The New Bottom Line: Black Women Cultural Entrepreneurs Re-Define Success in The Connected Economy

Black women cultural entrepreneurs are a group of entrepreneurs that merit further inquiry. Using qualitative interview and participant observation data, this dissertation investigates the ways in which black women cultural entrepreneurs define success. My findings reveal that black women cultural entrepreneurs are a particular interpretive community with values, perspectives and experiences, which are not wholly idiosyncratic, but shaped by collective experiences and larger social forces. Black women are not a monolith, but they are neither disconnected individuals completely devoid of group identity. The meaning they give to their businesses, professional experiences and understandings of success are influenced by their shared social position and identity as black women. For black women cultural entrepreneurs, the New Bottom Line goes beyond financial gain. This group, while not uniform in their understandings of success, largely understand the most meaningful accomplishments they can realize as social impact in the form of cultural intervention, black community uplift and professional/creative agency. These particular considerations represent a new paramount concern, and alternative understanding of what is typically understood as the bottom line. The structural, social and personal challenges that black women cultural entrepreneurs encounter have shaped their particular perspectives on success. I also explore the ways research participants articulated an oppositional consciousness to create an alternative means of defining and achieving success. I argue that this consciousness empowers them with resources, connections and meaning not readily conferred in traditional entrepreneurial settings. In this sense, the personal, social and structural challenges have been foundational to the formation of an alternative economy, which I refer to as The Connected Economy. Leading and participating in The Connected Economy, black women cultural entrepreneurs represent a black feminist and womanist critique of dominant understandings of success.

The Promise of Access: Hope and Inequality in the Information Economy

In 2013, a series of posters began appearing in Washington, DC’s Metro system. Each declared “The internet: Your future depends on it” next to a photo of a middle-aged black Washingtonian, and an advertisement for the municipal government’s digital training resources. This hopeful discourse is familiar but where exactly does it come from? And how are our public institutions reorganized to approach the problem of poverty as a problem of technology? The Clinton administration’s ‘digital divide’ policy program popularized this hopeful discourse about personal computing powering social mobility, positioned internet startups as the ‘right’ side of the divide, and charged institutions of social reproduction such as schools and libraries with closing the gap and upgrading themselves in the image of internet startups. After introducing the development regime that builds this idea into the urban landscape through what I call the ‘political economy of hope’, and tracing the origin of the digital divide frame, this dissertation draws on three years of comparative ethnographic fieldwork in startups, schools, and libraries to explore how this hope is reproduced in daily life, becoming the common sense that drives our understanding of and interaction with economic inequality and reproduces that inequality in turn. I show that the hope in personal computing to power social mobility becomes a method of securing legitimacy and resources for both white émigré technologists and institutions of social reproduction struggling to understand and manage the persistent poverty of the information economy. I track the movement of this common sense between institutions, showing how the political economy of hope transforms them as part of a larger development project. This dissertation models a new, relational direction for digital divide research that grounds the politics of economic inequality with an empirical focus on technologies of poverty management. It demands a conceptual shift that sees the digital divide not as a bug within the information economy, but a feature of it.