{"title":"Everyone can make mistakes, but not everyone can fail: a response to Price & Jaffe","authors":"Astrid Van Oyen","doi":"10.15184/aqy.2023.139","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>In <span>Born losers: a history of failure in America</span> (2005), historian Scott A. Sandage traces how, through the course of the nineteenth century, business failures gradually morphed into personal failures. Where losing money initially meant just that by the later nineteenth century, as the narrative of the ‘self-made man’ took hold, it came to be seen by society as a personal shortcoming and framed as a moral judgement. Fast-forward to the big-tech era of the twenty-first century and failure has become a trophy rather than a scar. Silicon Valley's credo of ‘fail fast and fail forward’ entrenches failure not only as a standard element of business practice—start-ups are expected to fail, their founders slated to move forward on their path to success—but also as a commendable addition to a CV or resumé thought to reflect ambition, innovativeness and resilience (see critique in Myers 2019). This admittedly truncated narrative of failure in America, closely intertwined with capitalist profit-seeking, serves to illustrate that failure is not a neutral concept but rather a social phenomenon, the reality and valence of which are context dependent. Moreover, like all social phenomena, failure has a history.</p>","PeriodicalId":8058,"journal":{"name":"Antiquity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.9000,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Antiquity","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2023.139","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"ANTHROPOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
In Born losers: a history of failure in America (2005), historian Scott A. Sandage traces how, through the course of the nineteenth century, business failures gradually morphed into personal failures. Where losing money initially meant just that by the later nineteenth century, as the narrative of the ‘self-made man’ took hold, it came to be seen by society as a personal shortcoming and framed as a moral judgement. Fast-forward to the big-tech era of the twenty-first century and failure has become a trophy rather than a scar. Silicon Valley's credo of ‘fail fast and fail forward’ entrenches failure not only as a standard element of business practice—start-ups are expected to fail, their founders slated to move forward on their path to success—but also as a commendable addition to a CV or resumé thought to reflect ambition, innovativeness and resilience (see critique in Myers 2019). This admittedly truncated narrative of failure in America, closely intertwined with capitalist profit-seeking, serves to illustrate that failure is not a neutral concept but rather a social phenomenon, the reality and valence of which are context dependent. Moreover, like all social phenomena, failure has a history.
在《天生的失败者:美国的失败史》(2005)一书中,历史学家Scott a . Sandage追溯了在19世纪,商业失败是如何逐渐演变成个人失败的。在19世纪后期,随着“白手起家的人”这一说法的流行,赔钱最初只是意味着一种个人缺点,并被社会视为一种道德判断。快进到21世纪的大科技时代,失败已经成为一个奖杯,而不是一个伤疤。硅谷的信条是“快速失败,向前失败”,这不仅使失败成为商业实践的标准要素——初创企业注定会失败,它们的创始人注定会在成功的道路上继续前进——而且还将失败作为一种值得称赞的补充,添加到被认为反映雄心、创新和韧性的简历或简历中(见迈尔斯2019年的评论)。在美国,这种诚然被截断的失败叙事与资本主义逐利紧密交织在一起,说明了失败不是一个中立的概念,而是一种社会现象,其现实和价值取决于环境。此外,像所有的社会现象一样,失败是有历史的。