Between Productivity and Imagination: Black Entrepreneurs' Sensemaking of Digital Technologies for Work

Description of Research Project: 

Previous scholars have attended to how entrepreneurial activity among Black Americans can be conceptualized as both an indivudual solution to employment discrimination, an alternative to employment, and a collective solution to racial economic self-determination. My research project uncovers how Black entrepreneurs think of their own labor, how they think of their relationships to others in their community, and how they view entrepreneurship as a path toward resistance. Secondarily, I hope to study the role that digital technologies play in shaping these ideas for Black entrepreneurs. These technologies include online platforms that serve as virtual shops, customer tracking databases, alternative lending platforms, and, of course, language learning models/artificial intelligence. Although marketing for these technologies depicts them as supercharged tools to assist the lone entrepreneur, scholars argue that the platforms that own these technologies offer them on expensive, precarious, and therefore, predatory terms. The precarity of these digital tools, despite the marketed symbology around them as modern, accessible products, has important implications for understanding the persistence of racial inequality. This project has 3 aims:

Aim 1: Assess how Black entrepreneurs describe their relationship to their work, including their motivations, experiences, and perceptions of entrepreneurship as a means of individual and collective resistance.

Aim 2 is to evaluate how Black entrepreneurs engage with digital business technologies and the extent to which these platforms influence their business practices, values, and understandings of productivity and opportunity.

Aim 3 is to analyze how the intersection of race, technology, and entrepreneurship informs Black entrepreneurs’ beliefs about economic mobility and reveals both alignment with and resistance to dominant societal narratives. By addressing these aims through in-depth interviews, site visits, and participant observation at entrepreneurship events, this study will fill a crucial gap in scholarship on race, technology, and labor.

Methods: In this study, I will engage in a combination of in-depth and walkthrough interview with entrepreneurs, where I will ask them questions about their belief systems around work, as well as have them walk me through the digital technologies (social media, online marketing tools, orother software) that they feel is important for their work. I use a software called MAXQDA to analyze interview data, a secure cloud-based qualitative computing software.

Description of work that will be assigned to research assistants: 

SURO assistants will be tasked with transcribing interviews and organizing literature (articles, books, and media) for the project.

Supervising Faculty Member: Dr. Erin Cech

Graduate Student: Erykah Benson

Contact Information: erykahb@umich.edu

Average hours of work per week: Minimum 6-8 hours per week, maximum 10 hours per week

Range of credit hours students can earn: Minimum 2 credit hours, maximum 3 credit hours

Number of positions available: 1-2