Arts & Sciences Magazine

By Mara Sassoon

The term “tech start-up” has dual connotations. On one hand, it sparks images of a group of people innovating and collaborating, vying to make an impact in their workplace and in society. On the other hand, it conjures images of those same employees working long hours with little work-life balance, in the hopes of becoming the next Amazon, Apple, or Airbnb.

Sociologist Patrick Sheehan is fascinated by the critical element that motivates employees to work despite uncertain success: hype. While completing his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin and his postdoctoral work at Stanford, Sheehan wanted to examine how start-ups can leverage so-called “hype culture,” stirring up their employees’ commitment and belief in the company with the promise of becoming the next big thing.

In 2021, amidst a post-pandemic boom of start-ups in the US—the US Census Bureau reported that a record 5.4 million new business applications were filed that year—he reached out to a company that billed itself as an online marketplace where people could buy and sell their expertise in different areas.

Sheehan, now an assistant professor of sociology at CAS, initially planned to conduct interview-style research into the mindsets of employees at this company, which he gave the pseudonym BrainShare. “I wanted to speak with start-up workers about why they’re doing this puzzling thing of committing themselves super hard to this unlikely future,” he says. “But I soon realized that there was something missing from just talking about it over a meal or coffee, this emotional element that people are experiencing that’s hard to reconstitute through an interview.” The solution? Join the company.

Beyond the Interview

One day, Sheehan was conducting an interview with one of the higher ups at BrainShare. “I was saying how interested I was in the culture, and he challenged me and said, ‘We’re hiring.’” Sheehan went through the interview process and wound up taking a full-time entry-level customer service role.

Sheehan worked at BrainShare for almost five months. He was transparent about what he was doing—conducting research for a sociological study for his PhD.

“There’s a long tradition of ethnographic research, particularly in the workplace, where you join a company and take on all the obligations of workers to really understand the full process of socialization and the experience of doing that work,” he says. In fact, Sheehan says his approach was greatly inspired by Ashley Mears, an adjunct professor of sociology at BU, who wrote Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit (Princeton University Press, 2020), an ethnography in which she immersed herself in the party scene of exclusive nightclubs.

Even though Sheehan was open about what he was doing, he found that people quickly forgot. “I ended up being very much part of the ‘family,’ as we called it,” he says. “Taking on that job provided access to so much stuff that you just wouldn’t get from an interview—particularly this collective emotional experience.”

Sheehan recalls being in meetings in which the CEO would show a graph projecting the company’s promise. “The graph is pointing way up,” he says. “And, the CEO is saying, ‘We’re right here, guys, and in the next two weeks, we could just take off if we go a little bit harder in these next two weeks.’ There’s this collective experience in these meetings where young men are pumping fists and shouting, ‘Let’s go!’ It’s an emotional thing.”

Sheehan’s family’s history has fueled his interest in sociology and his specific passion for exploring issues around labor and the workplace. “Through my dad’s side, I have a long history of labor union activism,” he says. “My family is from San Francisco, and they used to work on the docks and were very involved in these famous strikes in the 1930s that established the workers labor movement.” He says that the concept of exploitation—how massive inequalities between the people that own companies and those that work for them are created—has always fascinated him. He was drawn to sociology to explore imbalances in the workplace. “I’ve always thought of [sociology] as a way of thinking about how we do better as a society,” he says. “We need to understand these relationships in order to improve them, fix them.”

To Sheehan, the world of start-ups seemed rife with exploitation. “There are all these start-ups here in Silicon Valley that are full of these mostly elite young men. They came from elite private schools and then universities. They come to these start-ups, and they’re promised this grand vision of ‘We could become millionaires, change the world, make friends, and have a great time,’” he says. “And they work themselves to the bone, to the point of burnout, until physical and mental breakdown.”

This—despite the fact that the majority of start-ups fail. “This promise, this imagined future somehow enrolls these elite young men who have all the options in the world to grind themselves towards something that’s almost certainly not going to work out,” Sheehan says.

Millennialist Cult

Sheehan notes that hype has a feedback loop of sorts. While he worked at BrainShare during a time when the company was doing well, there came a point when the company’s success wasn’t as great as its hype indicated it would be. (Sheehan says the company is still in business but has gone in a slightly different direction). In follow-up interviews, he was able to see the disillusionment that follows unfulfilled promises.

“I’m theorizing hype is this collective emotional energy within companies that’s oriented towards this imagined future,” he says. “But then when it doesn’t happen, you get all of this disillusionment, disappointment, and exhaustion in workers.” The feedback loop comes into play when people either quit or are fired for expressing their disillusionment, Sheehan says.

“I compare it sometimes to a millennialist cult. What happens when the day of prophecy comes and goes and nothing happens? Well, you get rid of the doubters and the losers, and then the people that stay do these disciplinary loyalty tests of sorts, where the CEO will be like, ‘Are you still all in on this?’ and you kind of have to demonstrate that you still believe. This keeps the hype going through these repeated failures.”

Sheehan is working on a book about hype culture while also beginning a project investigating masculinity. “I’m really interested in this larger story about the ‘crisis of masculinity’ and this sort of a rightward turn in gender politics,” he says.

The new project is inspired by his start-up research and will focus on the various ways that men are “doing masculinity” together. Tied up in the hype culture, he says, was a kind of performative masculinity that he observed at BrainShare. “There was so much young man/bro energy in the start-up.” His initial research has included attending a men’s retreat in Northern California. “It was part bro boot camp, part group therapy where you come to be your best man,” he says. “You’re challenged physically and emotionally. I’m interested in that world of therapeutic masculinity.”