Inventing Startup Capitalism: Silicon Valley and the Politics of Technology Entrepreneurship from the Microchip to Reagan (2015)
This dissertation is the first scholarly inquiry into the development of technology entrepreneurship on the San Francisco Peninsula as a species of American capitalism. The region's electronics manufacturing district was reorganized as a distinctively entrepreneurial community when, beginning in the 1960s, local businesspeople embraced flexible mechanisms for coordinating their economic activities in lieu of hierarchical ones: they supplemented fixed salaries with performance-based incentives; tempered executive prerogative with more autonomy for rank-and-file employees; traded corporate patronage for new financing vehicles that expanded their rights as stakeholders; and, shifted toward disintegrated modes of production. This project recaptures the entrepreneurial turn's contingency by reconstructing its catalysts - the advent of Silicon Valley, as the Peninsula's business system has been known since a journalist coined the term in 1971, was not a foregone conclusion. Nor did its boosters break with the managerial status quo as completely as they claimed. Their practices empowered individuals and reaffirmed corporate hierarchy at the same time. Recovering the connections between the entrepreneurial class and American politics during the Cold War is this dissertation's second contribution. The Peninsula's business, civic, and academic leaders leveraged the national security state's demand for electronics to build up local manufacturing capabilities in the 1950s and early 1960s. The region did not accumulate its entrepreneurial structures in earnest, however, until the federal government clamped down on contractors' profits, inspiring them to cultivate new civilian markets and experiment with more agile, less capital-intensive ways to organize production. As Silicon Valley's prominence grew in the 1970s, its entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, trade organizations, and elected representatives lobbied for deregulation and tax cuts, policies intended to energize the virtuous cycle of startup formation and monetization that made the region rich. They played a key role in Congress's decision to lower the capital gains tax in 1978. More generally, their political ambitions aligned with the country's rightward turn. Ronald Reagan made their cause his own, arguing that more government retrenchment would yield more Silicon Valleys - a vision that never materialized but reflected technology entrepreneurship's appeal as a means of legitimating conservative economic doctrine. In the late Cold War era, the military appropriated Silicon Valley's innovations while the Reagan administration used its economic and technological prowess to highlight the Soviet Union's backwardness: the Peninsula's industrial district had spun off of the national security state abruptly in the mid-1960s; a decade and a half later, Silicon Valley was spun back on by design.
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