Indeed the transition between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is marked by large ruptures that can be observed from a macroscopic and microscopic point of view, and on several levels of analysis: economic, technological, technical, social, organizational. Authors such as Livian (1998) or Cohen (2006) converge towards the description of a context stimulated by a new technical system (computers, electronics, development of the tertiary sector) and a modification of economic issues (globalization, financial revolution). They also take into consideration the transformation of the enterprise (flexible specialization, the need for differentiated products, international competition…), and the way people whose values have changed operate (individualism, weakening ideals), as well as their relationship at work (workers better trained, higher levels of education, requirements for progression and autonomy). Livian (1998) makes the assumption that in the face of such upheavals, a new organizational model must emerge in line with the co-evolutionary logic of Daft and Lewin (1993). That context seems therefore conducive to the emergence of new companies and hence two major well known phenomena: the creative destruction of Schumpeter (1951) and the phenomena of exploration and exploitation of March (1991).

Indeed, the 1990s witnessed the birth of new companies which inherited innovations related to a new technical system (an exploration phenomenon), and thus disrupting the competitive game between existing markets (“creative destruction”). Without wishing to fall into a technological determinism, it is now established that “it is a fact that the birth of technical systems is accompanied by a transformation of the way organizations work. New businesses devise new ways of working while the former are trying to take advantage of opportunities offered by technological progress” (Loilier, Tellier, 2001, p. 66). Thus we can suspect that organizational innovations have emerged at the same time as the development of a new context.

So, can start-ups be considered as a form of innovative work organization? What are the subjacent organizational innovations? The literature dedicated to start-ups is primarily focused either on financing (Randjelovic et al., 2003) or on the creation process itself (Arlotto, Ayadi, 2004; Lichtenstein et al., 2007). Thus the value of this research is to identify start-ups as a form of work organization.

To meet the objective of this research, it is necessary to reposition the start-up through its emergence and its development (Part 1). Indeed, one can assume that the Internet bubble burst could change the work organization within start-ups. It is essential to integrate this element into the methodological research (Part 2). In this section, we describe the idealtype method, which can crystallize the representation of a complex phenomenon and an appropriate protocol. Results show an innovative work organization. Results will be presented according to the stabilized characteristics over time and also with theoretical elements (Part 3). Finally the conclusion of this article will address the question of generalization and the practical lessons of this research, theoretical issues, and perspectives for further research (Part 4).

ICT start-up – without a doubt the most popular – can therefore appear as a form of company that can submit new principles of operation at the heart of organizations, spurred by an environment conducive to their emergence. However what is hiding under the "start-up? What do we recognize there? The difficulty in answering this question is twofold: from a practical point of view, their economic data are unstable and from a theoretical point of view, the literature does not provide a comprehensive vision of work organization.

The current turbulence surrounding start-ups reduces the possibility of giving a clear representation of the work organization that prevails there. Indeed, the bursting of the Internet bubble in 2000 is well known to all. The deep enthusiasm for technologies and start-ups has led to speculation and an over-valuing of the technology values in question, leading to the gradual build-up a financial bubble. This period of euphoria spurred investors to distribute funds to companies from the moment they had an activity focused towards new technologies, regardless of their product, their turnover or their business model. Nasdaq saw its index multiplied by five over a period of five years, to fall sharply in 2000. By bursting, the speculative bubble of 2000-2001 has resulted in a freeze of all investments in technology, regardless of the performance of relevant sectors across the world: telecommunications, biotechnology, new materials, hardware, software, IT services, and so on.

However, in each major technological upheaval, different phases could be discerned: excitement, euphoria, disappointment, and then a new stabilization. Cartier (2003) has extracted these three stages in an article referring to the disappointment linked to the technological leap of railways in England in 1850: “The economy is stuck in the doldrums, thanks largely to the broken promises of technology. Dazzled by seemingly limitless returns, bankers had funded hundred of companies, all going after the same dubious markets. Heedless, individual investors clamoured to get into the stock market, driving share prices to unheard-of levels. Soon, the overheated market crashed, turning the new heroes of business into goats and scoundrels. Now, disillusionment reigns, and nobody knows what’s going to happen next” (excerpt: Business Week, 2002).

So after the shock of 2000-2001, these new companies boosted by a speculative euphoria should not be condemned. Many players who have experienced this period agree that Internet and associated technologies have been exploited too quickly and that today these technologies are keeping their promises, announced by economists as the “third industrial revolution” (Caron, 2000). Literature puts forward the concept of “innovative SMEs” (start-up, high-tech spin-off, and so on.) as a vehicle for economic growth (Ayadi et al., 2005). Among these forms, the ICT start-up and the high-tech companies are the most common, with a fairly similar meaning but still a difference in use. While ICT start-ups are especially akin to companies created around the “new economy”, “dotcoms” and Web2.0, the high-tech company now integrates a wider sense of the applicative technologies.

Finally, what remains of the work organization in ICT start-ups after the 2000-2001 economic shock? What are their residual characteristics? From a theoretical point of view, pioneering research on start-ups comes from the study project of Stanford University launched in 1994, named the Stanford Project Emerging Companies (SPEC), where three main researchers have focused on start-ups in Silicon Valley by building a database identifying most of these companies. Early studies look at understanding the positive effects associated with creation, personality of the entrepreneur and mode of recruitment (Baron, Burton, Hannan, 1996), then they have expanded to examine the changes and human resources policies taking place in these new enterprises (Baron, Hannan, 2002; Baron, Hannan, Burton, 2001).

More recently, start-ups have been looked at from three main angles. The first angle looks at the start of the company and entrepreneurship. To this end, thematic research has focussed around the process and the creative environment (Arlotto et al., 2004; Ayadi et al., 2005), the motives aiding their emergence (Ayadi and Arlotto, 2004; Lichtenstein and al., 2007), and the individual creator (Fayolle, 2001, 2004). The second angle questions the growth, the conditions for survival (Lasch et al., 2005), and the financing of start-ups (Randjelovic et al., 2003). The third angle of this research analyses the components of the organizational arrangement of start-ups, such as the regional mimicry of collective identity (Dalla Pria and Vicente, 2006), resources and strategy (Heirman and Clarysse, 2005), modelling the start-up marketing (Popovic, 2005), or leadership style and associated values (Whalen et al., 2004).

However, none of this research offers an overall vision of the work organization at the heart of these companies whose emergence is situated at the crossroads of major economic, technological and organizational disruptions. Our research question is then: “What synthesis of work organization can characterize the ICT start-ups in France?”

For this research, we have preferred to choose idealtype because unlike models, idealtypes are not intended to identify what is common or what is an example to follow, in terms of efficiency or example, but they are concerned with giving a possible representation of a phenomenon, “focusing more on unique traits, which makes sense, even if it is only a partial and subjective seizure of reality” (Combes, 1997, p. 13). We rejected the metaphor because of its distance from reality. Indeed, this mode of representation highlights a phenomenon from a specific angle, offering therefore a truncated and fragmented vision of the latter, even if “they provide new intellectual vistas focusing attention on different facets of the perplexities of life” (Varan, 1998, p. 58).

Max Weber’s idealtype, of heuristic nature, helps the researcher to grasp and understand the complexity of reality through a simplified representation (Weber, 1995; Galbraith, Schendel, 1983; Lazarsfeld, Barton, 1951). It should be noted that the idealtype is a tool; a method for social sciences, and of empirical nature, i.e. that knowledge is the result of experience. According to Weber, it is impossible to establish universal laws for any issue surrounding the social sciences. In this sense, idealtype “[…] is an array of thought, it is not the historical reality nor especially an ‘authentic’ reality it is even less than a scheme in which one could order the reality by way of exemplary” (Weber, 1965, p. 185). “[…] hence, the construction of an idealtype is not considered as a goal, but only as a means of knowledge” (Ibid., p. 183).

In other words idealtype is a not only a representation of a phenomenon that can set a milestone in the complex reality, but it is also an epistemological choice. Not only it is not an observed average nor a model, nor an a priori of logical deductions, it also incorporates the fact that what is observed is not the only outcome of strictly rational acts and admits they can be guided by errors or effect: “An idealtype is an intellectual construction obtained by unilaterally emphasizing one or several points of view and by linking a multitude of isolated events, diffuse and discreet, found sometimes in large numbers, sometimes in small numbers and sometimes nowhere, that are ordered by views unilaterally chosen in order to form a homogeneous thinking.” (Weber, 1965, p. 181)

That is why we have developed a methodological protocol which follows Max Weber’s idealtype definition, anchored in a constructivist posture and structured around a project of knowledge and the development of a representation of structure in the workplace in an ICT start-up. Then we followed an inductive approach, in order to emerge from the ground while abstracting descriptive characteristics of the operation start-up. Finally, we decided to focus towards a qualitative analysis that promotes the construction of meaning in the heart of researched characteristics. Thus, we set this research in a phenomenological approach which can be defined as “an introspection made by actors on past events experienced, to allow the conscience, knowledge, then the transmission of streamlined experiments” (Wacheux, 1996, p. 265). One then has to realize the description of a phenomenon that the actor is living or has lived.

Two idealtypes were built in four stages (figure 1) to understand what the organizational characteristics of the current ICT start-ups are, compared to the start-ups created before the Internet bubble burst. Start-ups of the two idealtypes were selected according to their sector of activity (ICT: Internet universe, software, telecoms and technology), their date of creation (before / after the Internet bubble burst), and age (less than 5 years at the time of the investigation in order to observe a minimum of construction and consolidation of the work organization). The pre-bubble type is built from data extracted from studies and publications available on ICT start-ups, while the post-bubble type is based on data from semi-structured interviews and also primary data (table 1).

Table 1
Description of the ground

Once obtained the data were collected in a database. The aggregation of data categories was supported by two waves of coding opened by themes of work organization, using a data management software. The stabilization of the idealtype was provided by the confrontation between the two idealtypes, in the light of a comparative analysis between the categories formed, which enabled us to identify the convergent and divergent characteristics of these two idealtypes.

Start-up idealtype has finally showed a dominant key success factor, namely instant change adaptability. Gueguen (2004, p. 5) puts forward that these new industries are characterized by a “speed management”, where “the speed in decision-making is no longer seen as an advantage, but as an obligation.” Thus, strategy is looking for innovation of product or service, fast access to markets within a context of uncertainty, and requiring an ability to react and quickly adapt.

The desire to foster a flexible structure and an oriented “projects-network” is strong in the exploration of the start-up idealtype. The work and the realization of tasks and projects are significantly close to the concept of “an out project” (Clark, Hayes, Wheelwright, 1988), by virtue of the fact that the actors are mobilized and completely out of their business structure. Thus the appearance of the structural start-up idealtype appears to move towards the establishment of “small businesses and large networks, “as researchers from MIT must have imagined in 1997 when they worked on scenarios to represent the organization in 2015” (Laubacher et al., 1997): “[scenario] puts ICT at the heart of the evolution of the organization. Widely disseminated, ICT have generated a drastic decline in transaction costs, have contributed to the explosion of companies that have increasingly resorted to the market, and who outsource (partnership, subcontracting, co-development…) more than they are doing internally. Within these small companies, most productive tasks are covered by independent teams. These teams are small (a few individuals) and ad hoc: they do and undo according to the pace of projects. The vast hierarchical organization has disappeared and has given way to a formal relationship between independent contractors and micro-enterprises linked by networks […]” (Loilier, Tellier, 2001, p. 145).

In summary, this structure is characterized by an atomized and mobile organization in order to respond to internal and external environment changes, by a flatter hierarchical system where all relationships are possible, boundaries blurred and influenced by an opening on the external environment.

Rules are organic, i.e. dynamic and poorly formalized, barely distinctive (Adler, Borys, 1996), which can release margins of freedom, however limited by a low level of control, but strongly guided by results and the community of employees. Each member of the community has the power or duty to participate without intermediaries in the life of the company. The rules of the game can change rapidly, according to the learning capacity of community members. Therefore individuals must acquire new knowledge that they mostly share with the community.

The tone used when people communicate is akin to the communication style of a “public place” or more exactly a forum, in the Latin meaning of the term. Indeed, like the meaning of the Latin – designating the public square where exchanges take place between citizens – they tend to shout to one another, to inter-cut the dialogues, thanks to the open space provided. Movement of the communication is horizontal and allows for a democratization of information, thus placing the individual as a central element of communication, permitting the use of tools such as internal blogs. For several years we have seen an erosion of the hierarchical pyramid which triggered the end of top-down communication.

This state of mind seems to lead to a convergence between the expectations of the organization and individuals. Indeed, as the idealtype is constrained by low visibility and sentenced to permanent change, it pushes people to be independent and to take initiatives which they need to make to ensure that their work relationship will be attractive. Accordingly, the demands and expectations of both parties seem balanced thanks to this entrepreneurial spirit: “And even, as is the case in many start-ups, they are required to innovate and develop an entrepreneurial spirit. Instead of a ‘house spirit’, an entrepreneurial spirit participates in defining the company project: each offers its expertise and its projects to the directors of start-ups, instead of waiting for tasks to be precisely determined by the directors” (interview excerpt). This is fostered by individuals who share a taste for challenges: “People are mostly looking for a human adventure. For those who are not passionate about the human adventure – that is not reduced to ‘we are a bunch of buddies, it’s great’ – but rather from a human body what we can get to do and what we can build? The world of technology is still initially brain juice…” (interview excerpt).

The working atmosphere is then punctuated in a friendly way (through a variety of techniques such as promoting laughter, cronyism, some dedicated infrastructures), around the stimulation of an objective which is developing a community culture, where solidarity solidifies around a project. The opinions and knowledge are shared in the form of ‘common pot’ to develop mutually: “So you do not have a family culture. Here is more a team, in the sense that everybody is helpful, and then immediately when there is one of them who cannot do something, hop, immediately, there is another who does the job, sometimes there are things that I do not know how to do, then, I ask the others… all questions, all experiences are mutualized in a common pot” (interview excerpt).

So individuals look to be entrepreneurs – to build, be autonomous, participate – to develop a friendly atmosphere and to create an “adventurous” climate, with challenges, avoiding any process of “routinisation” and to compose a community where knowledge and experiences are shared through frank and direct relationships.

The “active activity” concerns the guiding role the manager must assume. Beforehand, he must lead by example, give evidence of his skills and exhibit a pleasant and eloquent personality (contamination by enthusiasm, and conviction as a coach) in order to be recognized by his team. The manager has to place his team members in a process of continuous improvement, assign roles and set up new challenges customized according to their desires and their potential, based on a skills analysis to acquire or identify new projects. So he meets expectations which we have mentioned before, namely the acquisition of new skills, aversion to routine and the need for living adventures inside the company.

The “reactive activity” is linked to its support function and its watermark support. Indeed, entrepreneurial culture means that the manager encourages the initiative of team members, having as a consequence an increased awareness of their responsibilities; the manager’s role is however to remain in the background, and only to intervene if necessary. He assumes that the individual is capable of initiatives, of good judgments and does not need to be constantly supervised to work and act. So the manager gives targets more indicative than defined. This style of management means that the manager must have an ability to react, by stimulating exchanges, by being accessible, and by having the ability to listen to his team members. Such a style is therefore the guarantor of a transparent working environment, which is reminiscent of the main characteristics of a transformational manager (Sashkin, 2004).

Table 2
The 4-transformational manager-characteristics (Sashkin, 2004)

In addition post-bubble leaders have seen experiences of some start-ups, which have opened their capital and then have been dismissed from their own businesses or who have lost their autonomy and their decision-making power: “Our first company was funded by private investment. At the start, we were very quickly going to market and that was rapidly profitable – the headquarters was in an attic – and then, when we raised funds, we had millions on our bank account, but we were linked to investors. There was no autonomy any longer and we decided to resign two years later. At the beginning of this new start-up, it was immediately made clear what we want to do: we wanted to be free, be happy, travel, and we did not want to do the pace that investor decided for us, we wanted to do it by ourselves” (interview excerpt).

It is clear that the relationship between individuals and business has changed, when an analysis with hindsight of history is made. Indeed, the perception of people we interviewed is significant. While for their parents’ generation work was the central life pillar, it seems that the post-bubble idealtype shows individuals who wish to restore some space to their privacy, having made the observation that despite a dedicated and hard investment, the return on that investment from the company cannot be depended on, as highlighted in this excerpt from an interview: “I am certainly not ready to sacrifice my privacy as other generations have been able to do. Companies have never returned anything to employees, and even people who invest in companies rely first and foremost on themselves. I think the best way to keep one’s post, is not to be afraid to lose it. That is more my philosophy” (interview excerpt). So people have repositioned their privacy and professional life. The latter is necessary, because it provides a financial resource, but it is also a function of development. Sacrifices and compromises are accepted only if there is a return in exchange (in either physical or intangible form).

Concerning hours worked and working time, the gap is big. Whereas post-bubble individuals and managers prefer being in a logic of adaptability, pre-bubble individuals and managers had the reputation of having no schedule and working day and night. Among post-bubble individuals, it is possible to see a proximity between the company’s needs and those of the individual. Flexibility is maintained when it comes to adjusting working time. However, the idealtype shows that flexibility is limited by imperatives related to the position held, priorities, intensity and variability of the activity. However in the post-bubble idealtype it is recognized that hours’ accumulation of work is not a guarantee of efficiency.

However, start-up idealtype characteristics present strategic setbacks and theoretical limits. Indeed, the practical application of the characteristics of the start-up idealtype has two main disadvantages. The first one is the lack of retro-vision linked to a very unstable environment where competitive positions are highly volatile. Thus decisions can be taken on dubious strategic leaps which can condemn the organization to live in short term mode, by constantly reacting without long-term coherence. From the first follows the second drawback: organizational instability. Indeed, the lack of strategic hindsight imbues the organization and its members with a tendency to constantly take risks. It is also influenced by the fact that markets and the whole business environment are in process of evolution, which requires frequent new strategic re-adaptations, changing entry barriers and key success factors. This organizational instability may lead to disastrous consequences on individuals (deviant behavior, inconsistency of employment policies, perpetual questioning about employees’ skills and their knowledge, and so on) and thus brings the problem of their ability to function in the face of such instability.

From a theoretical point of view, it is necessary to emphasize that the idealtype is a generic tool and not generalized, that applies to specific sectors (mainly service activities like ICT) where creativity is a goal (entrepreneurial behaviour is necessary) and individuals with a high-level education (at least licence graduate). So why is the idealtype not generalizable but generic? In this research, we observed predominantly ICT start-ups which provide service to their customers. The concepts of product and maturity of the industry have a crucial effect on the style of work organization in the company. For example a biotechnology start-up or a new materials start-up have production processes focused on more tangible products than for ICT start-ups and the funding needs will be more important because of a major research phase. If we build the idealtype of the biotech start-up, we could probably observe characteristics which differ on some elements of work organization, but it is likely that we could find convergent themes (e.g. style of leadership, innovation strategy…). The idealtype built can also serve as a comparison in future research, in order to build other idealtypes stemming from other sectors or other new enterprises forms. That is why it is necessary to consider idealtypes as a means and not an aim of knowledge because of their generic nature and as a positioning tool, a “yard stick” (Mommsen, 1974), a “measuring rod” (Lachmann, 1971) to compare and analyze companies.

Thus the idealtype helps to establish a first milestone of comparison and then to enhance organizational knowledge by its generic character: “Knowledge does not present itself in the form of normative universal principles or in the form of predictive theories. It is considered as providing landmarks and heuristic guides intended to arouse practitioners’ reflection, questioning and intelligence, and to stimulate their imagination and creative action. In other words, in this framework, knowledge is viewed as generative (Gergen, 2001, pp. 208-209), and generalization does not aim to establish supposedly ‘universally applicable’ theories” (Avenier, 2007, p. 3; Gergen, 2001).

The ICT start-up idealtype proposed in this article has merit for purposes of expanding and updating generic organizational features since the exploitation of the twenty-first century technical system and economic upheavals and environmental needs of this era, even if we do not yet have the necessary historical hindsight to understand all the ins and outs of this idealtype which should over time evolve and change. Many questions arise: how will post-bubble start-ups grow old? Will they transform into bigger companies? How will change characteristics when start-ups will advance in their lifecycle and when the sectors will be more competitive?