Text Sushi by Alf Rehn

The Hidden Enterprise Culture – Entrepreneurship in the Underground Economy
Colin C. Williams
Cheltenham, UK: Edwar Elgar, 2006
xi + 263 pp.

It is almost impossible to dislike this book. As the field of entrepreneurship studies in such a dire need of serious, critical engagements with the whole potential field, rather than the ideologically delimited part most focus on, this book serves as an important reminder of what is yet to be done, and the possibilities that remain. By taking the underground seriously, rather than just moralizing about it, Colin Williams presents a fascinating and stimulating piece of scholarship, one which hopefully will at least partially shake the field out of its intellectual complacency. The book isn’t perfect, as books rarely are, but it represents the kind of serious inquiry that could change the way in which entrepreneurship studies is usually seen outside of the field – i.e. as a politically motivated sham of either trite generalities or scholastic inanities – and re-energize the discussion therein.

The book sets out to inquire into the entrepreneurial underground economy, seeing this as an area which is legitimate to study if not necessarily to engage in. Noting that most commentators have treated it as an aberration and a pathology, and focused on different ways in which it could be combated, Williams looks to the fact that many (if not most) entrepreneurs have at least some experience of gray or off-the-books exchanges and endeavors. This is the hidden enterprise culture of the book’s title, and Williams goes on to analyze this as a field of economic and organizational behavior unto itself, with fascinating results. He does not completely escape the procedural trap, and unfortunately spends a lot of time delving into possibilities for government policy, when this could have been better spent by enriching the empirical cases, but one is prepared to forgive this as the book so clearly is doing important work.

Part I of the book details the ways in which both entrepreneurship studies and research into the underground economy has turned a blind eye to to the notion of “underground entrepreneurship”, and how this myopia has reduced and hindered intellectual development in both. Many of the arguments put forth in this part have been formulated before, but Williams has done us a great service in summarizing and collecting them, and it constitutes a great read. One comes away from these chapters amazed at how stunted the discourse has been, and the author makes a most convincing case for the necessity to inquire into the linkages between entrepreneurship and underground economies.

Part II then goes on to portray and discuss the hidden enterprise culture. This is the most important part of the book, and is simply dazzling. I cannot over-emphasize the sheer pleasure of reading an intellectually aware and analytically rigorous text on an important but almost completely ignored aspect of entrepreneurship. I want to draw a comparison to Dick Hobbs’s masterly Doing the Business, and Sudhir Venkatesh’s recent Off the Books, both amazing ethnographies, and suggest that it is through such case-studies (rather than the tired accolades to the usual IT-startups) that entrepreneurship studies can be developed as a serious social science. Williams combines surveys, cases, portraits and stringent analysis to present a compelling picture of an ignored economic culture, and this section alone is worth the price of the book.

Part III and IV discusses possible policies for dealing with the hidden enterprise culture, presenting the different options for deterring gray economies and potential initiatives for utilizing the energies contained therein. These parts are no doubt important, but they aren’t quite as fascinating and pressing as the earlier parts. I can see their importance as e.g. a report for government, but as a scholar I would have rather seen part I and II extended and these parts substantially shortened.

The book is well-written, even if it sometimes lapses into a dry and bureaucratic tone. There are parts that read like an official report rather than a piece of research, but one is (again) prepared to excuse such minor blemishes. Overall, this is important work, and it suggests that we need to radically alter the reading lists in the courses on entrepreneurship in our universities. It is a serious book, written by a serious thinker who is also a fine scholar, and I contend that the book should be required reading for every single researcher in the field – and I bloody well mean it! Succinctly put, we need more books like this, and should be thankful to Colin Williams for having written it. Kudos!

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Benkler, Yochai
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006
(Available for free download on http://www.benkler.org/)

OF PEERS AND MEN

Yochai Benkler likes the internet. He loves blogs, wikis, social networking sites, participatory democracy, Web2.0 and, in all likelihood, World of Warcraft. He is also a very bright legal scholar, with an interest in protecting the public sphere and the new forms of social production that are now emerging. All this taken together forms the core of his new book, a celebration of the power of social networks, technologically intermediated creativity, and the things even dispersed and virtual communities are capable of, presented in an often elegant (if at times rather verbose) manner. It would be easy to write an panegyric of such a nobel strive, but the task of criticism is not the same as that of eulogy. Instead, it might be that specifically the way in which this book is so easy to agree with forces us to subject it to criticism.

This is a book written in order to be both a magnum opus and a major statement. Everything about the book, from the title – a less than subtle play on “The Wealth of Nations” – to the scope, which spans pretty much all of the social sciences, signals that this is to be read as a total analysis of our world. Not necessarily a final word, as Benkler is far too smart to fall into that trap, but still a magisterial proclamation about our times. Oddly enough for our secular era, this seems to be why a lot of very intelligent people (e.g. Lawrence Lessig and Paul Duguid) have fawned over the book. Admittedly, the main arguments and points are compelling, but the adulation that has already been heaped upon this book are rather bewildering, as it neither presents anything particularly novel, nor does so in a particularly gripping way.
Stated in the briefest way possible, Benkler’s arguement is that the forms of social production contemporary technologies (particularly so the set of such known as the internet) have enabled and engendered an entirely new – albeit logically following – socio-economic state of affairs, one that forces us to rethink how we should conceive economy and politics (and law). This is by no means an original statement, as something similar has been stated by a number of thinkers during the last ten years, and he does not portray it as such. Rather, the book tries to collate this thinking into more complete whole, creating a theory of this new age of social production – an age of distributed politics, wonderful social creativity (think Wikipedia on steroids), transparency and the unleashing of human potential. It is a pleasant picture, filled with references to the best aspects of humanity, and one can easily read the book as a paean to the human race and its glorious future.

Yet, the problems of the book stems from this attempt of mapping out this “new” world. While I’ll be the first to agree that a phenomenon such as social production – groups of people cooperating in production outside of the market economy – is important, the implicit claim of Benkler that this has completely revolutionized the economy is nothing short of silly. We still have traditional production, and with e.g. China gearing up to become an industrial powerhouse such as the world has never seen, with factories and market-driven industrial relations galore, this form is not going anywhere anytime soon. It might be academically expedient to praise the ways in which the hip kids are crowdsourcing and building Web2.0-communities, but in its attention to these matters, the author quite willfully ignores the manifold of ways in which the world has stayed the same, and although the book is written in a careful and deliberate way, one often feels as if this merely exacerbates the matter – masking but not quite concealing the problem. Even though the novel ways of cooperation Benkler discusses deserve the kind of attention this book lavishes upon them, the strive to create a system of the unsystematic is bewildering. In a world of abstract peers, emergent phenomena and wildly massive redundancies – the user “toothpastery” on Flickr has over 500 photos of toothpaste posted – the old notion of creating a singular systemic description seems quaint but misguided.

Thus the main question this book raises, at least for this reviewer, is: Why has our age become so enamored with attempts at great systems? Looking to the way in which people like Manuel Castells, Antonio Negri and now Yochai Benkler have been hailed as seers for presenting the same kind of totalizing statements we are taught to ridicule 19th-century thinkers such as G.W.F. Hegel for is nothing short of amazing. Whereas we turn away from attempts to present singular, great theories of everything and the hunt for the one true method which will generate a pure social science, the kind of sweeping statements Benkler’s book is full of is met with nothing short of adulation. Why this desire for order, and why, in our distributed age, has the question of the grand system been reawakened?

A review I just finished for Gastronomica.

The Sausage Rebellion: Public Health, Private Enterprise and Meat in Mexico City, 1890-1917
Jeffrey M. Pilcher
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006
x + 245 pp. Illustrations.

MMM… MEXICAN MEAT…

One could, in the manner of Slavoj Zizek, wonder if in contemporary society there could be such a thing as truly Mexican food. Whereas one obviously needs to separate Mexican cuisine from the global food phenomenon described as “Mexican”, it stands as both symptom and testament to the former that the mongrelized and bastardized latter versions often seem to retain some of the magic of authenticity – and perhaps this very thing forces us to question whether there is such a thing as authentically Mexican food. In a situation where the humble refried bean has been turned into a commoditized cultural signifier, is not the hunt for Real Mexican Food a sign of the very non-authenticity of the same? None of this is the subject matter of Jeffrey Pilcher’s book, but the general theme of the book – the manner in which the modernist project of Mexico City’s development 1890-1917 – awakens questions about what it means to be authentic and what it means to be “developed”, and these issues clearly link to our current state of wondering about our world and our place in it.

It should be patently obvious that any book dedicated entirely to meat will be treat and a half, and this book, with it’s focus on how cultural, economic, historical, scientific and various other trends and discourses affect the market for meat in a country, is no exception. In an engaging narrative which ambles through the often confusing socio-political context of Mexico City during the last years of the Porfirio-regime and the years that followed the Revolution of 1910, Pilcher tells a story of butchers and pigs, meat moguls and street vendors, chicharrones and global capitalism, and does so in a way that can only be described as loving. It is, in the end, a book that leaves one slightly bewildered. As it so clearly is a labor of love, the attention to detail and cultural subtleties is nothing short of painstaking. Thus the book is often a treasure-trove of piquant details, where what is merely an aside in a sub-story can get the reader engaged into thinking about a number of issues. For instance, although the book barely touches upon matters of gender, I often found myself lost in rumination through the ways in which the book presents the connection between meat, butchering and masculinity, and was further moved by the few descriptions of female meat sellers that occur in the book. This is perhaps the main strength of the text, the way in which it highlights how the humble and in a sense archaic business of butchering animals and selling their meat can show us the entire panoply of society and its many oddities. By examining meat provisioning in a major city, and particularly in such an unapologetically carnivorous one, Pilcher manages to show not only how an industry can simultaneously be modernized whilst holding onto traditions and ideals of craftsmanship, but in addition he manages to show how things such as globalized competition and the notion and debates regarding free trade are by no means modern inventions. In fact, the rollercoaster-ride of Mexico City’s meat industry could serve as a fine example of how economic history should be written, as there are so many connections to modern debates – as an example there is enough fodder in the book to keep a labor process theorist going for years, and I often found myself noting cross-references to current discussions in organization theory in the margins of my copy (I wrote down “Foucault?” more than once, but don’t judge me too harshly.).

However, this does not mean that the book is without flaws, and the contribution of the book is at the same time its major shortcoming. It is, no doubt, a rich book, but it is not a well-structured one. Unless one has a fairly good grasp of the history of Mexico, particularly during the period the book describes, one is constantly left bewildered and lost in its pages. The author seems all too confident that the reader can follow an often meandering story, and continuously keep in mind the historical backdrop, and thus leaves many a thing completely unexplained. I guess I should know the full story of Porfirio Díaz but I don’t, and Pilcher seems wholly uninterested in enlightening me. Important historical facts are taken as well-known throughout, making the book seem like it was written for an extremely limited audience of historians with a special interest in Mexico City. This is a shame, as the book could have a much wider range of interested readers, but now it is not written in a way to accommodate these. It contains much of interest, for those of us who soldiered through, but much like you can’t make a pollo pibil by throwing together some oranges and chicken, a book like this needs to be more than a collection of narratives.

A review I wrote for the Scandinavian Journal of Philosophy.