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C 2004)

Project Time in Silicon Valley

Johanna Shih

This article explores the pace of work for highly skilled workers who are employed
in the high-tech industry of Silicon Valley. I link the temporal experiences of these
workers to systems of domination at work, and to the particular characteristics of
flexible specialization in the region. I ask four questions: How can the temporal
rhythms of work be described? What factors shape these rhythms? Why do workers
comply? How does this pace of work impact on other aspects of individuals’
lives? I focus on the organization of work through project cycles, the de-linking
of workers and organizations, and the ideology of individualism that constructs
workers as entrepreneurs of their own careers as key factors that shape the erratic
and quickened pace of work in Silicon Valley. I also show how this pace of work
negatively affects other temporal spheres that individuals negotiate, most notably
“bodily time” and the “interaction time” of social relationships.
KEY WORDS: Silicon Valley; project cycles; systems of domination; time.

There was, it appeared, a mysterious rite of initiation through which, in

one way or another, almost every member of the team passed. The term
the old hands used for this rite. . . was “signing up.” By signing up for a
project you agreed to do whatever was necessary for success. You agreed
to forsake, if necessary, family, hobbies, friends—if you had any of these
left (and you might not if you had signed up too many times before). From a
manager’s point of view, the practical virtues of the ritual were manifold.
Labor was no longer coerced. Labor volunteered. When you signed up
you in effect declared, “I want to do this job and I’ll give it my heart
and soul.”
Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine (1981, p. 63)

Correspondence should be directed to Johanna Shih, Department of Sociology, Hofstra University,

Hempstead, NY 11549; e-mail: socjzs@mail1.hofstra.edu.

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C 2004 Human Sciences Press, Inc.
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224 Shih

Well, I think we’re seeing a kind of Darwinian capitalism at its best out
here. Or worst. And people are working incredibly hard. . . the tremendous
competition will go on, though it’s reaching reasonable limits. I mean,
people are, you know, people can’t work too much harder. . . ”
Larry Ellison, CEO, Oracle

In the past three decades, Silicon Valley has vaulted into the spotlight of
international attention, gaining recognition as a major center of technological in-
novation and production (Henton 2000), and emerging as a critical sector of the
U.S. economy. During this rapid ascent, the region became the subject of intense
scrutiny, both from a public enamored with tales of sudden riches, and from scholars
who flocked to study the factors that could account for the success of its high-tech
industry (Saxenian 1994; Rogers and Larsen 1984). Researchers highlighted the
region’s “flexible specialization” (Piore and Sabel 1984),1 pointing at particular
characteristics in the economic organization of the industry that allowed it to adapt
quickly to the rapid fluctuations of the global capitalist economy, where “time to
market” is key and where product lives tend to be short. Flexible specialization
is typically seen as a shift away from the mass production and large, hierarchi-
cal organizations of the Fordist era, and is characterized instead by small batch
production, decentralized and specialized organizations, flexible technologies, and
densely woven inter-firm networks (Kumar 1995; Bagguley 1991; Harvey 1989).
The focus on the structure of Silicon Valley reflected an interest in analyzing how
particular forms of economic organization could affect competitiveness in the con-
text of global capitalism, in part because regions both in the U.S. and abroad hoped
to replicate Silicon Valley’s success.
Despite this attention, the experiences of individuals who work in the region
have not drawn similar scrutiny, even while popular accounts consistently depict
high-tech development as a “gold rush,” where speed in development and produc-
tion is essential. While there have been compelling analyses of the harsh conditions
of low-wage assembly workers who are disproportionately nonwhite, immigrant
women (Hossfeld 1988), or of flex-time workers who are a growing proportion
of the labor force in the “new economy” (Carnoy, Castells and Benner 1997),
the experiences of those who are considered “privileged,” that is, highly skilled
1 The term “flexible specialization” originally emerged to describe production in the post-Fordist state
(Kumar 1995; Harvey 1989; Piore and Sabel 1984). Piore and Sabel (1984) argued that the shift
in economic organization was a response to a change in consumption patterns that arose with the
improvement in the technologies of communication (and the advent of “real time”). Given the more
ephemeral tastes of consumers, mass production, using expensive, rigid machinery, became less
profitable, especially within the context of rising international competition. Consequently, alternative,
more flexible and specialized modes of production emerged, first noted in the so-called “Third Italy,”
a reference to the successful textile industries in several towns of central Italy (e.g., Prato). What
characterizes flexible specialization is a “strategy of permanent innovation: an accommodation to
ceaseless change, rather than an effort to control it” (Piore and Sabel 1984, p. 17).
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Project Time in Silicon Valley 225

white-collar workers, have either been ignored or were assumed to be positive,

especially given the high average remuneration in the region.2
This article addresses this gap, by using in-depth interviews to explore the
experiences of highly skilled workers who are employed in the high-tech industry
of Silicon Valley. Understanding the experiences of these workers is important, not
only because they represent a critical component of the high-tech industry, but also
because of the constraints under which even the most advantaged workers operate
within flexibly organized economies. Here, I investigate one particular aspect of
their work experience—the pace of work—by asking four questions. First, how
can one describe the temporal rhythms of work? Second, what factors shape these
rhythms? Third, why do workers comply? And fourth, how does this pace of work
affect other aspects of individuals’ lives?

TEMPORALITY AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF WORK

The questions I explore are linked to four key issues in the sociology of work:
the advent of clock time and its role in the process of industrialization; worker
resistance and ideologies of authority; the production of collective, organizational
identities; and the negotiation of the temporal worlds of work and home. Temporal-
ity has long been understood as a central feature of the workplace and of the labor
process. Industrial sociologists have shown how a linear conception of time and,
more specifically, the organization of work around clock time were fundamental
to the process of industrialization (Thompson 1993; Mumford 1934). The accli-
mation of workers to the rigid scheduling of the clock was key to the shift away
from a craft and agriculturally based economy because it resolved the problem of
coordination inherent within the larger firms of industrial production. Clock time
synchronized workers’ temporal rhythms to the needs of industrial production, be-
cause the pace of work was no longer self-determined but instead was regulated by
fixed units of time determined by capitalists and machines. Equally important, the
organization of work around the clock became the linchpin with which capitalists
could control their workers and productivity. Time defined by fixed units could be
turned into a commodity that capitalists could manipulate to increase productivity.
By equating time with money, and paid labor as “owner’s time” (Thrift 1990), time
became a unit by which labor could be controlled through increased production
demands.
The advent and implementation of clock time, however, was not sufficient to
ensure increased productivity. After all, clock time was part of the larger project
2 Median household income in 1997 in California was $39,595, in comparison to the median in Santa
Clara County, which was $59,639 (data from a 1997 census model-based estimate). For occupations in
clusters such as software and semiconductor/equipment, average salaries were even higher: $90,380
for those in software and $83,690 for those in semiconductor/equipment manufacturing (statistics
from Joint Venture Silicon Valley Report 1999).
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of industrialization that transferred the control of production from craftsmen to

managers (Braverman 1974). Divested of their autonomy, workers must still be
coerced to comply. Indeed, worker resistance can be quite effective in shaping
the pace of work, as exemplified by the phenomenon of “goldbricking” (Burawoy
1979; Roy 1952), where workers resist managerial control by slowing down their
pace of production. If managers are to convince workers to submit to their pace of
work, they need to develop effective modes of control. In his classic analysis of
industrial authority, Bendix (1956) showed how managerial ideologies served to
justify authority and dissipate worker resistance. In the U.S., this was characterized
by a shift away from an ideology of social Darwinism that justified authority as a
brutal “survival of the fittest,” to ideologies that emphasized cooperation, posing
workers’ and managers’ interests as either common, or at least mutually benefi-
cial.3 Frederick Taylor’s strategy of “scientific management” envisioned workers
and managers cooperating to develop and enact the most efficient production tech-
niques, because they share an interest in increasing the size of the surplus (rather
than arguing about the division of the surplus). More importantly, the human re-
lations model of organizations championed by Elton Mayo and Chester Barnard
viewed organizations as inherently suiting individuals’ need to be part of a larger
collective and goal; in turn, it also emphasized managers’ responsibilities towards
their workers. In this vision, managers and organizations could satisfy individuals’
desire for a sense of belonging, thus securing compliance “internally.”
Edwards (1979) has also illustrated how workers become identified with
organizations through “structural or bureaucratic control,” which disguises the di-
rect authority of managers apparent in “entrepreneurial or simple” control. Struc-
tural/bureaucratic control is efficient because workers are more subtly controlled
either through technological specifications (i.e., the pace of the machine) or through
the “rules of the company.” In both cases, the pace of machines or organizational
rules are seen as outside the province of managers themselves; thus control is
masked. Bureaucratic control also equates workers’ interests with the interests of
the company, building incentives via an internal labor market that rewards employ-
ees for demonstrating “desirable” work traits and creating organizational cultures
that socialize workers into identifying with their companies. Whyte’s (1956) “or-
ganization men” are thus created—workers who replace their individual identities
with collective, organizational ones. Zussman (1985) has argued that the concept
of careers is central to engineers’ and other middle-level employees’ experiences
with work and authority, and weakens the likelihood that they will collectively
resist managerial power. Careers create for engineers a stake in the reproduction
of the industrial order, since their own rewards are dependent on the stability of
this structure.
Ironically, what saves individuals from being completely subsumed by their
organizations is what bonded them initially—the organization of work around
3 See also Perrow (1972) or Barley and Kunda (2000) for a summary of managerial ideologies.
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Project Time in Silicon Valley 227

the clock. Zerubavel (1981, 1979) has argued that the increasing rigidity of tem-
poral boundaries at work serves to benefit workers precisely because it clearly
distinguishes between private and public time or, put differently, personal time
and organizational time. This split protects “the modern individual from being
entirely ‘swallowed’ by what Coser has called ‘greedy institutions”’ (Zerubavel
1981, p. 166). If a typical work schedule is defined by the clock and the calendar,
as it is in the example of the nine-to-five, Monday through Friday work week,
all time outside of these hours is defined as the workers’ own time. Zerubavel’s
argument is important because it goes beyond the perspective of industrial soci-
ologists, which solely looks at the issue of temporality within the limits of the
workplace, and the linear definition of time set by work (Hassard 2000). Not only
do workers experience temporality in more ways than the clock time of the em-
ployer’s definition (because time has a qualitative, experiential aspect [Fine 1990;
Lauer 1981]), workers also negotiate what Gurvitch (1964, 1990) calls “multiple
systems of time.” This means that work time is only one of the temporal worlds
that individuals live in, underlining the importance of a strict separation between
work and home. In this way, the organization of work around the clock is also an
important conduit for worker resistance.

THE CASE OF SILICON VALLEY’S HIGH-TECH INDUSTRY

In this article I seek to show how the organization of time in Silicon Valley
departs from conventional organization and suggests that new systems of domina-
tion or discipline may be emerging in the most “advanced” sectors of American
industry. First, work is not organized by the linear conception of clock time but
instead by the cyclical rhythm of projects. Whereas clock time suited the needs
of industrialization, I argue that project time synchronizes the pace of workers to
the needs of a flexible, organized economy embedded within a global high-tech
market. Second, in Silicon Valley, organizations and workers are de-linked via a
fluid labor market. Organizations abscond a paternalistic stance towards workers,
with workers expected to “prove themselves” at work through individual achieve-
ments. Workers are treated as responsible for their own career livelihoods and
must continuously develop skills to maintain their own marketability. Third, ide-
ologies of control do not model workers and organizations as having common
interests, nor do they promote collective identities. Instead, I show that worker
compliance rests on the inculcation of an individualist identity epitomized by the
concept of the “workers as entrepreneurs” of their own careers, a conception in
direct contrast to the “organization man.” Finally, the distinction between work
time and personal time is blurred, such that any time can be co-opted as work
time. In synchronizing work time with “market time,” a desynchronization of the
temporal worlds of “bodily time” and the “interaction time” of social relationships
occurs.
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228 Shih

For highly skilled workers in the region, work is not primarily organized
through clock time, or calendar time, for that matter. Rather than a pre-set time
schedule, work is typically organized through projects (Kanter 1995; Saxenian
1994; Kunda 1992; Kidder 1981) or, as I call it, “project time,” which constructs
a cyclical, or seasonal, rhythm of work. The length of projects (i.e., the design
of a newer version of a microprocessor, a component of hardware, or a piece
of a software program) varies from three months to more than a year, and the
structure of work is subsequently guided by project deadlines as well as coor-
dination within project groups. Employees are expected to work autonomously
towards the completion of project goals, mostly without specific instructions
from managers.
Whereas clock time suited the needs of industrialization, the organization of
work around projects and the resultant pace of work are connected to the charac-
teristics of flexible specialization in the region and the global capitalist market in
which it is embedded. Since flexible, specialized regions are organized to adapt
quickly to changes in market demand, and because a gold rush scenario has charac-
terized the high-tech industry, where “time to market” is seen as key, workers must
also be synchronized to the fluctuations of the global high-tech market. Project
time achieves this synchronization, in part because managers can easily manipu-
late project deadlines to extract greater amounts of work from their employees.
Deadlines are not set by the specifications of a particular project, nor are they
necessarily based on a realistic assessment of the project, but are instead dictated
by market cycles.
High-tech workers seem aware of increasing pressures at work, but are per-
suaded to comply because they see their increased work as potentially benefi-
cial to their own interests and not simply their manager’s or company’s inter-
ests. More specifically, flexible specialization in Silicon Valley gave rise to what
Keat and Abercrombie (1991) have called an “enterprise culture” and led to a
dominant conception of the worker as entrepreneur. At its heart, this is an in-
dividualist ideology, buttressed by the autonomous nature of work in high-tech,
the performance-based evaluations within companies that emphasize individual
achievement, and the relinquishing of companies’ responsibility to take care of their
workers.
The enterprise culture in Silicon Valley is manifested by its regional ide-
ology that idolizes the “saving grace” of unfettered capitalism that purportedly
enables anyone, regardless of class, gender or ethnicity, to pursue and achieve
limitless wealth. Silicon Valley’s hyper-individualist ideology celebrates the mav-
erick individuals who rely on their own resources to pave their own trajectories,
and emphasizes the moral responsibility of every individual to maximize their
potential. This possibility is reinforced by the pervasive stories of the region’s
overnight millionaires and, certainly, the sky-high fortunes of the high-tech indus-
try in the 1990s led individuals to believe that they too could realize this dream,
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Project Time in Silicon Valley 229

particularly because stock options were a ubiquitous feature of employee compen-

sation plans.
Individualism, however, is more than an ideology; it is reinforced by particular
characteristics of flexible specialization in Silicon Valley. Whereas industrial soci-
ologists showed us how workers began to see their own interests and the interests of
their organizations as aligned because of internal incentives and strong organiza-
tional cultures that emphasized collective identities, Silicon Valley diverges from
this in a number of ways which reduce the paternalistic role of the organization
that “takes care of” its employees, and emphasize individuals’ responsibility to
take care of themselves. This is seen in the shift to performance-based evaluations
rather than pay based on seniority (Kanter 1995), emphasizing individual achieve-
ment rather than a collective identity (Harvey 1989). The autonomous character of
work in high-tech, knowledge-intensive and conceptual in nature (Piore and Sabel
1984), reinforces the concept of individual contributions, encouraging individuals
to “prove” their worth.
The relinquishing of companies’ responsibility for their workers is also re-
flected by the fluid labor market (Harvey 1989; Kumar 1995; Carnoy, Castells and
Benner 1997; Hyde 1997; Baron, Hannan and Burton 2001), with job turnover
rates higher than the national average. Put differently, flexibility is embedded not
only within the structure of the economy, but also within the labor market, where
organizations employ a growing proportion of part-time or temporary workers and
maintain the right to fire and hire workers in accordance with market cycles. Since
organizations are no longer expected to “take care of” their employees, workers are
subsequently expected to be accountable for their own careers and livelihoods and
to consistently update and broaden their skills to ensure their own marketability.
Nardi, Whittaker and Schwarz write, for instance, in their ethnography of a high-
tech firm, “Rather than being nurtured by institutionalized group structures, we
found that workers are increasingly thrown back on their own individual resources”
(2000, p. 2).
The emphasis on the individual, as de-linked from companies, reflects the
emergence of the concept of workers as entrepreneurs of their own careers, the
opposite of the image of the organization man. Here, the expectation is that
highly skilled workers can and should use a flexible labor market to their advant-
age (Kanter 1995; Bagguley 1991) and actively job-hop to achieve career mo-
bility instead of relying on an internal labor market. Carnoy, Castells and
Benner, for example, characterize highly skilled employees as entrepreneurs
who sell their human capital, writing that, for those with sought after skills,
“flexibility represents a new form of entrepreneurship in which the individual
worker markets his or her capital portfolio among various ‘buyers”’ (1997,
p. 30). In this vision, highly skilled workers have turned the tables, gaining a
position of control by marketing themselves to the highest bidders. From this
perspective, workers comply with a hectic, erratic pace of work because
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230 Shih

they view it as being in their own interests as entrepreneurs of their own

careers.
Fourth, the advent of project time and the resultant pace of work blur the
boundaries between work time and personal time, which are, as Zerubavel (1981)
noted, clearly distinguished when work is organized around the clock and calen-
dar. Since project time is based on deadlines, any time can be construed as work
time. The rhythms of workers’ lives are tied to the rhythms of the global capitalist
market, which is indifferent to the cycle of the day, week or year. This is the case
precisely because the logic of flexibly organized regions is to closely match pro-
duction with the fluctuations of a rapacious global market. From this view, perhaps
what is most detrimental about project time in Silicon Valley is that it causes a
displacement and desynchronization of other spheres of time in individuals’ lives,
notably what Mukerjee (1990) has called “bodily time,” meaning the routine needs
of the physical body, and “interaction time,” or the time that is needed to sustain
family and social relationships. Because these two spheres require a routine, regu-
lar rhythm, the erratic nature of project time is disruptive, particularly when work
needs are prioritized, as they are in Silicon Valley.

DATA AND METHODS

This study is based on fifty-four in-depth, open-ended interviews of highly

skilled white and Asian (primarily Chinese and Indian, the major Asian ethnic
groups) men and women working in Silicon Valley. I conducted interviews from
March 1999 through January 2001; all interviewees work in the high-tech indus-
try in Silicon Valley, and are currently in engineering jobs or jobs that require
an engineering background (this includes research engineers, design engineers,
marketing engineers, engineering managers, entrepreneurs, those at the business
or marketing end, etc.). Interviewees were chosen using a snowball method. Ini-
tial respondents were found in a variety of ways, ranging from contacts garnered
through my attendance at specialized engineering society functions to solicitations
of professors at major universities for referrals to graduates they sent to Silicon Val-
ley, an ad in an alumni magazine, and referrals from acquaintances. I asked initial
respondents if they would be able to refer me to someone who “had either different
experiences from you, or who had different perspectives,” and each chain ended at
either the second or third link. Interviews ranged from one to two hours, and were
held primarily at interviewees’ workplaces.4 I designed the interview schedule

4 Thirty-two of the respondents were women. Nineteen of the respondents were Chinese/Taiwanese,
nineteen were white, thirteen were Indian, two were Filipino, and one was Vietnamese. Twenty-four of
the respondents were U.S. born (all the whites were U.S. born); the remainder were foreign born. The
average age of the respondents was 36.3, which is approximately the average age of those in Silicon
Valley. All interviewees had bachelor’s degrees and half of the respondents had graduate degrees
(seven of these had doctorates). Few of the respondents worked at the same companies: at the time of
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Project Time in Silicon Valley 231

to elicit information around three primary topics of interest: respondents’ pace

of work, respondents’ career history, and their perceptions of mobility in Silicon
Valley. While this is a case study of a particular region, the speed-up of time that
is characteristic of Silicon Valley has also been noted in other industries and ar-
eas of the U.S. (Hochschild 1997) and as a symptom of the general “time-space”
compression resulting from the globalization of capital (Harvey 1989).

PROJECT TIME AND MARKET TIME IN SILICON VALLEY

I indicated earlier that work in Silicon Valley is organized through project

cycles and deadlines, instead of a pre-set work schedule based on the clock, and that
within project cycles workers are expected to achieve goals autonomously, rather
than as dictated by any specific guidelines set by managers. While autonomy at
work might be seen as a benefit, allowing for a self-regulated pace, rather it leads to
an erratic, hectic pace of work where “nobody dictates a specific schedule . . . [but]
you are trying to get the work done.” It is erratic because workers are unable to
report weekly average hours, ranging as they do from thirty at the more laid-back
beginnings of a project to well over one hundred at the tail end of a project cycle,
when deadlines are looming. It is hectic, resulting in reportedly high frequencies
of “burnout” by the end of each project cycle.
One reason for this pace of work is that the lack of a strict schedule makes
it difficult for workers to set any limits on how much they work. Furthermore,
autonomy within the structure of project cycles becomes a tool by which man-
agers can obtain limitless amounts of labor. Project deadlines can be easily ma-
nipulated, thereby extracting increasing amounts of labor. Given the lack of a
rigid temporal structure, individuals find it increasingly difficult to distinguish
between and determine work time and private time, protected from the demands
of work.
The impact of ambiguous deadlines and schedules is evident when I talk
to engineers about their work lives and the time pressures they face. Matt, for
instance, who is a senior engineer at a networking giant, spoke frankly about how
project deadlines can be shortened to push productivity. He explained:
The nature of engineering is that it’s imprecise, and so deadlines and schedules are all just
best guesses about when it will be accomplished. So managers, they like to play head games
with people. They say, okay, we need something done by this date, and then people feel
constrained to really deliver by then, and then family just gets trashed . . . You can’t deny
that it works. You tell someone that it needs to be done in two months, and it takes six
months or a year . . . So for a person who is really driven, they compromise everything.

interviewing, they worked (or were entrepreneurs) at forty-one different firms, distributed evenly at
large, well-established firms, smaller, specialized firms, and start-ups. However, the majority of the
respondents had worked in firms with different characteristics, and almost all the respondents had
worked for more than one company. The average number of years in the work force was 11.2.
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232 Shih

As Matt’s comments indicate, because work is “imprecise” (relying on the workers’

ability to finish project goals autonomously, rather than dictated by specific steps),
managers are able to extract increasing amounts of time and labor simply by
manipulating deadlines. Work becomes consuming for those who are “driven,” for
those who agree to comply with this managerial pressure.
While one might say that managers always have a motivation to push employ-
ees to work harder, the manipulation of project deadlines is particularly tied here to
the broader context of the global market for high-tech development. The industry
has faced a “gold rush” scenario, particularly in the past decade, a race to create
and capture niches in the growing market of services and goods. In this economy,
speed is understood as integral since, at any given time, it is likely that several
firms are developing the same services or products. Consumer tastes are fleeting
as well. For instance, according to Thom Stohler, director of work force policies at
the American Electronics Association, the average shelf life for a product is nine
to eighteen months, and just three months for an Internet product.5
This dynamic and fluctuating market has a direct impact on the temporal
rhythm of work, precisely because economies organized around flexible special-
ization are structured to adapt and respond quickly to the market (Piore and Sabel
1984). Given this situation, project cycles have an intimate relationship with mar-
ket demands; the patterns of the market become the patterns of work. This is
exemplified by the following comments from Raj, an Indian software engineer in
his mid-thirties who works at a mid-sized company. He had spoken to me about
the increasing time pressures at work, and when I asked him how this had come
about, he described upper management’s expectations that employees deliver a
project on time:
These are unrealistic timelines . . . They are not set by product specifications, but what
competitors are coming out with for the market, so it’s really demanding. I mean, if a
product should take ten months to finish, there’s often a six-month deadline, and you just
have to finish it to meet the market . . . It’s a gold rush scenario, which makes it different,
I think, because there’s also extra pressure on the company. It [comes from] much higher,
from the investors . . . and that trickles down to the employees.

As Raj’s comments suggest, the speed-up of the high-tech market sets deadlines
for project cycles that are difficult for engineers to meet. Clearly, the “gold rush
scenario,” that is, the competition for market share, affects the rhythms of work,
and this pressure from competition is refracted at several levels, from investors to
management to employees.
In a similar account, Shelley, a senior design engineer at a microprocessor
manufacturer, spoke about the impact of increasing competition in the high-tech
industry and the subsequent escalating pace of development. She related its effect
on project cycles, especially in “money maker” groups such as the one in which
she worked.
5 Alexander Nguyen, “High-Tech Migrant Labor,” The American Prospect, 11(3), December 20, 1999.
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Project Time in Silicon Valley 233

In this business, the design cycle is getting shorter, shorter, shorter, shorter. You have to do
more things in that time because, I mean, time to market, getting it out, quicker and quicker,
better, faster, smaller. In the last eight years, the first projects, the cycle was this long [holds
hands wide apart]. Now it’s this long [holds hands much closer] but you have to do more,
so it’s like, really, cranking it out.

As Shelley noted, the design cycle (a type of project cycle), is shaped by the de-
mands of “time to market,” a phrase meant to denote the amount of time one needs
to design and develop a product for the market. In her particular field, micropro-
cessors are quickly becoming “better, faster, smaller,” and she and her colleagues
are pressured by the heavy competition and increasing pace of innovation in the
microprocessor market. As the pace of development in high-tech quickens, project
deadlines shorten, increasing the pace of work in Silicon Valley.

PROJECT TIME AND THE WORKER AS ENTREPRENEUR

Since respondents seem to be aware that they are subject to increasing and
often unreasonable time demands by their managers, the obvious question be-
comes “Why do they agree?” In this section, I show how managers gain compli-
ance through the normative, individualist ideology in the region that interprets the
worker as an entrepreneur who can ultimately achieve success (and untold riches)
in Silicon Valley’s high-tech industry through their own active efforts. In this vi-
sion, workers are responsible for their own performance at work, for managing
their own careers by persistently gaining new skills and remaining marketable,
and for constantly look out for opportunities to advance via job-hopping. As en-
trepreneurs of their own careers, increasing amounts of work is seen primarily as
satisfying their own interests rather than the interests of managers or organiza-
tions. This is in sharp contrast to the organization man, who is motivated by an
internal labor market, subsumed within a paternalistic organization, and defined
by a collective identity.
The shift to and emphasis on the individual is reflected in the expectation that
workers “manage themselves,” that is, push themselves to put in long hours and
strive for individual achievement. Chen, who is a vice president of a relatively new
start-up company, exemplifies this. When I met him on a Sunday afternoon at his
sparsely furnished company, he and many of his employees were busy working,
and it is evident that this is a regular routine. When I asked him what hours he
demands of his workers he immediately exclaimed, “Whatever it takes!” When I
asked him what that means in actual number of hours worked, he was evasive. I
pressed him again, and he answered me:
I am looking for a person who is committed to the company, who is committed to the project,
who believes that the idea can really take off in the marketplace. In terms of absolute time
commitment, I don’t have any numbers. You can work like . . . in this day and age, it’s very
hard to tell when people are working and when people are not working.
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234 Shih

Chen’s attempt to skirt the issue of time illustrates an important recurring pattern—
the substitution of an objective work schedule with the subjective demand for
commitment. Note that when he says “committed to the company,” he does not
define it in terms of long-term commitment, but rather in complete dedication at the
moment—the requirement that work demands take priority over other demands,
and that any time is potentially work time. Chen further explained,

Over here, [it’s] like teaching my daughter to swim, just dump [her] into the water! You
must be independent and motivated. I always tell my engineers, you are your own managers.
There is a pile of work on the table and I don’t want to give you the deadline to finish the
work because the work is almost infinite at this point in time so why don’t you just dive in,
and find your own work and deadlines and it’s up to you to figure out how to swim.

Chen’s expectation that workers must be their own managers is significant, re-
flecting the burden placed on employees when strict responsibilities, schedules
and deadlines are not preset. Again, by suggesting that his workers manage their
own time, he has created a situation where the time dedicated to work is limitless.
It is no longer delineated by nine-to-five, but rather by the workers’ dedication to
the company and the demand that one should always be working, lest loyalty be
questioned.
The pressure to work longer hours is buttressed by a shift to performance-
based evaluations. As is suggested by Chen’s comments, management does not feel
responsible for taking care of workers. Rather, workers are expected to prove their
worth to their companies. Workers are expected not only to put in hours but also to
come up with innovative ideas, because the high-tech industry expansion depends
on constantly evolving products and services. Chen, for instance, explained that
he created a flat hierarchy (typical of both start-ups and decentralized large orga-
nizations) because he expects everyone to contribute and because the “best idea
wins . . . that’s the critical issue for us to survive, I want people’s brain power to
work together and make this happen . . . My philosophy is like this: You have the
best idea this moment, I give you five minutes, you tell me what it is, from your
brain and heart.”
Chen’s stance reflects the expectation of individual achievement, a stance in
accordance with the ideology that Silicon Valley is not hierarchical, but rather
is a place where the “best idea wins.” In this way employees are encouraged to
be “entrepreneurial” in their work by “adding value” through new ideas. This is
characteristic of economies organized around flexible specialization. It “. . . has
put a premium on ‘smart’ and innovative entrepreneurialism, aided and abetted by
all of the accoutrements of swift, decisive, and well-informed decision making”
(Harvey 1989, p. 157). Thus individuals’ time gets bound up as organizational
time, in large part because the autonomous nature of work creates a demand for
individuals to prove their worth through performance. Performance as a subjective
criterion is difficult to satisfy and, as Kanter notes, “It becomes difficult to set
limits, difficult to determine how much work is ‘enough’ . . . It eats into personal
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life and exaggerates the conflict between work and family” (1995, pp. 358–359).
As is suggested by Chen’s comments, organizations no longer see themselves
in the role of taking care of workers. This is also reflected in the fact that long-
term employment is not promised in exchange for loyalty. Instead, workers are
expected to be in charge of their own career livelihood, and are seen as responsible
for keeping themselves marketable by maintaining and improve their skills set,
keeping up to date on changing technologies, and broadening their specializations.
Indeed, workers who do not “initiate” learning new skills can find themselves in a
difficult position. A senior vice president at a major hardware firm talked matter-
of-factly about letting go of forty percent of their staff when the company was
experiencing financial difficulties, because their skills were in older, obsolescent
technologies. He explained that while, in the past, people may have been able to
spend their careers working on one type of technology, the current environment is
quite different:
For many years technology did not change very fast so the person who was interested in tech-
nology could probably have their entire technical life working in that technology . . . Today
in many fields, hardware and software, in the computer and biotech industry, things are
advancing so well that the technological underpinnings change every couple [of] years. So
if you are just in one technical discipline you may find yourself high and dry.

This executive’s perspective reflects companies’ relinquishing of responsibility

for their workers and the expectation that employees should be self-reliant. He
continued:
[The] thing in the valley is that it is not the company’s responsibility, it’s the individual’s
responsibility. The quid pro quo here is that in return for opportunity, the individual has to
make choices, unless you want to go back to a slower, more idyllic time where the company
takes care of you . . . So the individual has to take responsibility.

Here the emphasis on individual responsibility is discernable, as is the idea that

workers should be entrepreneurs of their own careers, particularly because Silicon
Valley is viewed as a place of opportunity.
The fact that it is the employees’ task to “prove their worth” to the company
and to remain marketable, without any long-term expectations in return, reflects
a de-linking of individuals and organizations, at the very least on a psycholog-
ical level. This is a marked departure from a human relations model (Bendix
1956; Perrow 1972; Barley and Kunda 2000) of managerial ideology, which views
membership in an organization as inherently beneficial to humans and managers’
responsibilities as creating collectivity within organizations. In Silicon Valley,
neither appears to owe the other side any promises, and each is understood as
motivated by maximizing their own outcomes.
Indeed, the de-linking of organizations and individuals is reflected by what
hiring managers look for in prospective employees. This is suggested by my con-
versation with a recruiter for a networking company that was seen as a “hot”
company to work for at the time. When I asked him to tell me what his company
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wanted in its workers, he emphasized that it was not looking for someone who had
stayed at one place for a long time, but rather someone who has “taken the initia-
tive” and acquired a number of skills and expertise in a few companies, someone
who is “not afraid to learn something new.” His definition of a desirable worker
suggests that there is no expectation that an individual remain loyal to a company
and that it values those who are seen as having an individualistic drive for success
rather than a collective identity satisfied with the status quo.
This perspective does not seem to be discordant with employees, who them-
selves expressed similar viewpoints about individual accountability. Those I spoke
with emphasized that it is individuals’ own responsibility to remain marketable, to
be strategic about their careers, and to be open to any opportunities. Respondents
were very conscious of the need to broaden one’s skills set, whether within one
company or by switching jobs. The common belief is that “if you are not growing,
you are really not going to get anywhere” and that “it’s very important to change
to move ahead . . . people get too comfortable, and you can’t.” The socialization
of this belief of worker as entrepreneur is important, because it drives individuals
to push themselves at work, presenting this increased labor as within their own
interests rather than the interests of their managers or the high-tech industry as a
whole.
Part of the incentive, then, lies in the belief that Silicon Valley is a place where
individuals have the opportunity to design their own futures and fortunes. Those
in high-tech are quite aware that they are working in an industry that is a dynamic
sector of the U.S. economy, and answer my question of why they agree to work
as hard as they do by explicitly noting that they believe they have the potential
to “strike it rich”—because they hold stock options at their company or, in some
cases, because they are partners at a start-up. For instance, Raj, the engineer who
earlier talked about managerial pressures, frankly explained that he feels he would
like to switch his career in a few years, but is staying in high-tech for now because
he hopes to make a sizable amount of money. He said, “The thing is, technology,
it’s kind of like the gold rush of the ’90s, and realistically I’m in a good position
to capitalize on that . . . you can make a lot of money.”
Of course, as the post-boom downturn has shown, this position is overly
optimistic. Yet almost everyone I spoke with had the hope that perhaps he or
she would be one of those who “made it,” in part because most people knew of
someone who was worth millions, at least on paper. This mood is exemplified by
one respondent, who wryly noted about living in the region:

A lot is different, it changes you . . . being surrounded by people who make millions, if
you’re not doing that, well then something’s wrong with you, you’re doing something
wrong. It’s unspoken, but its definitely there. I mean, you think, my friend, today he’s worth
ten thousand, and then tomorrow he’s worth ten million!”

When I responded by asking whether it is unrealistic to expect everyone to be a

success by these measures, he exclaimed rather ruefully, “We don’t talk about the
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failures, right? It’s unspoken. We just talk about the successes but we don’t talk
about the failures!”
This ideology of Silicon Valley as the pinnacle of capitalist possibilities draws
people to the region. Joe, a senior engineer who regularly conducts hiring inter-
views for his company, equates the lure of Silicon Valley with the lure of Holly-
wood, noting the region has attained a glamour that draws people in with the hopes
that they will “make it big” and “get rich and retire.” Thus this ideology of Silicon
Valley as the American Dream writ large turns every individual into a capitalist,
encouraging them to believe that their possibilities for wealth are limitless and
re-interpreting their hectic pace of work as the pursuit of their own interests, rather
than the interests of their managers or companies.

PROJECT TIME AND OTHER TEMPORAL SPHERES:

FROM COORDINATION TO DESYNCHRONIZATION

So far I have analyzed the dynamics of time in Silicon Valley solely through the
lens of work. Yet the pace of work is not the only temporal structure that individuals
live within. I will now discuss two other temporal spheres—the rhythm of bodily
needs, and the rhythm of social relationships—to illustrate how changes in the
pace of work, and the blurring of the line between work and personal time, impact
on individuals’ ability to negotiate what Gurvitch has noted as “multiple temporal
worlds.” These two temporal spheres are often overlooked because they are so
basic, but I will show that the erratic and quickened pace of work results in the
displacement and disruption of the more regular, routinized needs of these spheres.
In this way, the organization of work around project time, rather than clock time,
eliminates a critical protection that workers had. In addition, engineers themselves
do not seem particularly motivated to protect their private lives as they have done
in other settings (Zussman 1985) but, instead, now caught up in the ideologies of
Silicon Valley, allow their work to pervade and subsume their private lives.

Bodily Time

Bodily time, or biological time (Mukerjee 1990), refers to the regularized

routine needed to care for the physical body and bodily functions. The rhythm of
the physical body is an often overlooked temporal sphere, in large part because
its needs (eating, sleeping, etc.) are so basic that we take their satisfaction for
granted. In actuality, however, the routine of the body is often infringed upon; a
simple example is sleep deprivation, which can be understood as the displacement
of the temporal rhythm of the body with other temporal structures, such as those
of paid work or new parenthood.
In Silicon Valley, project cycles often displace bodily rhythms. In the broadest
sense, the “burnout” reported by many respondents suggests that the rhythms of
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project time do not allow for the regularized care of physical bodies. Take, for
instance, the comments of Shelley, the engineer I quoted earlier, who observed
that project cycles were shortening. As she talked to me about these project cycles,
her vivacious manner diminished as she lost her composure and became quite upset.
I’ve been in this industry for eight years. I’ve worked the long hours. I’ve worked the
grind, I’ve given a period of my life to this company as I’m sure you have heard others
say . . . Basically, I remember being young [laughs] and getting here at 7, say, outta here 9,
10, 11, 12, 1, okay, and doing this for prolonged periods of times for extensive deadlines,
for big projects and stuff. So you can imagine that doing this for a number of projects, it
can take its toll.

Shelley is an engineer in her early thirties, yet the fact that she no longer saw
herself as “young” and that she experienced work as giving a “period of my life”
to the company reflects the physical toll taken by the demands of project cycles
and the tremendous growth of the high-tech industry.
In another example, Caren, a senior research and development engineer, spoke
about her experiences in a large hardware manufacturing company that she had
just left, and about the prioritization of work over any physical needs. A talkative,
bright woman, she spoke about the consuming nature of her work: “When I worked
at [this company], I woke up thinking about work, and I went to bed thinking about
work. It was totally consuming and there were very few moments when I wasn’t
thinking about work.” Caren continued to describe its demands:
[My company is] very demanding in that this is a highly competitive environment. So if you
leave at 5 or 5:30, you feel you are sneaking out! You feel “this is going to reflect on me”
in this way, so I would work until 8:30 . . . I just could never say, “You know what, I can’t
do that because I need to rest.” It just didn’t seem like the right thing to say there. You were
admitting to physical problems . . . [My company] is a place that depends on people being
there when they are supposed to be. It’s a manufacturing environment—if something goes
wrong, you are there; you are there until the problem is fixed. You know they will pay you
for it, they will praise you for it, but if you are not there, you can bet you will be . . . Because
your job is to be there, and a lot of times at [company] your job should come before your life.

Caren’s comments reflect the implementation of performance-based rewards, as

well as the company’s ability to inculcate a norm of long hours where “your job
should come before your life.” The fact that she felt that it was not “okay” to admit
to physical problems suggests that a stratification of temporal worlds—where the
time demands of work, where leaving at 5 is “sneaking off”—takes priority over
the demands of the body. Caren eventually left her company because she could
no longer face the physical toll and opted to become a technical writer at another
company where she could have a well-defined work schedule.
Shelley and Caren talked about the experience of burnout, but another respon-
dent told me of a more extreme case where his manager pushed himself beyond
his physical limits.
One particular case . . . happened early in my career and, once again, the pressure, I mean,
we were dealing with market pressure; we were losing money; everyone understands losing
money! So I had a manager who was the epitome of health, California native, took care
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of himself, exercised, did everything right, and was put under tremendous pressure to the
point where he suffered a stroke and he was my age, 41–42, at the time, suffered a stroke,
developed perforation of the intestine, was hospitalized for a long time, and so he was out of
commission for months. And when he returned after this horrible thing, I remember having
lunch with him and saying, “I have to ask you this. How much did this pressure contribute
to your health problems?” And he said 100%.

As these cases suggest, the pace of project time can result in a displacement
of the more routinized needs of bodily time with deleterious results. The erratic
and speeded-up nature of project cycles often results in the prolonged inability to
care for the regular needs of one’s body.

Interaction Time

Temporal rhythms of work interrupt not only bodily time, but also the inter-
action time needed to sustain social relationships. Those I interviewed spoke of
a lack of interaction time, both in terms of the time and space needed to develop
and sustain friendships, and in terms of the time needed to maintain romantic and
family relationships. Ana, an Indian engineer in her thirties who moved to the Sil-
icon Valley a few years ago, talked about her difficulties developing relationships
outside of professional ones.
It’s pretty dead here. I moved here to the South Bay, and I’m pretty settled. So now I’m
trying to build up my social life, but it’s difficult . . . I have a lot of acquaintances here, since
I moved here; so I did meet a lot of people. So it’s at a point where people will call me and
ask about jobs or technology or information, etc. But it’s a professional thing I think . . . The
biggest problem is that everyone works really hard.

Although professional socializing is ubiquitous in a region that values networking,

there is little time or space in which people can develop and sustain relationships
that are not related to work. Ana saw this as a function of the fact that “everyone
works really hard,” with little time to invest in sociable interaction. In this scenario,
the impact of project time is self-reinforcing, because she said she “might as
well be working” if the alternative is simply to “sit at home.” She concludes,
rather sardonically, “It’s capitalism, the thing about the pressures of this particular
cauldron, where you work all the time and it’s money money money and work
work work.”
Another engineer, Julia, a Chinese woman in her thirties, spoke of how the
region breeds people who are young and single:
That’s what people talk about. We don’t have a life. We don’t have free time, you just go
home and sleep, and on weekends you just recuperate, or you have to work. And a lot of
people travel . . . and that takes a lot out of you. It’s nomadic, people traveling all the time,
so there is no home base. It’s very hard to maintain a relationship that way.

For both these women, the temporal structure of work continuously interrupted
and constrained interaction time and, as Julia noted, it’s difficult to “maintain a
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240 Shih

relationship that way.” When I asked her what drives her to continue, she paused
and thoughtfully responded, “I’m trying to think if it’s because everyone else is
doing the same thing so you don’t realize you have a choice, or if it’s because
you’ve been working so hard for so long that you don’t have a life so you don’t
miss it . . . I mean it’s not as if we could keep on going like this forever. I don’t
know; this is a hard question.”
Aside from the development and maintenance of friendships and romantic
relationships, respondents also noted that their work is supplanting time they had
with their families. This was primarily noted by male engineers, especially those
who opted to join start-up ventures, which tend to have much more consuming
schedules. For example, Subash, a successful, multiple entrepreneur whose wife
is a biochemist, talked about the impact his career has had on his family life. He
related the high expectations for success in Silicon Valley and the pace at which
one needs to grow their company in order to be considered a success by investors.
Subash thoughtfully concluded, “Clearly, in my case at least, [my career] has
affected the richness with the kids and the rest of the family. There are certainly
less things that I do with my family.”
Similarly, Alex, another engineer who has worked for both an established
company and now a start-up and whose wife stayed at home to care for their
children, commented somewhat regretfully,

I’ve seen a significant difference since joining a start-up in terms of balance. I used to spend
a lot of time with my kids before I started my own start-up, and what I noticed, just a month
ago I think, is that, when I come home and try to pick up things with my kids from where
we left off, that the thing would be gone in their minds already. Because you know, in the
past I would have daily contact with them. Now my contact has gone down to once a week
or even sometimes not even that much. And the kids just got used to me not being around.
And in a way it’s good because they’ve become independent and at this age it’s good for
them. But four to five years from now, they’ll be gone, and I’ll probably remember that I
had this opportunity to spend this time with them and I didn’t take it.

Alex and Subash both referred to the suspension of interaction time with family
due to the erratic and exhaustive temporal rhythms of work, and they noted the
loss of regular interaction time with their kids as irretrievable.
Richard, a design engineer at a start-up, also talked about how he wanted to
spend more time with his wife and newborn, but was unable to because of direct
pressure from his company. When his wife Marianne went into labor at 2:30 a.m.
on a Sunday morning, she called Richard, who was still at work, and he joined her at
the hospital. The next day, he asked his boss for two weeks off. He refused, saying
that the particular project they were working on was heavily invested, necessitating
quick completion and release to be market competitive. Richard was told instead
to “spend time with your children when you’re rich.”
In a final example of the displacement of family time, Nell, an energetic
engineer who is a successful product manager at a mid-sized desktop company
and the mother of a six-year-old boy, talked about the impact of her husband’s
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decision to join a start-up (he is also an engineer). She talked with good humor
about what happened when her husband “disappeared into the murky world of
Silicon Valley start-ups,” saying that they decided that she would cut her own
hours to take on a greater share of childrearing. They agreed that, if her husband
were to put his full energies into the start-up, he would need to have “free rein on his
time,” with the ensuing “seven-day workweeks and nights when he didn’t get home
’til 11.” Thus, they decided to “substitute less of [my husband] to more of me.”

[So when he went] two times full-time [laughs] to the start-up, one of the discussions we
had was that, in order for him to have full capability and flexibility of schedule—and the
position he was going into was vice president of engineering—he needed to be able to be
on the spot, to stay on the spot, without even a guilty conscience. You know, so, basically,
I became a single mom, okay, which means I had to be available for anything.

She later exclaimed, “Thank God they made a camcorder because [my hus-
band] is missing everything!” and added that she herself would not have made this
choice because she would not have wanted to miss out on all the events of her
son’s life.
Nell’s example reflects how engineers—male engineers in particular—have
allowed the temporal structure of work to interrupt and constrain interaction time
with their families. Having “free rein on his time” and “without even a guilty
conscience,” no less, essentially means that project time holds priority over other
temporal spheres.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

In this article, I have examined the organization of work through project cycles
for high-tech engineers in Silicon Valley and showed how project time represents
a shift away from the routinized rhythms of work characterized by clock time,
leading to erratic, intensified, and speeded-up rhythms. I have argued that project
time becomes the tool by which managers can extract more labor by manipulating
project deadlines, and that it is the medium by which individuals’ lives become
intimately linked to the rhythms of the global capitalist market. The “discipline” of
workers is not regulated by clock time, but by market time, effectively blurring the
lines between work and personal time, and making it more difficult for employees
to resist.
The particular characteristics of flexible specialization in Silicon Valley define
individuals as entrepreneurs who are not only responsible for their own fates,
but free to pursue their fates through “egalitarian” capitalist markets. As such,
individuals are encouraged to behave as capitalists, putting in limitless hours for
the possibility of increasing rewards. This ideology functions as an effective mode
of control because it posits this labor as being in the worker’s own interest, as an
entrepreneurial activity rather than one embedded within relations of control. This
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242 Shih

individualist ideology also reflects the de-linking of organizations and workers,

where organizations have absconded the paternalistic role of caretakers of their
employees, and demand that their employees prove their worth. As the introductory
quote from Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, suggests, it’s a “Darwinian capitalism”
out there, a survival of the fittest.
What is problematic about the speeded-up and erratic nature of project time
is that it results in a disruption and displacement of other temporal spheres and
rhythms. In particular, a desynchronization with the more routinized needs of
bodily time and interaction time appears common, as individuals report being
burnt out, unable to care for their own bodies and those of others, and unable to
engage in regular social interaction with friends and families. This displacement of
bodily and interaction time reflects an assumption that temporal structures should
be stratified, prioritizing the time structure of work over the needs of other time
structures.
After hearing respondents’ comments, it would seem that from the point
of view of the individual, and even from that of a community, Silicon Valley
is unsustainable. The organization of work demands such huge inputs of time
and energy that even some of the most necessary bodily and social needs are
neglected. The “gold rush” metaphor is apt, because it refers to a period in which
all other social and personal needs were suspended in favor of the single-minded
pursuit of digging for gold. And yet clearly, Silicon Valley is surviving (although
it is currently undergoing some difficulties), despite the displacements of bodily
time and interaction time I have noted. On a speculative level, I suggest that its
ability to do so is dependent on collective and individual mechanisms of temporal
suspension. I cite the following three trends.
First, the collective prioritization of work and tolerance of the displacement
of other temporal spheres appear to result in a reconfiguration of one’s life course.
Perceptions of one’s life course are, of course, inherently socially defined, because
cultural norms dictate the “appropriate” times one should achieve status passages
such as marriage, children, and career mobility (Lewis and Weigart 1981). In
Silicon Valley, the consuming nature of work appears to be reconfiguring the
standard conception of a life course. Rather than seeing the building of careers,
relationships and families as simultaneous events, the cultural norm in Silicon
Valley is moving towards sequencing these life events (as exemplified by the
sentiment that you can spend time with your family after you are rich). For example,
instead of anticipating retirement at age sixty-five, individuals are far more likely
to see themselves leaving their current occupation in their forties and either retiring
or moving into a less demanding occupation. In this sense, the conception of career
structure is changing, condensing into fewer years but at the same time agreeing to
its intensification. This is reflected by Julia’s comment that they could not “keep
on going like this forever.” But individuals do believe that the opportunities of the
high-tech industry are such that they should be taken advantage of now because,
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as another person optimistically said, “If you make it, you can go retire and do
what you want!” Afterwards, other aspects of life, such as maintaining long-term
relationships and families, can be resumed.
The region’s demographics are also suggestive of a collective agreement of
time suspension. Silicon Valley has managed to import large numbers of work-
ers who are younger, single, childless, and more likely to be male. For example,
15.4 percent of California’s population are between the ages of 25 and 34, but
21.9 percent of those in Santa Clara City, 23.2 percent of those in Sunnyvale, and
24.7 percent of those in Mountain View are in this range. Residents in several
cities of Silicon Valley are also less likely to have children. While 31 percent of
adults in California have children, only 24 percent in Santa Clara City, 24 percent
in Sunnyvale, and 21 percent of adults in Mountain View do.6 Additionally, Santa
Clara County, the main county of Silicon Valley, has the highest single male-to-
single female ratio in the U.S., supplanting Alaska’s longstanding claim of this
distinction (Cooper 2000). This is reinforced by the large numbers of H-1b tempo-
rary workers who leave families in their countries of origin. These demographics
seem to reflect a gold rush scenario, and suggest that at least a portion of the pop-
ulation is experiencing a temporary suspension of familial relations and personal
lives.
Finally, the collective prioritization of work, and the development of the high-
tech industry, over other concerns seems to be shaping the type of communities that
are being formed. Residents of the region express dissatisfaction with the breadth
of community services and life, from the lack of simple services such as grocery
stores to cafés, restaurants and other centers that serve as gathering spaces. This
outcome was noted by one respondent, who said,

The way to describe Silicon Valley is a “camp town” . . . In that when I say “camp town”, you
think of the old East coast coal-mining towns, or a town that has only one business and every-
thing revolves around it . . . And that’s Silicon Valley; the industry is high-tech . . . everything
is fueled by that. If it weren’t for that, a lot of people wouldn’t be here. So it’s a bit of a soul-
less sort of culture . . . the reason why people are there is to earn money . . . and everything
is dictated by the work. It’s “in the name” . . . I mean, it’s amazing . . . This is one industry
that has flourished, one industry that has dominated.

This “camp town” analogy is powerful, because it depicts what is lacking in a

community whose sole purpose is “in the name” of work and that agrees upon
collective mechanisms of temporal suspension. While these comments are spec-
ulative, they suggest that we should give careful consideration to the social and
individual costs of this region’s success, particularly given the conscious attempts
to duplicate Silicon Valley both domestically and internationally.

6 Numbers are tabulated from Census 2000. Tables: General Demographic Characteristics of California,
Selected Counties and Cities.
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244 Shih

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank Gil Eyal, John Horton, Anastasia Prokos, Barrie Thorne, Roger
Waldinger, Min Zhou, an anonymous reviewer and Robert Zussman for their in-
cisive and thoughtful comments. The research on which this article is based was
supported by the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, the Center for Working
Families at the University of California- Berkeley, and the International Migration
section of the Social Science Research Council.

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