Words Matter: How Tech Media Helped Write Gig Companies into Existence
papers.ssrn.com
papers.ssrn.com
To be fair, I don't think these companies were written into existence. I think the hype helped, but the main draw was convenience to users and most of those did't think about the larger repercussions and just wanted to save some money.
Some examples - Uber, Theranos, anything AI. Also happens in politics.
Policy advocacy would be a better word.
But the word 'science' means something different from its meaning in 'social science' just like 'Act of God' in your insurance paperwork does not mean a supernatural being acting (it just means natural catastrophes and the like - one kind of force majeure).
Altogether, I've chosen to just accept that "social science" is not "science" in general.
Science is not necessarily about data or statistics. You're confusing it with "hard sciences".
We've had soft sciences (and non quantitative scientific inquiry) for as long as we've had hard sciences...
In the Anglo world "Science" seems to be a badge of honor, a title to earn and it leads to cargo culting and physics envy and mock quantitative analysis just for the show.
It's better to make specific criticisms about particular methods in the particular contexts, rather than fight over semantics and definitions of words. "This isn't science" is a lazy and uninformative critique. Better is: this and this quantitative analysis or structured approach would better help us uncover the truths behind this topic.
Not that someone not affiliated with a university cannot write scientifically valid papers. On the contrary. But a journalist writing about journalists should in my mind at least warrant extra scrutiny.
Yes, I understand that the paper's author is only using a narrow definition of "tech" to mean non-software non-programming products such as silicon or lasers. It may irritate the author but if a word has enough shared agreement by others, it won't matter if he disagrees with it -- because _others_ will still use it.
To copy & paste a previous comment, I'll attempt to explain why _others_ think of Uber as a "tech company".
Others' viewpoint: Yes, virtually every company uses technology but not every company is birthed by technology:
- the Uber founders (Travis K and Garrett C) were software programmers, not taxicab owners.
- the product they worked on was a smartphone app instead of buying a car with a taxi medallion and driving around for fares.
- the type of investors that funded them (e.g. Benchmark Capital) were VCs that specialize in the tech sector.
- the type of companies Uber has acquired[1] so far are tech focused (e.g. machine learning, geospatial, etc).
Yes, 100-year-old banks always have ongoing modernization with evolving technology (e.g. Citi and Chase have developed smartphone apps) but Uber's birth was programmers playing around with smartphones.
Another example of the perception difference is eBay vs Sotheby's/Christie's. eBay is typically called a "tech company" but Sotheby's/Christie's are called "auction houses". If eBay brings together buyers & sellers in a marketplace... and Sotheby's/Christie's also has an auctions marketplace... why is "tech company" more often attached to eBay rather than Sotheby's/Christie's? (Both Sotheyby's & Christie's have websites for users to place bids so they develop technology as well.) Probably because eBay was born on the internet by a software programmer named Pierre Omidyar.
I'm not saying you have to agree with all that but just trying to explain the "hidden taxonomy" that some of the others (including the news media) use to label certain companies as "tech company".
EDIT to reply: yes I agree that the "What “tech” communities understand from tech is high growth low capital businesses" ... is often included in the mental taxonomy of "tech" but there are exceptions. Youtube/Amazon are considered "tech companies" even though they are highly capital intensive. Datacenters with petabytes of harddrives to store videos and logistics warehouses consume a lot of capital.
What the author argues in the paragraph is that many of those business don’t actually invent technology but only do business using internet technologies.
For example, somehow Uber is a tech startup but WeWork is not. Realistically, they’re about the same from technology perspective but WeWork happens to have capital intensive business model that is not suitable for the high growth that is expected from “tech” companies despite that both essentially use the same level of technology - software to organize a business model with an UI to integrate the participants.
Being identified as a "tech" company feeds into valuation. Uber, on the merits, ought to have a negative valuation. They bought growth by spending money from Softbank, funded by the Saudi sovereign wealth front. They subsidize every ride with investor capital. There is no plausible scenario in which the investors see a return on their investment.
That's it.