"Flexible Meritocracy and Flexible Masculinity: Remaking Gender and Organizational Form in Silicon Valley, 1957-1998"

It is a curious fact that the firms that most loudly declared themselves to be exemplars of “meritocracy” in the 1970s and 1980s were famous not just for their managers’ claims of rigorous rationality but for their extravagant displays of emotion. “Constructive confrontation” was what the CEO of one such firm called his preferred approach to problems in the firm’s flexible organizational form—it was also widely known as a “euphemism for screaming.” This paper explains this apparent contradiction between claims of rationality and displays of emotion through an archivally-based reconstruction of the communication strategies of the early Silicon Valley. The focus is on two firms, Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, and two executives, Robert Noyce and Andy Grove. Faced with challenges to their authority from movements for racial and gender equality while also navigating the transition from bureaucratic to flexible organizations, white male managers found a way to preserve their prerogatives by combining claims of a rational hierarchy, “meritocracy,” with an ostensibly universal but highly gendered affect, aggression. Evidence of these developments range from images of workplace parties in employee magazines to hand-made collages of executives as Playgirl pin-ups, from the everyday language of managerial social Darwinism to the dreams executives recorded in their personal notebooks. The paper culminates by tracing the gendered origins of a communication device that typifies these paradoxes: the “family tree” of spin-outs and start-ups that was prominently hung in personal cubicles and corporate foyers across Silicon Valley—to all appearances a symbol of nepotism, yet celebrated as a depiction of meritocracy in action.