Review Essays: Little Shop of Horrors? A Digital Age Startup’s Experiment with Radical Transparency

TechCo, the conversational firm at the center of Catherine Turco’s ethnography, is a fast-growing social media marketing company. Turco opens The Conversational Firm: Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social Media by introducing the founders of the firm, Eric and Anil, whose mission is “radical openness” in the service of succeeding in the digital economy (p. 15). Eric and Anil believe their organization must be nimble, responding directly and personally to their business customers through social media of all types. They abhor bureaucracy, hate hierarchy, and envision an open organization that gives people freedom through radical transparency.