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Technology Entrepreneurship Networks in Beirut: Starting Companies, Stabilizing Dynamism
Abstract
This paper describes an emerging technology entrepreneurship network centered in Beirut, Lebanon. Small tech ventures and their funders and facilitators are enacting new styles of business and finance in Lebanon, creating new relations between the nation and its diaspora. The network described draws on globally novel institutional forms and financial practices such as business incubation and venture capital, but also relies on long-standing reserves of Lebanese commercial and financial expertise, both in the country and in the diaspora. The paper is based on ethnographic research conducted in Beirut, Lebanon in 2009-2010. Lebanon’s economy has long been composed of sophisticated financial institutions and small commercial enterprises, but the emerging network of tech, finance, and knowledge economy actors centered in Beirut draw on new, globally dispersed techniques of business organization and financial expertise. These new techniques simultaneously formalize and abstract what were once socially embedded business practices while drawing strangers into close association. Equity financing terms between startups and venture capital firms, university-based entrepreneurship programs, and new online public spaces are creating novel social and economic groupings. The network emergent from these groupings extends outside the country, bringing expatriate Lebanese back into close association with new ventures, if not back into residence in their country of origin. Mediating institutions and events such as business incubators, business networking groups, and entrepreneurship conferences are propagators of a global shift in post-Fordist economic arrangements; Lebanon, having never been primarily dependent on heavy industry, has been well positioned to utilize these institutions and practices. That this network has only blossomed in the last few years is a function of the country’s ongoing political troubles. The entrepreneurship network, while certainly not ignorant of the political realities of the country, is decentralized enough to sidestep blatant sectarianism; a loosely attested Neoliberal values and individualist voluntarism inheres in the field, and the emergence of this network gives its participants a novel perspective on their identity as Lebanese citizens, and on their country’s financial and regulatory climate. As the political events of early 2011 have shown, information technologies are dramatically reshaping the social, political, and economic landscape of the Middle East, and the network I have studied is a crucial site for the regional production of the ventures and properties that sustain and expand these technologies, in addition to being a site of their consumption.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Lebanon
Sub Area
Trade/Investment