Benjamin Shestakofsky, Ph.D.

Benjamin Shestakofsky’s research centers on how digital technologies are affecting work and employment, organizations, and economic exchange. His academic articles have been published in journals including Socio-Economic Review, Theory and Society, Big Data & Society, Work and Occupations, Socius, the International Journal of Communication, and Teaching Sociology. His research and commentary have appeared in media outlets including the New York Times, National Public Radio, San Francisco Chronicle, Financial Times, Fast Company, Los Angeles Review of Books, Forbes India, Axios, and in a publication of the World Economic Forum.

His new book, Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality, investigates the role of financiers in shaping our technological future. The book draws on 19 months of participant-observation research to examine how investors’ demand for rapid growth created organizational problems that managers solved by combining high-tech systems with low-wage human labor. The book shows how the burdens imposed on startups by venture capital—as well as the benefits and costs of “moving fast and breaking things”—are unevenly distributed across a company’s workforce and customers. With its focus on the financialization of innovation, Behind the Startup explains how the gains generated by tech startups are funneled into the pockets of a small cadre of elite investors and entrepreneurs. To promote innovation that benefits the many rather than the few, Shestakofsky argues that we should focus less on fixing the technology and more on changing the financial infrastructure that supports it. The book will be published in March 2024 by the University of California Press.

Articles based on this project have been awarded the 2019 W. Richard Scott Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the ASA's Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work, and the 2021 Star-Nelkin Paper Award from the ASA's Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology. Benjamin's recent and ongoing projects examine the sociology of artificial intelligence; how organizations can improve conditions for the hidden workers who support AI systems; the governance of digital platforms; power and positionality in organizational ethnography; and the relationship between venture capital, organizational cultures, and organizational change.

Benjamin’s research has been supported by the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, and the UC Berkeley Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.