The labour process in China's internet industry

Abstract

As the internet sector extends its scale and employs an increasingly large workforce, the labour conditions in the industry have attracted the attention of labour scholars, especially since the prevalent overworking practices in China’s internet companies came into the public spotlight in 2019. Following the ‘control debate’ in labour studies, this research explores how management at internet companies develops their control techniques to organise the labour process more efficiently and how workers respond to these techniques while making sense of their itinerant work lives. The thesis contends that the strategies of both management and workers are enabled and constrained by the social context of post-socialist China - the market reform, the danwei and hukou systems since the socialist era, mass domestic migration, and the deregulated model of development in the internet sector.

The empirical data were collected through my four months of participant observation in an internet startup in Beijing and 103 interviews with tech workers in China from 2018 to 2020. Drawing on the data, the thesis reveals the ‘double flexibility’ in management strategy, flexibility in employment relationships, and the flexible, combined use of coercive and normative control within in a single firm, through an intensive analysis of the overworking phenomenon. The flexibility in employment relationships means that management pursues a just-in-time workforce to exploit workers’ work-for-labour. However, in the increasingly flexible employment relationships, workers also more actively and frequently exercise their mobility power, increasing the indeterminacy of labour mobility for each company. In response, in a particular firm, management employs the flexible, combined use of coercive and normative control techniques.

Furthermore, this thesis reveals how management develops its normative control techniques through the case study of corporate cultures in internet companies. Both internet giants and small startups have ‘decoupled’ from the socialist history and traditional Chinese culture as intellectual resources in their corporate culture construction. Meanwhile, startups ‘recouple’ with the market meritocracy discourse, while in addition to it, internet giants ‘recouple’ with an altruistic narrative of technological progressivism. From a labour process perspective, this is because the former prioritises reducing the indeterminacy of labour mobility, while the latter prioritises reducing the indeterminacy of labour effort.

In the internet sector, workers construct the comparison between two ideal types - the socialist danwei and the highly marketised internet industry - to make sense of their career trajectories. The thesis elaborates on the pendulum of worker subjectivity, which swings between the ‘self-as-business’ metaphor and the ‘self-as-property’ metaphor, when workers move across the firms and periodically overwork in one of them. The ‘self-as-business’ metaphor justifies market competition as meritocracy and encourages individuals to polish ‘employability’ in overwork efficiently. The ‘self-as-property’ metaphor reflects a conventional, Marxist understanding of employment relationships. The pendulum of worker subjectivity highlights that workers vacillate between the two metaphors throughout their work histories, and they dynamically adjust their actions according to their changing interpretations of the employment relationships.