Professional Documents
Culture Documents
[FREE PDF sample] Venture Work: Employees in Thinly Capitalized Firms Alexander Styhre ebooks
[FREE PDF sample] Venture Work: Employees in Thinly Capitalized Firms Alexander Styhre ebooks
OR CLICK LINK
https://textbookfull.com/product/venture-work-
employees-in-thinly-capitalized-firms-alexander-
styhre/
Read with Our Free App Audiobook Free Format PFD EBook, Ebooks dowload PDF
with Andible trial, Real book, online, KINDLE , Download[PDF] and Read and Read
Read book Format PDF Ebook, Dowload online, Read book Format PDF Ebook,
[PDF] and Real ONLINE Dowload [PDF] and Real ONLINE
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...
https://textbookfull.com/product/indie-video-game-development-
work-innovation-in-the-creative-economy-alexander-styhre/
https://textbookfull.com/product/behind-the-startup-how-venture-
capital-shapes-work-innovation-and-inequality-1st-edition-
benjamin-shestakofsky/
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-kitty-hawk-venture-jeffrey-
scheaffer/
https://textbookfull.com/product/why-i-dont-work-here-anymore-a-
leaders-guide-to-offset-the-financial-and-emotional-costs-of-
toxic-employees-1st-edition-mitchell-kusy/
Creative Innovative Firms from Japan A Benchmark
Inquiry into Firms from Three Rival Nations Young Won
Park
https://textbookfull.com/product/creative-innovative-firms-from-
japan-a-benchmark-inquiry-into-firms-from-three-rival-nations-
young-won-park/
https://textbookfull.com/product/politics-at-work-how-companies-
turn-their-workers-into-lobbyists-1st-edition-alexander-hertel-
fernandez/
https://textbookfull.com/product/employees-and-employers-in-
service-organizations-emerging-challenges-and-opportunities-1st-
edition-birdie/
https://textbookfull.com/product/leading-and-managing-
professional-services-firms-in-the-infrastructure-sector-first-
edition-ellis/
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-growth-of-firms-in-less-
developed-countries-lessons-from-kosovo-fadil-sahiti/
Alexander Styhre
Venture Work
Employees in Thinly
Capitalized Firms
Venture Work
Alexander Styhre
Venture Work
Employees in Thinly Capitalized Firms
Alexander Styhre
School of Business, Economics and Law
University of Gothenburg
Gothenburg, Sweden
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Preface
xi
xii Contents
A
ppendix: Methodology235
Index249
Part I
Theoretical Perspectives
Introduction to Part I
Part I of this volume provides an overview of the theoretical framework
that structures the empirical material reported in Part II, and which
serves as the analytical tools and models used in Chap. 5 to discuss the
empirical data. Part I is organized into two chapters: The first chapter
(Chap. 6) discusses changes in corporate governance practices and how
that affects labor markets and the economic security of salaried workers.
The second chapter (Chap. 7) discusses how individuals to a varying
degree make reasonable and rational decisions in everyday life, and how
such capacities are involved when making career choice decisions.
Furthermore, the ability to be motivated and to engage with current and
potential work assignments is a matter of combining reasonable expecta-
tions and instrumental rationality regarding, for example, how work is
compensated for by the employer, and how the employer otherwise sig-
nals a satisfaction and an understanding of the work effort made. These
two theoretical chapters—wherein the former addresses more macro-
oriented structural and institutional changes, whereas the latter empha-
sizes the individual’s role in acting in accordance with, but also deviating
from, structural and institutional conditions—jointly constitute the the-
oretical framework used to examine the empirical material reported in
Part II of this volume.
1
New Forms of Work in the Post-
corporate Economy: Venture Labor,
Contract Work, and Freelancing
[Corporate liberalism] emerged not as the ideology of any one class, let
along the corporate sector of the capitalist class, but rather as a cross-class
ideology expressing the interrelations of corporate capitalists, political lead-
ers, intellectuals, proprietary capitalists, professionals and reformers, work-
ers and trade-union leaders, populists and socialists. (Sklar 1988: 35)
that not only venture capital investors supply “smart money” (Sørensen
2007), but the state also offers these benefits when policies and R&D
subsidies are carefully designed and monitored.
As innovation-led growth demands substantial finance capital invest-
ment, both in the build-up of regulatory activities and institutions sup-
portive of firm-based activities, and as direct venture capital investment
benefiting firm-specific development work, “credit constraints” are a pri-
mary concern for policy-makers promoting innovation-led growth. The
lack of venture capital and qualified venture capital investors, for exam-
ple, “[m]ay further limit or slow down the reallocation of firms toward
new (more growth-enhancing) sectors,” Aghion and Roulet (2014: 918)
warn. Furthermore, even in the case where the supply of venture capital
funds is favorable, so-called knowledge spillover effects (Owen-Smith
and Powell 2004) or “information leakage” (Pahnke et al. 2015) occurs,
where the advancement of know-how in one firm may also benefit other
firms, thus free-riding on others’ investments (as in the case, for example,
where financial institutions such as banks develop algorithms that can be
used for trading otherwise illiquid assets; see MacKenzie and Spears
2014: 437). In such cases, it may be difficult for firms to borrow or raise
money from private capital markets to finance their growth as their assets
are not assisted by legal protection that secures a return on an investor’s
initial financial capital (Aghion and Roulet 2014: 918). In this situation,
the sovereign state can make investments that benefit a broader set of
actors, or a sub-field within an industry, as in the case of military research
spending, or the financing of scientific programs such as in the European
and North-American space programs.
In the end, Aghion and Roulet (2014) suggest, innovation-led growth
is not the outcome of heightened competition (which instead inhibits
innovative work; Amable et al. 2017; Aghion et al. 2005), but from re-
embedding the economy within the realm of the governance of the sov-
ereign state, or within the transnational initiatives in which the state
participates. This new model of innovation-led growth, the conventional
wisdom of neoclassical economic theory, and policy-making doctrines
derived therefrom, make up the free-market model, which stipulates the
market as the origin and source of all meaningful rent-seeking activities,
as being outmoded and even what undermines innovation-led growth
8 A. Styhre
Introduction
In folk belief and popular culture the gigantic corporation has always
been a concern. Typically it is hierarchically organized into layers and lay-
ers of employees, middle managers, department bosses, division direc-
tors, and, at its apex, the top management team and the iconic figure of
the chief executive officer, executing formal and real power over activities
whose complexities and details are so vast that no human can practically
overview and cognitively process all the information generated. As
opposed to society proper, being widely understood as a set of sub-systems
and functionally oriented activities that are at best loosely coupled, but in
many cases operating in relative isolation, the large-scale corporation is
commonly seen as an integrated whole, a machinery for the production
of goods, services, or both. Consequently, the corporation is simultane-
ously understood to be benevolent in terms of providing jobs and in
delivering various commodities and other defined benefits, and a more
unnerving entity inasmuch as faceless managers and executives have an
enormous capacity to influence and shape the everyday lives of humans
New Forms of Work in the Post-corporate Economy: Venture… 9
Our current problems of higher inequality, lower mobility, and greater eco-
nomic insecurity are in large part due to the collapse of the traditional
American corporation. Over the past generation, large, public traded cor-
porations have become less concentrated, less interconnected, shorter-
lived, and less prevalent: there are fewer than half as many public
corporations today as there were fifteen years ago. (Davis 2013: 284)
With economic inequality rising sharply over the past four decades, now
being back to interwar period levels (Duménil and Lévy 2004), slower
economic recovery and growth after the 2008 collapse of the finance
industry, and unemployment stabilizing at historically high levels, also
during the upturns in the economic cycle, the issue of the corporation’s
role needs to be revisited. In 1950, Davis (2010: 333) reports, the ten
largest employers hired 5 percent of the American workforce; today, they
hire only 2.8 percent. In 1950, eight of the top ten employers were man-
ufacturers, while today all are in services, and seven are retailers. In fact,
by March 2009, Davis (2009: 27) writes, “more Americans were unem-
ployed than were employed in manufacturing, and all signs pointed to
further displacement in the goods-producing sector.” At this point, Wal-
Mart, the American grocery store chain, frequently criticized for its low-
wage policy and lack of benefits for its employees, “employed about as
many Americans (1.4 million) as the 20 largest U.S. manufacturers com-
bined” (Davis 2009: 30). This decline of the American corporation,
10 A. Styhre
model, and the re-direction of the corporation toward the more singular
end of enriching its investors, the shareholders, needs to be considered in
some detail.
investors (e.g., Manne 1967: 260). Some scholars, such as Manne (1967),
argue that the corporation-as-capital-raising-device in turn justifies the
idea of a centralized management:
large and medium-sized firms generate their own capital and therefore no
longer need to rely on financial market actors to supply capital to finance
development work, for example. The increased degree of institutional
ownership of all public stock companies, now being in the range of 73
percent of all publicly traded Fortune 1000 stock (Gilson and Gordon
2013: 874), suggests that the stock market no longer effectively monitors
managerial opportunism (as well as other factors) as agency theorists, for
example, suggest they do (Fama and Jensen 1983). Instead, institutional
investors more directly intervene in the day-to-day decision-making at
board of director and top management team levels, participating in so-
called shareholder activism. As institutional investors hold large shares of
stock in specific companies, their holdings are essentially illiquid as their
choice to signal dissatisfaction with a managerial decision, for example,
by taking the “exit option” (i.e., selling off their stock on the market)
would affect the stock market price unfavorably.1 To avoid biasing the
market to their own disadvantage, institutional fund managers are incen-
tivized to execute the “voice option,” in other words, they actively inter-
vene in managerial decision-making when they believe it would benefit
their interests. Coffee (1991) explicates this proposition:
1
“By definition, a market is liquid if it can absorb liquidity trades without large changes in price,”
Allen and Gale (1994: 934) write. By implication, large institutional investors (e.g., pension funds)
often hold illiquid assets by default. Furthermore, in venture capital investment, qualified investors
hold illiquid assets inasmuch as the companies they choose to invest in acquire their market value
precisely on the basis of their close relationship with specific owners and their networks of contacts.
Speaking more generally about the issuance of credit through loans, Diamond and Rajan (2001:
322) point at the same illiquidity problem, and suggest that certain loans can only be sold at a
discount for this reason: “When a lender makes loans that can be collected only with her specific
collection skills, the loans are illiquid. The reason is that the lender’s specialized human capital can-
not be easily committed to collecting the loans; hence they will sell at a discount or will be poor
collateral.” Liquidity is thus not only a quality to be examined on the structural level of the market,
but also on the basis of the qualities and competencies of market actors, say, financial traders, ven-
ture capital investors, and mortgage industry institutions.
14 A. Styhre
that is best for the short term but suboptimal over the long run.” In other
words, fund managers representing institutional investors have a prefer-
ence for short-term returns over long-term and potentially higher returns,
which justifies a short-term mindset that may undermine a willingness to
invest in production capital and development work (e.g., R&D).
Connelly et al. (2010: 737) report empirical data indicating “that tran-
sient institutional owners may discourage strategic competitive actions,
which limits the range of competitive options available to firms.” More
specifically, Connelly et al. (2010: 737) show that transient institutional
owners (e.g., owners that hold stock for a shorter period of time) actively
use the “the threat of exit” to pressure executives “to consider only those
competitive actions that will not result in short-term earnings shortfalls.”
That is, institutional investors participate in shareholder activism cam-
paigns to discipline managers to make investments that maintain or
inflate the stock market evaluation of the share in a short-term perspec-
tive. The downside is that more long-term production capital investment,
conducive to sustainable competitive advantage but demanding a consid-
erable amount of investment in illiquid capital over longer periods of
time, is disqualified. Says Dallas (2011):
— No niin.
*****
— Vai kihoo. Elä, elä koske hinkkiin. Sitä pitää ensin haistella ja
sitten vasta maistella. No haista.
— Etkö sinä sen vietävä anna minulle tippaakaan. Kun ihan kieli
tarttuu kitalakeen.
— Mitä antamista siinä, muuta kuin kisko turpaasi. Hälyytit sen
Höröläisen.
Ka, kun tansseissa käynnistä puhuu. Piiat ovat taas olleet yöllä
juoksussa. Se synti ajaa itsekutakin omalla tavallaan, mitä mitenkin.
Piikojen ja poikien pitää käydä tanssimassa ja sitten loppuyö viettää
lihan nautinnoissa… sepä syntinen liha kun vetää ja viekoittaa.
Niin, niin, henki olisi altis ihmisessä, mutta liha on heikko, tahi
oikeastaan niin vahva, että tekee mitä lystää. Panee jalat
tanssimaan ja sitten kävelemään toisen sängyn viereen. Jos heissä
piioissa sitä hengen puolta lieneekään. Eivätkö liene niinkuin vasikat
metsässä. Eipä sitä nämäkään tyttäret, omat enempää kuin
vieraatkaan, viitsi kuunnella saarnaa pyhäisin, eikä veisata. Jos
sanomisen paljoudella saa tuvan penkille tahi sängyn laidalle
istumaan lukuajaksi, niin kohta vihollinen painaa niin, että ei muuta
kuin silmät kiinni. Tytöt torkkuvat ja rengit kuorsaavat ja väliin
poksauttelevat äkeissään suuruspommeja, jumalattomat.
Kun sitä ihmisen, näes, pitää kilvoitella, loppuun asti, ihan siihen,
kun viimeinen henki kurkussa korahtaa. Sittenpä se reuhtominen
lakkaakin ja alkaa se toinen elämä, hyvä tahi paha, kuinka kulloinkin
osaat kilvoitella ja tämän maallisen juoksusi ja kouhotuksesi päättää.
Kun hänellä välistä ottaa se repijäinen niin lujalle, että pitää istua,
olipa paikka mikä tahansa. Sillekin kun on antaa ajallaan ja
tarpeellisen määrän, ei kuulu eikä näy koko repijäistä.
Nyt tässä tulee kohta pahat, jos ei vaan heti saa. Alkaa jo
repijäinen nytkyttää niveliä, pahan tauti, mikä lienee sekin, ihmisten
vitsaus.
Ke, ka, kun repäisi toisesta polvitaipeesta. Etkö sinä sitten herkeä
kiskomasta, kitkuttajainen, pahalainen.
— Viinasi? Joko sinä taas sitä olet ostanut, koettaa Aatami sanoa.
—
Vai viinasi… milloinka minä ennen sinun viinojasi? Häpeileppäs
vähän.