START-UP WORK &

WORKER MENTAL
WELL-BEING
ADİL BERK KÜÇÜKALTUN
RESEARCH DESING
BACKGROUND, MOTIVATION, & REFLECTIONS

• Talk by a neuroscientist on ımportance of Self-regulation skill (also used as Emotional or

Nervous System Regulation)

• STS & Life Science literature particularly on mental health

• Possible Mental Health Topics:
Urban Worker Children/Family Planetary

• Field accesibility, time/scale, feasibility and practicing research design.

• Worker Meantal Health
TOPICS, GOALS, RATIONALE

• Trough the history new technological innovations have changed the work practices, and
had impacts on economic developments, the creation of new types of work and work
conditions.
• This new works practices and conditions can affect mental well-being of workers.
• Therefore it’s important to understand these practices and the infrastructure it’s situated
in relation to mental well-being.
• That’s why the aim of the study is to focus on the Startup/Entrepreneurial work and
mental health.
Globalization(of work) > New work/future of work > New work & Mental health
RELEVANCE TO STS & RESEARCH QUESTION

• Economy as a Performative Activity: Economy is neither a singular structure nor an

outside reality. It is produced and reporduced.
• ‘’Startup is a term that proliferates across mainstream and popular, as well as academic,
descriptions of knowledge, digital media, and technology-based regional economic
geographies(Cockayne, 2019, p. 2)

• Ecological conception of mental health & human/environment entanglement: Rejection

of reductionist aproaches(biomedical, lifestyle) and conceptualization of mental health
with complex interplay of social, cultural, economic, and environmental factors.
• Thesis/Research Question: How the entrepreneurial work practices causes overwork,
burnout, and stress, therefore decline in mental wellbeing and to what extend
ınfrastructure and governance of this work contribute or prevent this declining effects?
STUDY QUESTIONS

• How do the work practices of entreprenuers and startup work culture create overwork,
stress, and burnout?
• How do the individual strategies for mental health are limited and how do these
limitations shaped and influenced by work environment and ınfrastructure of startup
work?
• How do startup work (practices, culture, workplace) is constitued by human and non-
human agents and
• How these agents contribute or prevent burnout and stress?
SITE AND ACTORS (PARTICIPANT SELECTION)

• Human:
• Choosen Startup Team’s Workers: Entrepreneurs, Founders, Software Engineers, Datascientist
and so on;
• Hub Managers

• NonHuman:
• Slack: messaging app for Startups in TechQuartier
• Economic Policy

• Site:
• TechQuartier Frankfurt and Hub Darmstadt. Additionally remote work places of startup
workers.
ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK:
INFORMING EMPRICAL STUDIES
• In the case of startup, those silences and ignorances might be the kinds of working
conditions implied by the term, the tiredness and fatigue; the systematic exclusion and
discrimination of women and other minority groups; and the emotional and material
implications of failure that often includes extreme overwork, downsizing, and pay cuts.
(Cockayne, 2019, p. 25)
• Field Exploration: Networking Event of TechQuartier
V: Health is first but you have breakdowns and burnout. Working more than fifty hours for
building your own Startup.
C: We are already working over hours. Take care of yourself, your children, being present
with your children is extremely hard.
• Because of the connections and similarities of Silican Valley and TechQuartier;
investigate, question and critique (practicing methodological doubt) on
Germany(Frankfurt-Darmstadt) case.
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

• Economic Performativity: Startup then–and perhaps other methods of categorizing and ordering
economic phenomena–might be better conceived as a performative, as a particular mode of
speaking and acting, of knowledge and ignorance, which are produced and reproduced, alongside
digital media and other kinds of economic activities (Cockayne, 2019, p. 26).
• Niching: Yet we employ the term to highlight an important ambivalence in our material: people
living with a psychiatric diagnosis constantly negotiate the multiple tensions between both being
part of urban assemblages, exploring them, building social networks, conquering unknown urban
spaces and engaging in modes of dwelling that close them off from urban assembling, that fold in
on themselves and that individualize experiences. (Bister, Klausner & Niewöhner, 2016, p. 191)

Adele E. C., Margaret L., Niewöhner J., Nicholas R., Paul R., Michel C.
• Where there is also clear policy rhetoric around developing an entrepreneurial, startup-driven, regional economy.
(Cockayne, 2019, p. 21)
• Firms in this region depend far more on provincial and federal funding, and research grant applications play a far
larger role in the financial landscape. (Cockayne, 2019, p. 21)
RESEARCH METHODS

• Etnography
• Conducting interviews: Both with startup workers and hub managers. And possible related
actors of the Hub.
• Participant observation: Becoming the team member. Joining networking events of Hub
Frankfurt(TechQuartier) and Hub Darmstadt
• Literature and Online Archive
• Reflexivity & Mapping : Situational Maps; 1- Locating self’s position, 2- outward focus on the
standpoint or situation of Research Components
REFINING RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS

• Development
• Research Question and Fıeld:
• Changing thesis statement after field work
• Cutting and adding concepts

• Key moments:
• Emprical: Ethnographic study on startups at Silicon Valley and field exploration
• Theory/concept/analytical: Figuring out the overlapping approaches of theories and concepts:
ontologic, epistemologic and analytical points
SCHEDULE

• Literature Reading:
• Economy as a performative activity. Michel Callon, Tımothy Mıtchell
• Distinctions of ANT and Assemblage Theory
• Affective Theory & Emotional Labour: Emotional Regulation

• Conducting field work and analyzing the Data

• Writing the thesis

 LITERATURE

• Barry, Andrew & Georgina Born (2013): Interdisciplinarity: Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural Sciences.
In: Andrew Barry & Georgina Born (Eds.): Interdisciplinarity: Reconfigurations of the social and natural sciences.
London; New York: Routledge, 1–56.
• Bister, Milena D., Martina Klausner & Jörg Niewöhner (2016): The Cosmopolitics of ‘Niching’. Rendering the
City Habitable along Infrastructures of Mental Health Care. In: Anders Blok & Ignacio Farías (Eds.):
Interdisciplinarity: Urban Cosmopolitics: Agencements, Assemblies, Atmospheres. London; New York: Routledge,
187–205.
• Cockayne, D., 2019. What is a startup firm? A methodological and epistemological investigation into research
objects in economic geography. Geoforum, 107, pp.77-87.
• Fitzgerald, Des & Felicity Callard (2015): Social Science and Neuroscience beyond Interdisciplinarity:
Experimental Entanglements. In: Theory, Culture & Society 32 (1), 3–32. DOI: 10.1177/0263276414537319.
• Fitzgerald, Des, Nikolas Rose & Ilina Singh (2016): Revitalizing sociology: urban life and mental illness between
history and the present. In: The British Journal of Sociology 67 (1), 138–160. DOI: 10.1111/1468-4446.12188
• Krieger, Nancy (2011): Contemporary Mainstream Epidemiologic Theory: Biomedical and Lifestyle. In: Nancy
Krieger: Epidemiology and the People’s Health: Theory and Context. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 126–162.
• Niewöhner, Jörg & Margaret Lock (2018): Situating local biologies: Anthropological perspectives on
environment/human entanglements. In: BioSocieties 13 (4), 681–697. DOI: 10.1057/s41292-017-0089-5