Fraiberg, S. (2017). Start-up nation: Studying transnational entrepreneurial practices in Israel’s start-up ecosystem.

• Fraiberg, S. (2017). Start-up nation: Studying transnational entrepreneurial practices in Israel’s start-up ecosystem. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 31(3), 350-388. https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651917695541 

Ok. So this is an original research article from the special issue of JBTC on entrepreneurship or startups--I forget which. Fraiberg takes an ethnographic approach. He studies the Israeli startup scene by traveling there twice and staying there for extended periods of time. He conjoins that with reading articles in the news, watching videos, reading books, etc. And in fact, it appears as though he tries to show the circulation of ideas across different media. To study this circulation, he draws on both ANT and CHAT, specially the idea of knotworking from third-generation AT. 

The term "mobility" is key to this article. He draws on mobility in critical literacies studies, I think, but in doing so hopes to respond to the likes of Pigg and Swartz. More broadly, Fraiberg situates himself in the tradition of Longo and Scott, who argue that studying tech comm within the four walls of an organization isn't such a good idea. 

The word that Fraiberg uses is "transnational." Also situating himself in the tradition of workplace studies à la Spinuzzi, Fraiberg shows how Israeli startups work while disregarding borders between, say, there and the United States. There was one point when someone was trying to create a smooth flow between work in the US and Israel, so that people could work in the US, on a plane, in a car, then on the ground again in a different country all continuously--echoing Swartz's research on mobility. 

Read and Swartz's work on ANT was important for Fraiberg, specifically this idea of collapsing scales, or not having to toggle back and forth between the global and the local. I can see how Fraiberg's entrepreneurs upset that hierarchy. 

Yea, I was thinking about this. "one limitation of CHAT (Prior, 2008; Prior & Schaffner, 2011; Spinuzzi, 2011) is that it has traditionally been applied to bounded institu- tional contexts with less attention to ways that actors move in and across multiple spaces and transnational scales."

Just in general, I thought the application of the ideas of knotworking and spin offs, etc. was very loosely applied in this. I got a very social media analysis feel from this article. Very story oriented. Like he just wanted to tell a story, so he would show how a story would begin in one form of media (in-person conversation) and move to various different forms over time (social media, film, etc.). He used the term "translation" from ANT to describe this. 

It looks like he got to Israel by doing some kind of high tech work? Like he got access to these conferences and sites by speaking Hebrew, but also by doing work for a company. 

These were the RQs:

• 􏰀  What elements constitute the Israeli start-up ecosystem, and what are the relationships between them?

• 􏰀  What is the history of this ecosystem, and how has it changed over time?

• 􏰀  How do the actors shape and get shaped by this ecosystem, and how does this process mediate movement in and across it?

• 􏰀  How can this analysis inform theoretical and methodological frameworks in technical and professional communication? 

The two main subsections of the results section contain the words and phrases "under construction" and "maturation and stabilization," thus pointing to the developmental focus of CHAT. 

https://utexas.box.com/s/bzmm1phc2klw2otw633lz85v3wxqow3y