned disenfranchised young people, and many who provide services to them, into skeptics of neoliberal reform.Less

Silicon Valley and the Resurgence of Route 128: Systems Integration and Regional Innovation

Michael H. Best

in Regions, Globalization, and the Knowledge-Based Economy

Seeks to address an explanation for the decline and subsequent resurgence of Route 28, the first high‐technology manufacturing region of the USA, in Massachusetts. The decline was combined with the ... More

Seeks to address an explanation for the decline and subsequent resurgence of Route 28, the first high‐technology manufacturing region of the USA, in Massachusetts. The decline was combined with the emergence of Silicon Valley (California), which was based on a completely different business model. It is suggested that both the decline and resurgence of Route 28 can be explained in terms of the emergence of a new competitive advantage. This advantage is based on the principle of systems integration in which the old vertical integration model has been transcended by an open system of specialist firms. This thesis is discussed.Less

Reel to Real: Desi Teens' Linguistic Engagements with Bollywood

Shalini Shankar

in Beyond Yellow English: Toward a Linguistic Anthropology of Asian Pacific America

This chapter identifies “Bollywood” films—feature‐length movies produced in Bombay (Mumbai), India—as a source of linguistic and cultural production in the South Asian diaspora. South Asian Americans ... More

This chapter identifies “Bollywood” films—feature‐length movies produced in Bombay (Mumbai), India—as a source of linguistic and cultural production in the South Asian diaspora. South Asian Americans (Desis), especially youth, engage with these Hindi language films with English subtitles on a number of levels. The chapter focuses on the circulation and consumption of Bollywood films in two locations in the South Asian diaspora: Silicon Valley, CA and Queens, NY. Ethnographic and sociolinguistic data of conversational exchanges, commentary during viewing, and personal narratives are presented to illustrate Bollywood's role in shaping linguistic processes of indexicality, bivalency, and identity. In these ways, the chapter analyzes how media and language use together shape style and identity in this Asian American community, as well as how this process varies between different locations of the South Asian diaspora.Less

Economic Specialization: Pathways to Change

Michael Storper, Thomas Kemeny, Naji Philip Makarem, and Taner Osman

in The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies: Lessons from San Francisco and Los Angeles

Industries, firms, and entrepreneurs in the Bay Area and Los Angeles did not plan the economic divergence of their regions. They faced challenges from the restructuring of the Old Economy and ... More

Industries, firms, and entrepreneurs in the Bay Area and Los Angeles did not plan the economic divergence of their regions. They faced challenges from the restructuring of the Old Economy and benefited from the opportunities of the New Economy. Their successes and failures widened the income gap between the two regions. This chapter presents comparative case studies of entertainment, aerospace, information technology, logistics, and biotechnology in San Francisco and Los Angeles, showing how they developed differently and shaped specialization, wages, and income divergence in the two regions.Less

The Geography of Systems Integration

Michael H. Best

in The Business of Systems Integration

This chapter presents a new model of technology management and regional innovation based on the principle of systems integration. The principle of systems integration is manifested in the ... More

This chapter presents a new model of technology management and regional innovation based on the principle of systems integration. The principle of systems integration is manifested in the organizational capability of firms — individually and networked — to foster rapid technological change. The effect is a network or cluster of entrepreneurial firms in which design is decentralized within the enterprise and diffused amongst networked enterprises. The combination of entrepreneurial firms and inter-firm networks fosters a range of dynamic cluster processes that, in turn, underlie the growth of Silicon Valley and the unexpected resurgence of Boston's Route 128.Less

Microserfing the Third Wave: The Dark Side of the Sunrise Industries

Rob Latham

in Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs, and the Culture of Consumption

This chapter describes the popular journalistic and fictional treatments of the rise of computer industries. Both Alain Touraine and Daniel Bell argue that the rise of postindustrial society has ... More

This chapter describes the popular journalistic and fictional treatments of the rise of computer industries. Both Alain Touraine and Daniel Bell argue that the rise of postindustrial society has produced a logic of resistance to the increasingly fossilized norms of capitalist social organization. The Silicon Valley firm is a cyborg formation, a hybrid of human dynamism and machinic proficiency. The Fordist dream of leisure industries generating eternal youth for productivist purposes has transmogrified into the post-Fordist dream of youthful leisure generating productivist industries. Microserfs by Douglas Coupland convincingly expresses the discouraging range of employment options available to young people in the computer industry. It also mounts a sophisticated interrogation of the ways that contemporary youth and high technology are complexly cyborgized. There may well be fresh possibilities for consumer pleasure and autonomy in interactive media that are radically incommensurable with a model of consumption based on passive appropriation.Less

Project‐Based Firms: New Organizational Form or Variations on a Theme?

Richard Whitley

in Business Systems and Organizational Capabilities: The Institutional Structuring of Competitive Competences

This chapter analyses the growing significance of inter-firm networks and project-based firms in many industries, which some claim heralds major changes in dominant economic forms. Rather than ... More

This chapter analyses the growing significance of inter-firm networks and project-based firms in many industries, which some claim heralds major changes in dominant economic forms. Rather than assuming that all such enterprises are basically the same, the chapter distinguishes between four ideal types of project-based firms in terms of the singularity of their goals, on the one hand, and the separation and stability of the division of labour, on the other hand. These ideal types vary in their importance across subsectors with different output characteristics, such as appropriability, modularity, and technological cumulativeness, and processes, such as client involvement. They also are more or less likely to become prevalent in contrasting institutional environments, which means that the establishment of the Silicon Valley type of economic organization as the dominant form is improbable in many societies.Less

Embodying Place

in Being and Well-Being: Health and the Working Bodies of Silicon Valley

This chapter considers the changes in work and health that have taken place in the United States, California, and the Silicon Valley region. It begins by identifying the five recurrent themes that ... More

This chapter considers the changes in work and health that have taken place in the United States, California, and the Silicon Valley region. It begins by identifying the five recurrent themes that emerge from an examination of the stories of embodied lives in Silicon Valley. These are Silicon Valley's geographic distinctiveness, rampant experimentation, cultural complexity, life restaging, and economic individuation. The discussions then turn to how Silicon Valley reflects larger geographies of work and health; how the story Silicon Valley tells about itself has been represented in many places, from exhibits at the local Tech Museum of Innovation, to scholarly works by historians and social scientists; ethnogenesis—the creation of new culture—as intrinsic to the deep diversity seen in Silicon Valley; and the demands of work and family in Silicon Valley. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.Less

Phantoms of Success: The Politics of Aspiration in Post-Boom Silicon Valley

Elsa Davidson

in The Burdens of Aspiration: Schools, Youth, and Success in the Divided Social Worlds of Silicon Valley

This book explores the lived space of Silicon Valley by focusing on the experiences and aspirations of local youth as well as the educational, social, cultural, and political contexts that shape ... More

This book explores the lived space of Silicon Valley by focusing on the experiences and aspirations of local youth as well as the educational, social, cultural, and political contexts that shape their daily lives and strategies of aspiration management. It considers how experiences of social contradiction shape patterns of subjectification and agency involved in processes of social reproduction within Silicon Valley's social landscape. It examines the process of aspiration formation among youth from divergent class, racial, and ethnic backgrounds, with particular emphasis on the children of the region's low-wage service workers and those of its highly skilled tech and service professional classes. This chapter discusses how Silicon Valley's polarization of wealth and local increased cost of living during the 1990s sharpened social, economic, and cultural divides along lines of race, ethnicity, and class. It also analyzes the rise of a techno-civilizing process in Silicon Valley and concludes with an overview of the book's scope.Less

Silicon San Francisco and the West Bay Wall

Alex Schafran

in Road to Resegregation: Northern California and the Failure of Politics

Silicon Valley as we know it emerged in part from encounters between the technology of the valley and the Bohemian culture of San Francisco. This San Francisco–Silicon Valley nexus would produce one ... More

Silicon Valley as we know it emerged in part from encounters between the technology of the valley and the Bohemian culture of San Francisco. This San Francisco–Silicon Valley nexus would produce one of the most dynamic economic growth stories any region has ever seen. Over the course of the latter part of the twentieth century, this encounter eventually turned both San Francisco and Silicon Valley into massive jobs engines. This chapter examines the spaces where this engine was most powerful, the places that drove the economic cart which attracted so many new residents and so much investment. These are also the places that largely did either very little or not enough to house the people who held these jobs. They did even less for those who had suffered under the segregated conditions of the earlier era.Less

The 9/11 Generation in Silicon Valley

Sunaina Marr Maira

in The 9/11 Generation: Youth, Rights, and Solidarity in the War on Terror

This chapter discusses the impact of 9/11 on South Asian, Arab, and Afghan American youth and the turn to the so-called “new Islam” and prioritization of a “Muslim first” identity as the basis for ... More

This chapter discusses the impact of 9/11 on South Asian, Arab, and Afghan American youth and the turn to the so-called “new Islam” and prioritization of a “Muslim first” identity as the basis for their affiliation as well as mobilization. It examines the notion of 9/11 as a crucible for politicization, reflecting on the narrative of Silicon Valley and the Bay Area as a liberal, multicultural “oasis” buffered from Islamophobic backlash as well as the contradictions this exceptionalist image generates for youth. The political subjecthood of the 9/11 generation has been deeply shaped by the binary of the good/moderate vs bad/radical Muslim, as explained in this chapter, which has infused the post-9/11 culture wars.Less

The Geography of Systems Integration

Michael H. Best

in The Business of Systems Integration

A new model of technology management and regional innovation based on the principle of systems integration is presented. The principle of systems integration is manifested in the organisational ... More

A new model of technology management and regional innovation based on the principle of systems integration is presented. The principle of systems integration is manifested in the organisational capability of firms, individually and networked, to foster rapid technological change. The effect is a network or cluster of entrepreneurial firms in which design is decentralised within the enterprise and diffused amongst networked enterprises. The combination of entrepreneurial firms and inter‐firm networks is shown to foster a range of dynamic cluster processes that, in turn, underlie the growth of Silicon Valley and the unexpected resurgence of Boston's Route 128.Less

A Fear of Slipping: A Cultural Politics of Class

Elsa Davidson

in The Burdens of Aspiration: Schools, Youth, and Success in the Divided Social Worlds of Silicon Valley

This chapter examines the political, social, and economic milieu of Silicon Valley's established professional middle class. In particular, it considers the ways in which these middle-class ... More

This chapter examines the political, social, and economic milieu of Silicon Valley's established professional middle class. In particular, it considers the ways in which these middle-class professionals channeled frustration about their eroding security and status into a politics of nostalgia for a pre-“New Economy” past, a critique of a “new entrepreneurial” present, during the boom and subsequent bust. In analyzing the political implications of this “cultural politics of class,” the chapter reveals expressions of adult middle-class anxiety and political entrapment that influenced young people's styles of self-definition and aspiration management. It also discusses the attitudes of middle-class adults toward the lifestyle and ethos of younger professionals whom they felt were usurping an older, middle-class order.Less