Organizing uncertainty: Individual, organizational and institutional risk in New York's Internet industry, 1995--2003

How are risk and uncertainty organized in emergent industries? This study uses the case of the earliest history of New York's Internet industry (alternately known as "Silicon Alley," where new media and multimedia firms produced interactive software and hardware). Using interviews, archival data, and social network data, I find that the economic ambiguity within contemporary, post-Fordist, high-end service industries is framed, shaped, and shifted by a new set of organizational processes, new institutional norms, and the individual socialization into risk.The rise of what I term venture labor is reflective of the extent to which nonentrepreneurs, that is ordinary employees, are exposed directly to entrepreneurial risk. This risk taking was naturalized within the industry and required for flexible work arrangements. This occurred largely through a process of cultural individualism in which people used different kinds of approaches to frame economic uncertainty into risk. These different underlying factors influence the mechanisms of evaluating worth and in turn determine which heuristics are used for making economic decisions.The distributed nature of modern production, or the rise of the "network economy" in this industry is examined by using a novel approach to social network analysis by using social events reporting, or gossip columns, to study the production networks within the industry. These data include over 2,600 industry participants and show the extent to which the work of regional networks or industrial districts rely on the work of social networking of its participants. The reintroduction of social events reporting as a rich form of social network data is one methodological contribution of this study.The privatization of risk is not the sole mechanism driving the increasing ambiguity in modern economic life. Organizational and institutional forces work with individual-level processes to create new boundaries of risk and to encourage entrepreneurial behavior. This research has implications for understanding the change in work and organizations within post-industrial settings, the role of individual risk-taking within high-technology companies, the social factors shaping economic phenomena and how media industries emerge.