Abstract
The fifth chapters summarizes the research findings and points at the implications for management practice, management studies scholarship, and policy-making. Venture work is employment in thinly capitalized firms, in for example, life science ventures, and is likely to represent a growing proportion of employment contracts as the finance industry business logic increasingly determines managerial practice. One such logic is to emphasize return on equity (ROE) as a key performance indicator, thus creating close ties between finance industry actors and non-financial firms. These ties easily translate into co-workers carrying some, if not most, of the market risk once borne by employers. Based on such grounds, the study of venture work is an important feature of the new regime of labor relations. The chapter points at the importance of further scholarly work to better understand how venture work both contributes to innovation-led growth and what costs and benefits this employment model induces and generates for key agents, including employees, employers, and the sovereign state.
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Notes
- 1.
In addition, studies of the role of legislation in shaping normative beliefs indicate that various forms of “weaknesses” in legislation (Hirsh 2009) and regulation (Pedriana and Stryker 2004), or even a “weak state” as such (Dobbin and Sutton 1998), still generate substantial effects. “Thin” and “weak” should thus not be read as “insignificant” as such mechanisms tend to generate robust effects.
- 2.
Monahan and Fisher’s (2015) study of healthy volunteers participating in clinical trial studies conducted by clinical research organizations contracted by pharmaceutical companies reveals that many volunteers treated their participation in studies as a form of salaried work, which in turn justified and enforced an enterprising and entrepreneurial attitude toward clinical trials. Such explicit endorsement of an entrepreneurial logic was not, at least in the material presented by Monahan and Fisher (2015), questioned on moral, financial, or any other grounds by the clinical research organizations that managed the clinical trial studies.
- 3.
Almeling (2011) proposes that while it was commonplace that sperm donors made reference to economic compensation and were half-jokingly speaking about themselves being “fathers” of many children, women were actively avoiding such stories and enacted themselves as “non-mothers” and refused to speak about economic compensation for “selling eggs.” Almeling also suggests that the male narrative concerning parenting is based on a biological and quite simplistic, yet straightforward, connection between “sperm” and “baby,” making fatherhood a relatively uncomplicated question of genetic inheritance. In contrast, for women, mothering includes a longer and more complex line of events and activities (structured around the process Eggs→Fertilization→Implantation→Pregnancy→ Birth→ Child-rearing), which undermined the simplicity of the fatherhood narrative. Unlike in the case of the sperm donor, this line of reasoning, cutting out the egg donor from most of the process, thus eliminated the egg donor from making any claims of legitimate parenthood. Unfortunately, the euphemism discourse also benefited from this low valuation of the biological and financial value of human ova.
- 4.
In contrast, during periods of turbulence in the financial market, in many cases during the peak of the business cycle and when speculation is soaring, there is evidence of severe and essentially unpredictable “asset price drops” that are harmful for all actors (Acharya and Viswanathan 2011). During such episodes, the finance industry suffers considerable losses, which in turn may also generate consequences for non-financial industries, at times reaching the point when the sovereign state or transnational agencies need to step in to restore the liquidity of and faith in the market. One such mechanism for restoring market stability is to infuse capital into distressed companies through a so-called bailout resolution system (Levitin 2011; Rosas 2006). Bailouts are controversial (see e.g., Barofsky 2012; Block 2010) as they generate moral hazard (Okamoto 2009) and transfer tax money to private financial institutions that already from the outset are granted considerable liberties, subsidies, and exemptions from the state (Pistor 2013), and which generate considerable profits during periods of relative stability. In many cases, the bailout option is the last remaining de facto alternative for policy-makers and regulators facing a situation wherein entire global financial markets end up in a stalemate (Levitin 2011), practically speaking making the bankruptcy option a too slow and too ineffective remedy once a financial crisis surfaces (Rosas 2006).
- 5.
The literature on policy entrepreneurs indicates that there are both benign cases of policy entrepreneurship (Anderson 2018) and less-successful cases, resulting in novel challenges being caused by legal or regulatory reform (Romano 2005). Policy entrepreneurship is thus introduced as a value neutral construct that denotes how individuals can affect policy-making in various ways.
- 6.
“[T]he neoliberal self is an entrepreneurial subject,” Scharff (2016: 108) proposes.
- 7.
In 1982, 19.2 percent of total employment was accounted for by firms no older than five years. In 2011, the same figure was 10.7 percent (Gordon 2015: 56). Decker et al. (2014: 4) report that the share of U.S. employment accounted for by “young firms” has declined “by almost 30 percent over the last 30 years.” “[I]ncentives to start new businesses appear to be declining in all sectors, but disproportionately so in certain sectors such as retail trade, and this has contributed substantially to the declines in the pace of business dynamics,” Decker et al. (2014: 18) summarize their review of the empirical data. This declining share of employment in young firms and entrepreneurial activity is a tendency across all 50 U.S. states, including states with a documented business climate supportive of entrepreneurial activities such as California (Decker et al. 2014: 18). Such empirical evidence indicates a need to critically rethink extant entrepreneurship models and to incorporate novel perspectives, including for example, the role of the finance industry.
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Styhre, A. (2019). Salaried Work in a Financial Economy: Market Risk. In: Venture Work. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03180-0_5
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