Carrie M. Lane
A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011, 194 pp.
Reading A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment in 2016 provides an opportunity to reflect on the experiences of tech workers during recent economic downturns in the United States. Carrie M. Lane’s original ethnographic fieldwork took place in the Dallas area in 2001, following the bust of dotcom and telecommunications companies, and she wrote A Company of One in 2009, with an epilogue that revisits informants to see how they fare in the wake of the 2008 recession. Looking back from the current period in which economists debate broad, policy-level responses (such as universal basic income) to potential employment crises, Lane’s account seems especially relevant for describing the ideologies that lead white-collar tech workers to reject labor solutions above the level of the individual. While she notes that economists and theorists (from Alan Greenspan to David Harvey) have largely turned against neoliberal policies (that emphasize free markets and place risk on individual workers), she argues that workers embrace neoliberal ideologies and see themselves as “companies of one,” constantly engaged in career management and accepting of the risk that their current contract could come to an end at any moment.
Lane is an anthropologist of work whose research to this point has focused largely on unemployment. A Company of One expands on her dissertation research, with chapters previously published in journals such as American Ethnologist. While her most recent research shifts to consider high-end service workers in the context of entrepreneurship, the ongoing relevance of her work on unemployment is indicated by its inclusion in several recent and forthcoming edited volumes on labor, including Beyond the Cubicle: Insecurity Culture and the Flexible Self and Anthropologies of Unemployment: The Changing Study of Work and Its Absence (both forthcoming from Cornell University Press; Lane co-edits the latter with Jong Bum Kwan).
A Company of One begins with a history of Dallas’ tech scene, focusing on the area’s strong ties to telecommunications and the impacts on that industry of the dot-com bust, but the heart of the book is in the following chapters, in which she details the ideology that she associates with career management and how this ideology is reflected in the job search process, the everyday lives of unemployed individuals, and their relationships with spouses and partners. The implication throughout is that, unlike workers of similar occupation in the 1950s through the 1980s, the tech workers studied view all employment as essentially contractual, with their skills filling a company’s needs only until those needs no longer exist. In contrast to previous generations, the individuals described hold little animosity for the employers who terminate their contracts, instead seeing this as the natural functioning of a free market. In this respect, Lane differentiates her workers from those included in early studies of tech work. For example, discussing Stephen Barley and Gideon Kunda’s Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies, Lane notes that while her informants share some career management strategies with Barley and Kunda’s independent contractors, their perspective that all work is inherently contractual (even full-time, permanent positions) is distinct.
Lane describes the employment search—which for Dallas tech workers in 2003 lasted an average of 13.6 months—as an extension of this ideology, with individuals treating the search as a job in its own right. This job, which Lane’s informants refer to as “the hardest job you’ll ever have,” requires networking, reskilling, branding and unpaid labor. Particularly striking is Lane’s analysis of the networking meetings that many unemployed tech workers attended. As Lane describes, employment services offered by the Labor Department since 1913 have historically failed to interest professional job seekers, who instead chose to network through job clubs (such as the Forty Plus Club, started in New York in 1939 as a way to help executives, managers and professionals over the age of 40 manage career transitions). While job clubs historically provided office space and equipment to job seekers, Lane argues that by 2001 the ubiquity of cell phones and personal computers led organizations—now referred to as networking groups or networking events—to focus on providing opportunities to make connections and receive advice. In the Dallas area, such networking events were often held at local churches, with Lane’s informants describing them as sources of information as well as community. But Lane also argues that they functioned to teach and reinforce an ideology of career management that required people to express positivity and faith in the individual, even in the face of few job prospects.
While Lane describes the experiences of her informants (generally middle-aged white males) with intimacy and warmth in the first half of the book, the book’s second half takes a more critical turn, with analysis of how people’s ideology around work plays out in relationships and results in political complacency. In looking to the role of partners and spouses in the lives of unemployed tech workers, Lane notes a shift from previous attitudes that viewed male workers as “bread winners.” Instead, her informants often expressed pride in their willingness to let their (usually female) partner provide an income while they performed the work of looking for work. As Lane argues, “Believing that marriage is a partnership and that men should respect and support their wives’ professional achievements … allowed unemployed men to reconceptualize relying on a partner’s income, at least temporarily, as evidence of their masculinity rather than a challenge to it.” However, Lane also notes that the ideology of self-reliance held by her informants prevented them from acknowledging their reliance on partners’ work. Lane argues that the relative financial stability afforded by partners who work in lower-paid but often more stable industries, together with a faith in individual agency, “softens any backlash that might be directed against the labor system and market economy that created these hardships in the first place.”
The book’s epilogue draws on interviews with nine informants that were conducted in 2009, five years after the completion of Lane’s original fieldwork. Of the nine, Lane finds seven employed, one seeking work and another who has voluntarily left the work force. In line with national trends, three of the nine experienced pay cuts of one-third to one-half of their former salaries after a period of unemployment. One became divorced, blaming much of his marital conflict on his unemployment. Another took a management position in Japan only to return to Dallas, contract work and intermittent unemployment after suffering from poor physical and emotional health in Japan. While Lane describes individual workers as at times questioning their experiences of constant risk and career management, her overall argument is that workers’ ideology remains largely stable through economic downturns.
Ultimately, Lane focuses on the ability of neoliberal ideologies to naturalize a labor system in which insecurity is prevalent, unemployment is inevitable and depression and divorce are common. In contrast to her informants’ faith in individuals and the free market, Lane concludes the book with a rather pessimistic view of the disadvantages faced by individuals who enter into unbalanced contracts with employers and who oppose collective action in favor of their own efforts. While Lane points to the supposed decline in neoliberal ideologies and the possibility that “career management … might also be in its final throes,” her closing thoughts make clear the resilience of ideology, suggesting that a shift away from the current situation cannot be assumed. In relation to recent books on labor such as Richard and Daniel Susskind’s The Future of the Professions and Erik Brynjolfsson’s The Second Machine Age, which look primarily to technological and political change, Lane’s ethnographic account is a good reminder of other, more personal factors that shape the meaning of work.