Project History
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The Principal Investigators
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Research Funding
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A Thanks to Participants
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This research complements the work of others here before us. While they are looking at community in cyberspace, we are interested in the impact of information technologies on life on this side of the screen. 

The Project Takes Shape

Dr. J.A. English-Lueck was hired in 1991 to be an all round generalist anthropologist, to add expertise in the anthropology of science and technology, and to participate in the Silicon Valley Cultures Project. At that time it was an indistinct vision of studying the distinguishing features of the region—its dizzying array of ethnic and cultural diversity, born of a century of immigration from Portuguese farmers to Taiwanese engineers—and the global cache of being the premier and prototypical technological territory. As time past she formed a collaborative relationship with several of her colleagues in the anthropology department and in the community. Chuck Darrah and J.A. English-Lueck formed the core of this alliance. They conceived of the idea of using the Silicon Valley Cultures project as a conceptual umbrella to integrate smaller, more focused, research projects.  By coordinating their classroom assignments to this goal they found that their students could produce real research, not just another round of classroom exercises. Darrah used his ethnographic methods course to elicit assignments in which students would investigate particular phenomenon—attitudes toward technology, school to work training, workspace changes. His economic anthropology course investigated consumer decision-making. English-Lueck asked her psychological anthropology students to explore the depths of intercultural contact at home, work and in public in the region—eliciting stories of interaction that formed an ongoing archive. James Freeman joined the team in 1992.  Most importantly we cultivated long-term relationships with non-profit organizations such as the The Tech Museum of Innovation in San José and the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park. The results of the collaboration with the Institute for the Future ultimately drove the creation of Work Identity and Community in Silicon Valley, a large-scale research project. 
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IFTF Projects: Infomated and Communicated

IFTF, the Institute for the Future, is a non-profit organization that embraces clients in industry, government and education. The develop long-term projects, such as the Outlook Project in which they examine the marketplace for group-oriented electronic technologies and services. They also take on smaller, more focused projects for particular clients. We had shared interests that spurred our interaction with them. Paul Saffo and Andrea Saveri were particularly sympathetic to the ethnographic approach. They recognized that cultural rules, meaning, and enaction of mental models were best captured by the depth of anthropological inquiry. At the same time, the Institute needed to speak the quantitative language their clients comprehend. They have learned to bridge that gap using quantitative data to identify interesting phenomena and general patterns and ethnography to find out what those patterns mean in daily life. Between 1996-1998 we cemented our relationship with them by becoming research associates, creating an ethnographic component to two of their projects—called here the infomated household and communicated workspace projects. 

The Infomated household project began when IFTF noticed a peculiar feature on one of their surveys. People who had five or more consumer information devices (ranging from pagers to computers) had a distinct profile from those who had less. They called this mysterious group infomateds. They conducted a large scale Harris and Associates survey whose questions complemented the ethnographic efforts of our team. Darrah, English-Lueck, and five students developed an ethnographic interview survey that sought to capture the relationships and values that underpinned the infomateds use of the information technologies. We ran 30 interviews on 15 selected households, constructing natural histories of their most precious, least precious and most contested digital devices. This interviews revealed so much data they ultimately drove the analysis of the quantitative surveys—revealing some intriguing patterns. The second project followed closely on the first as our team explored these digital device users in their workspaces in Fortune 1000 companies. In this project the ultimate focus was on the devices and again, in oblique ethnographic fashion, we explored their link to technology by examining how relationships were enacted using these devices. In both cases we employed the ethnographic wisdom that asking for values directly rarely works, instead approaching the topic indirectly by getting thick descriptions, rule and stories. The lessons we learned by examining devices in their “natural settings,” that is, households and workspaces revealed a fascinating juggling act. 
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Going Global

Continuing their successful collaboration with Menlo Park’s Institute for the Future, Chuck Darrah and Jan English-Lueck have been working on a long-term project to explore the nature of global work and family, especially high technology work, in the other “Silicon Places” across the planet.  In October, 1998 Chuck went to Bangalore, India and Jan went to Taipei, Taiwan to find out how people there manage their cross-cultural connections at work and home.  In January, they both went to Dublin, Ireland and continued to collect interviews.  They have continued to pursue global comparative data in Japan, Nordic Europe, The United Kingdom through a collaboration with the Insitute for the Future.   In 2002 Jan will go to New Zealand to explore the growing silicon focus in Christchurch and Auckland. 
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Work, Identity and Community in Silicon Valley

Concurent with the collaborative research with IFTF, the SVCP team were conducting 170 in-depth interviews in the Work, Identity and Community in Silicon Valley project. 

The Silicon Valley region is composed of diverse fragments—towns, companies, ethnic communities, social networks—that shift and reform themselves. Workers flow through a mosaic of organizational cultures in their daily lives. Individuals must negotiate this metamorphic social terrain by creating social networks that can sustain them and new metaphors to justify their strategies. Work is the dominant venue for this creativity. In the Silicon Valley technological metaphors evolve into solutions as the local community is “reinvented” to support an “optimal” work environment. Work and non-work time become blurred. Community activity, justified by its value to work, reaches into education, communications, recreation and family. Community becomes transformed into an instrumental force for production. Investigating the nature and impact of this shift in community self-definition is the primary research question. 

As a bellwether of American high tech communities, Silicon Valley displays distinctive characteristics. Because organizations import managerial and professional expertise from abroad they experience a demographic influx comprised of highly educated, upwardly mobile elite, largely from Asia. In California, the successive waves of ethnic, immigrant and refugee populations diversifies the lower echelons of the community. High tech communities also contain distinctive corporate cultures that may color the larger region with varied work ethics, models of interpersonal management and images of mobility and risk. The boundary of workplace and family blurs as “egalitarian, familial images” of relationships are shipped into the corporate culture, only to form new corporate notions of identity and family which trickle back into the home. The density of technological tools and toys may themselves mediate human relationships. Finally, just as pagers redefine parents relationships with their teenagers the information and telecommunications technologies may transform traditional face-to-face communities as well as virtual ones, redefining identities, relationships and family communication patterns. Our second research questions explores constant creation, transformation and erosion of individual and familial identities that take place within high tech communities.  (For details of this projects sample and methodology see the NSF report).

Families and Work in Silicon Valley

The Families and Work project is sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and San José State University.  The Sloan Foundation is interested in learning about the impact of work on family life and the University is committed to understanding the lives of people in the Silicon Valley.  We have conducted a two-year study that explored dual income middle class families whose daily lives were shaped by the demands of work and career building.  How are such families affected by the intrusions of work?  How do they in turn try to manage those intrusions? 

The project traced the connections between specific dimensions of work and family life.  It identified (1) dimensions of work; (2) how they affect family life; (3) the facets of family life that are affected; (4) the processes by which families manage the demands of work; and (5) how elements of family life are exported from home into the workplace.  The project paid special attention to the role of technology in mediating work/family relationships, as well as the significance of cultural variations in family backgrounds.  (For details of this projects sample and methodology see the Alfred P. Sloan  report). 
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The Next Steps

Go to the Next Steps page to see 
where our research is going from here.

ANTH102 (Silicon Valley Connections)
           105 (Applied Anthropology)
           108 (Medical Anthropology) 
           115 (Emerging Global Cultures)
           125 (Urban Anthropology)
           142 (Culture in Mind)
           146 (Culture and Conflict) 
           147 (Wealth and Power) 
           149 (Ethnographic Methods) 
           195 (Practicum in Ethnographic Research).and 

 Freshmen MUSE seminars