LUO Siqi CHEN Jiahui
社会学评论. 2024, 12(2): 176-198.
Frequent labour flows have nearly become a norm in the platform economy. Previous studies often treat them as a platform feature and examine how the platforms’strong control and low protection weaken typical employment, leading to labour precarity. However, this research brings workers back in by exploring their agency in the process. Based on extensive fieldwork on Chinese food delivery platforms, this article explores the root causes from both the platform and labour
sides. It argues that the combination of the capital designs and labour strategies leads to frequent flows. Whereas the platforms create dual employment models for business purposes and emphasize technological control over labour subjectivity,workers respond by individual turnovers, mainly forming a type of“circular flow” within the sector, and collective actions, particularly organizing for“high-priced part-times”. Consequently, labour flows are beyond the capital’s expectations and unilateral control, which causes not only precarious labour but also constant pressures on platform organizations, especially delivery service agencies and their stations. Thus, this study concludes that labour flows essentially reflect the dynamic processes of strategic interactions among multiple parties on the platforms. Such processes particularly reveal that the complexity of platform organization has not eliminated but even created some space for worker agency, which has limitations but continues to emerge in new forms.
