Freedom is Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose: Entrepreneurialism and the Changing Nature of Employment Relations

About the seminar topic

We explore the acceptance of new contingent work relationships in the United States to reveal an emergent entrepreneurial ideology. Our argument is that these new work relationships represent a new social order not situated in the conglomerates and labour unions of the past, but on a confluence of neo-liberalism and individual action situated in the discourse of entrepreneurialism, employability and free agency. This new employment relationship, which arose during the economic and social disruptions in the 1970s, defines who belongs inside an organisation (and can take part in its benefits) and who must properly remain outside to fend for themselves. More generally, the fusing of entrepreneurship with neo-liberalism has altered not only how we work and where we work but also what we believe is appropriate work and what rewards should accompany it.

Speaker bio

Stephen R Barley is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Technology Management at UCSB’s College of Engineering. He was the Christian A Felipe Professor, Technology Management and is also a professor emeritus of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. He holds an AB in English from the College of William and Mary, an MEd from the Ohio State University and a PhD in Organisation Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to coming to UCSB, Barley served for 10 years on the faculty of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University and for 22 years on the faculty of the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford. At Stanford Barley co-founded and co-directed the Center for Work, Technology and Organisation. He was editor of the Administrative Science Quarterly from 1993 to 1997 and the founding editor of the Stanford Social Innovation Review from 2002 to 2004.

Barley serves on the editorial boards of the Academy of Management Discoveries, Research in the Sociology of Organisations, and Information and Organisation. He has been the recipient the Academy of Management’s New Concept Award and was named Distinguished Scholar by the Academy of Management’s Organisation and Management Theory Division in 2006, the Organisation Communication and Information Systems Division in 2010 and the Critical Management Studies Division in 2010. Barley has been a fellow at Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and is a Fellow of the Academy of Management. In 2006 the Academy of Management Journal named Barley as the author of the largest number of interesting articles in the field of management studies. In 2018 he won Conrad Arensberg Award for Lifetime Contribution to the Anthropology of Work by the American Anthropological Society and in 2021 the Everett C. Hughes Award from the Academy of Management’s Careers Division.

Barley was a member of the Board of Senior Scholars of the National Center for the Educational Quality of the Workforce and co-chaired the National Research Council and the National Academy of Science’s committee on the changing occupational structure in the United States. The committee’s report, The Changing Nature of Work, was published in 1999. He also served on the National Academies’ committee on the Information Technology Research and Development Ecosystem (2006-2008) and the National Academies’ Committee on Automation and the Workforce (2015-2016).

Barley has written over 100 articles on the impact of new technologies on work, the organisation of technical work and organisational culture. He edited a volume on technicians’ work entitled Between Craft and Science: Technical Work in the United States, published in 1997 by the Cornell University Press. In collaboration with Gideon Kunda of Tel Aviv University, Barley authored Gurus, Hired Guns and Warm Bodies: Itinerant Experts in the Knowledge Economy, an ethnography of contingent work among engineers and software developers published by the Princeton University Press in 2004. His most recent book, Work and Technological Change, was published by Oxford University Press in 2020.

Barley has served as a consultant to organisations in a variety of industries including publishing, banking, computers, electronics and aerospace.

Register

No registration required. If you have any questions about this seminar, please email Luke Slater.