TY - CHAP AB - Abstract Hackathons, time-bounded events where participants write computer code and build apps, have become a popular means of socializing tech students and workers to produce “innovation” despite little promise of material reward. Although they offer participants opportunities for learning new skills and face-to-face networking and set up interaction rituals that create an emotional “high,” potential advantage is even greater for the events’ corporate sponsors, who use them to outsource work, crowdsource innovation, and enhance their reputation. Ethnographic observations and informal interviews at seven hackathons held in New York during the course of a single school year show how the format of the event and sponsors’ discursive tropes, within a dominant cultural frame reflecting the appeal of Silicon Valley, reshape unpaid and precarious work as an extraordinary opportunity, a ritual of ecstatic labor, and a collective imaginary for fictional expectations of innovation that benefits all, a powerful strategy for manufacturing workers’ consent in the “new” economy. VL - 31 SN - 978-1-78743-288-8, 978-1-78743-287-1/0277-2833 DO - 10.1108/S0277-283320170000031005 UR - https://doi.org/10.1108/S0277-283320170000031005 AU - Zukin Sharon AU - Papadantonakis Max ED - Arne L. Kalleberg ED - Steven P. Vallas PY - 2017 Y1 - 2017/01/01 TI - Hackathons as Co-optation Ritual: Socializing Workers and Institutionalizing Innovation in the “New” Economy T2 - Precarious Work T3 - Research in the Sociology of Work PB - Emerald Publishing Limited SP - 157 EP - 181 Y2 - 2024/03/28 ER -