Help wanted: Family, friends and co-ethnics as 'reserve labor' in Silicon Valley (California)

Family, friends and co-ethnics working together invoke images of migrants laboring in the fields or immigrants engaged in piece-rate sewing at home, a fading cultural vestige at the periphery of the economy. Drawing upon theories of spatial practice and boundary work, in this dissertation I examine how and why (and to what effects) family and communal labor persists at the economy's core. Specifically, I examine job help among high tech professionals in Silicon Valley. I define job help as any unpaid work, ranging from job training to task completion, that is commonly thought to be the duty of managers and co-workers yet which family, friends and community members (e.g., co-ethnics) beyond the firm give to employees. My methods include observations and interviews (n = 40) that focus on high tech professionals born in and outside the United States.; Whether sociologists claim Durkheim or Marx as an intellectual forebear, they generally assume that, at the core of the economy, the shift from agricultural to industrial production replaced family and communal labor with impersonal specializations. Yet family and communal labor persists. Collaborations that resemble pre-industrial practices may tend to emerge whenever workers perceive that formal organizations lack sufficient order and resources to get the job done and to secure status. Job help may contribute to a package of support (e.g., job search help) that enables workers to cope with flexible, insecure working conditions. New communication tools allow this support to be exchanged among ties that are geographically distant. Among my study participants, married couples in high tech exchanged the most job help. High tech professionals from India and Taiwan had the most well-organized work support, drawing upon transnational alumni networks that were maintained in some cases by e-mail lists.; When we ignore job help, we may miss important aspects of the labor process, including the ways in which unpaid services may contribute to the bottom line and influence the well-being and mobility of workers under flexible working conditions. Also, we may overlook the ways in which job training and support are shaped by identities and relations beyond the workplace (e.g., gender, race/ethnicity, marital status, alumni networks).