A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment by Carrie M. Lane (review)

Carrie Lane’s original plan for A Company of One was to write a situated historical ethnography of a specific group of workers: information technology workers in Dallas, Texas at the turn of the 21st century. This would have been a modest but admirable subject. However, along the way the dot.com crash struck, leading Lane into a much more complex and less researched topic. Her fieldwork morphed into a close examination of these workers’ experiences with unemployment and insecurity.

The late 1990s and early 2000s witnessed a great deal of scholarship revealing the realities of work in Silicon Valley. Lane’s original project would have offered a useful point of comparison to that literature. However, the timing of her research opened up a new avenue for exploration of the effects of massive layoffs on workers who were previously economic high-fliers. Additionally preparation of the manuscript was delayed until 2009, which coincided with another economic crisis. The result is a book about the dot.com collapse and immediate post-9/11 economic downturn, written in the context of the economic crisis of 2008–2009. Lane spent six months observing events and groups in Dallas designed for unemployed tech workers, speaking with more than 400 out-of-work people and organizers of unemployed networking events. The anchors of the project are 75 unemployed workers Lane interviewed multiple times over a period of three years. Nine were re-interviewed in 2009.

After a short historical overview of Dallas’ high-tech industries (Chapter 1), Lane examines the workers’ initial reactions to being laid off and their early responses to their new situation (Chapter 2). She is surprised at the lack of anger they expressed and by their unwillingness to blame their employer for their predicament. Here Lane draws out the theme of the book, which is also its most important contribution. The tech workers express a highly individualized notion of responsibility for their situation. They see themselves not as laid-off workers but as “‘companies of one,’ entrepreneurial agents engaged in the constant labor of defining, improving, and marketing ‘the brand called you’.” (9) They remain steadfast in their belief that the market will eventually reward them for their flexibility, hard work, and sacrifice. Lane identifies their hyper-individualism and faith in the market as an internalization of neoliberal ideology. Their understanding of their situation is shaped by their acceptance of a neoliberal worldview. These newly laid off workers do not see themselves as losers in the new economy; the “organization men” (highlighted by Newman and Dudley in their work on 1980s managerial layoffs) who refuse to adapt are the losers.

In subsequent chapters, Lane walks with the workers in their process of looking for work. Chapter 3 looks at their first struggles to figure out how to do a job search and how to deal with the emotional rollercoaster that has been launched. Chapter 4 explores the process of “networking,” including an in-depth description of the new formal networking and job-search organizations and events that pepper the industry. Her thick description of a specific event is an evocative account of how these types of events not only offer strong moral support and can buttress the flagging spirits of the job seekers, but how they simultaneously reinforce an individualist ideology that undermines the potential for collective action.

Chapter 5 shifts gears somewhat by looking more at the family and economic circumstances of the job seekers. Here Lane acknowledges that, relative to most other unemployed workers, the study participants are privileged. None lost their homes or cars as a consequence of their layoff, although they did experience significant financial stress. This is due in part, Lane argues, to the reality that most of the workers were supported by a second household income on the part of their spouse, something not acknowledged in their self-identification as independent, flexible free agents: “Job...