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Another form of venture labor involves shifting managerial responsibility onto the employees themselves. Flexible, short-term, project-based workplaces place more responsibility for getting and keeping work on employees themselves. Heightened job insecurity means workers are increasingly exposed to…

One strategy for managing the risk of contemporary work is what I call venture labor. Venture labor is the investment of time, energy, human capital, and other personal resources that ordinary employees make in the companies where they work. Venture labor is the explicit expression of entrepreneuri…

However, this knowledge is now matched with distrust in the institutions that could help individuals hedge their bets. As Van Loon put it, in a risk society “closures offered by expertise, legislation and moral panics are no longer met with trust in the systems that produced them.”42 We have replac…

In addition to the political and economic changes that brought about the new economy, there were new ways of talking about risk. These new ways of discussing risk led to new ways in which people managed, dealt with, and expressed risk. And, as we’ll see in this chapter, these ways of dealing with r…

I must admit that there is very little time for the higher life for myself, but my soul cries out for it, and my heart is not in my homely duties; they are done in a mechanical, abstracted way, not worthy of a woman of high ambitions; but my ambitions are along other lines.

I do not mean to say …