Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Silicon Valley Reinvents The Company Town, Jan English-Lueck

Jan English-Lueck

California's Silicon Valley, famous for its innovative high-technology corporations, makes an ideal laboratory for exploring certain cultural inventions. It is a bellwether for a particular kind of social order—one dominated by work. In anthropology we encounter many frameworks through which life is organized—kinship, religion, and politics. Work is another lens through which life can be filtered. People may move to California for the weather, but they go to Silicon Valley to work. High-technology work draws on a global pool of talent and shifting skills that creates a culturally complex community. Migrants to Silicon Valley bring and enact an image of …