Uncertainty is a defining feature of organizational life in the contemporary economy. How do organizations generate commitments from employees in a context of heightened uncertainty? I pursue this question through an ethnographic analysis of a Silicon Valley tech “start-up.” Tech start-ups exact intensive commitments from employees –long unbounded hours and social and emotional investments in the firm – despite the well-known fact that most of these firms will fail entirely within in a few years. Drawing on participant observation as an employee at a seed-stage software start-up, I find that managers use a repeated sequence of three techniques to generate commitment from the workforce. First, they hype up the workplace, using energized rituals and transcendent discourse to create a sense of moral purpose and collective excitement. Second, managers reward bait – they introduce an imagined set of rewards that workers can earn through commitment and insist that those rewards are immanent, legitimating urgency and overwork. And third, managers systematically purge the firm of workers who become disillusioned when such rewards don’t arrive, replacing them with eager new hires more amenable to the first two modes of motivation. The result is a repeatable cycle of management that sustains collective commitments from the workforce even as individual commitments falter. These findings challenge an overly rigid view of control in a given firm as relying on a single “mode” or “system” of management. Instead, it shows how managers address uncertainty by deploying multi-vocal forms of management, and how they draw on different techniques in response to different moments in a firm’s trajectory.
