Abstract
In the last chilling scene of Dave Eggers’ (2012) novel The Circle, a digital dystopia on the fictional San Francisco-based tech giant of the same name, Mae, a passionate and loyal Circle employee, envies her hospitalized and comatose friend Annie, because her thoughts remain ‘unknown to all’ (p. 469). Mae, in contrast, wears a lens around her neck that constantly streams her daily experiences—the exciting and the mundane—to her millions of viewers, who can listen, comment, and respond to those transmissions. The interaction is part of Mae’s job because ‘[i]f they were to be a company exposing transparency, and the global and unending advantages of open access, they needed to be living that ideal, always and everywhere (…)’ (Eggers, 2012: 312).
The company founders of TechCo, the non-fictional Silicon Valley startup that Catherine Turco studies in her ethnography The Conversational Firm, also believe that the changing ways in which we communicate openly and interactively on social media should be reflected in the way their company is organized—both internally and in their customer contacts. I started reading Turco’s book almost immediately after finishing Eggers’ book, and I was struck by the many resemblances between the vivid descriptions of the mundane work activities, aspirations, and rationales implied in contemporary visions of ‘radical transparency’ in both the books. After finishing Turco’s book, however, I was somewhat relieved to find her thorough account of TechCo not only less dramatic than its fictional counterpart, but also revealing that these Silicon Valley workers and visionaries do not blindly and dogmatically follow their ideas. Although they do not resist them altogether, in Turco’s case, they demonstrate critical human reflection—even if this sometimes means reverting to some – for them - much loathed conventional bureaucratic ways of organizing (Turco, 2016, p. 9). The careful description and analysis of how the firm negotiates informality and openness—what it means, how far it goes, and its unintended and often paradoxical is one of the many strengths of Turco’s book.
The concept of radical transparency was popularized by its adoption and promotion in one of the world’s largest hedge fund companies, Bridgewater. The firm’s CEO Ray Dalio has become famous beyond the finance industry for preaching the benefits of complete openness and the possibility of instant feedback, all the while ensuring that this openness remains behind closed doors. Bridgewater has strict formal rules and policies that keep all internal information carefully sealed off from the broader public. In contrast, TechCo tries to forego this paradox of openness and does not place any formalized restrictions on their employees’ communication behaviors. According to Turco, the informal ways of governing TechCo’s openness through ‘conversational practices’—that is, ongoing debates, to continuously, question, iterate, and improve organizing—is what distinguishes the company from more conventional forms of (post)bureaucratic organizing.
Turco’s overarching question in the book is how the open communication culture of the firm, based as it is on digital social media technologies, changes notions of bureaucracy, hierarchy, and participation. Much of her writing disentangles the sometimes subtle contrasts between this way of organizing and the more conventional means. But she just as carefully shows when and where they face the kinds of issues and conflicts that also appear in more formal and regulated ways of organizing. In the remainder of this review, I will focus my discussion on three central themes: governing openness, voice and decision rights, and the challenge of open methodologies.
Governing openness
Similar to The Circle, Turco’s book begins with a young millennial, Emma, who is excited about working for a company that involves their employees with the help of social media tools. Having grown up with digital technologies, these young employees do not feel skeptical about the idea of sharing their personal experiences and opinions with their colleagues, superiors, and a broader, sometimes unidentified, mass of customers, competitors, and the general public. Likewise, TechCo encourages every staff member to speak in the name of the company (p.92). From a firm-based perspective, this raises the question of how the company can trust their employees to say the right thing, without deploying formal ways of controlling the right to speak in the name of the company, for example, by delegating it to official spokespersons. To explore this tension, Turco offers the example of a lewd social media comment made by a TechCo employee in a public online forum that quickly spirals out of control. In contrast to similar examples from other companies, TechCo did not let the young employee go, but instead asked him to publish an apologetic post on the internal wiki to teach other employees how to (or not) to use good judgment. The remorseful and understanding employee writes: I am always a representative of TechCo regardless of the time of day, where I am, or where I’m commenting. (…) What I should have realized is that with the way social media works, I am never just ‘Brian Cassidy’, I am ‘Brian Cassidy from TechCo’. (quoted in Turco, p. 97)
Turco vividly illustrates how activities on social media platforms are not curtailed by a clear private/public distinction (p.92). Employees rely on a strong company reputation to build their personal brands to ensure future job opportunities and the company needs each employee to represent and disseminate company information to all stakeholders. This interdependence of the personal and corporate self makes formal and external control obsolete, because employees’ self-discipline avoids acts that could threaten them or the company. Put differently, asking employees to ‘use good judgement’ (UGJ), an official company policy, this firm can afford more openness as it relies on social media induced self-censorship (p. 104). Turco leaves open the question of whether the company policy works because it leads to self-monitoring, or if it works because self-censorship is so natural for its young employees that the company does not need more restrictive policies. Instead, she provides detailed examples to illustrate how a policy intended to create equal opportunities and freedoms for all, reinforces many of the existing inequalities by suppressing ‘certain voices, warp[ing] the form and content of what is shared, and even lessen[ing] the accountability of central authorities’ (p. 48). The voices of highly opinionated people override and drown others, who are more vulnerable and of lesser status. The ‘noise’ gives executives the chance to respond only to selected opinions, whereas sensitive issues are often glossed over (p. 51–56).
Voice and decision rights
Turco shows that workers expect and insist on their right to voice their opinions when it comes to important decisions for the company. They exert this right continuously through social media tools, such as the company wiki. Yet, one of Turco’s interesting findings is that they nevertheless still expect their executives to make the decision (based on their input). This is reflected in one of the many direct voices that Turco lets speak in her text: ‘I wish management would just exert a bit more control sometimes’ (p. 68). She sees here a crucial distinction from conventional discussions of post-bureaucracy and non-hierarchical organizations, in which voicing opinions and participatory decision-making are often conflated. To do so, Turco deploys Zuckerman’s (2010) distinction between voice rights and decision rights as two separate analytical concepts and observes the company’s practices along these lines. She finds, for example, that executives are worried that displaying too much decision-making power and control will demotivate employees and limit participation, which is also reflected in the UGJ policy. This leads to a situation in which decisions are often stalled, deferred, or simply not made and staff become frustrated by the confusion (sometimes even chaos) that such policy seems to entail. Turco collected many voices that wish for more direction, clarity, order, hierarchy, and control (p. 65ff). This leads to one of her central arguments: while staff want to engage in shaping the company’s direction by openly engaging in internal debates and voicing their (dis)satisfactions, they do not challenge, but instead rely on, hierarchical structures and the decision-making power of the executives.
Open methodology
What is noteworthy about Turco’s skilled ethnographic writing is how she manages to stay loyal to her empirical subject while exposing it to critical and challenging questions. There is no cynicism in her writing and she takes her informants’ self-descriptions and ambitions at face value. She reads them empathically with an engaged interest and hope for the transformative potential of open, social-media-based forms of organizing. At the same time, she lets her observations and investigations address obvious and less obvious criticisms from the literature, such as how authentic the self-promoted open culture of TechCo really is, and how far the practice of employee self-censorship is from authoritarian regimes that govern through fear? The text also points to the subtler, sometimes unintended consequences of such practices, such as chaos, (literal) messiness, and fear of decision-making that result from many of the open practices. One could argue, however, Turco has adopted and adapted to the conversational practices of the company that she studies. In her crucial final chapter, reflecting on her own methodology, Turco explains that TechCo executives read the anonymized manuscript before publication. Although their NDA ensured that the company could not influence her argument, Turco describes her intense worry that the executives would feel misrepresented and was relieved when they liked the manuscript and even suggested lifting the anonymization (which Turco did not do to protect other employees). This is a concern that all ethnographers can emphasize with. At the same time, it raises the question of to what extent this kind of writing is influenced by TechCo’s own governance techniques, resulting in self-censorship? Does her wish to share, and secure executive consent, force her to avoid interpretations and analyses that might lead to a more conflictual relationship? Is Turco’s method and practice itself a reflection of the culture that TechCo represents, and what kind of questions does this raise about the necessity and merit of closure and secrecy? In my opinion, these are some of the many exciting avenues of research that this book opens up.
Dave Eggers’ story ends with a world in which privacy, speaking out, and thinking differently are eradicated as well as the manifestation of a stark division of the world between the connected and the disconnected. Catharine Turco shows that these developments are at least up for debate.
