This article examines how taxi drivers adapt to, manipulate and fight against the rise of ride-hailing platforms like Didi Chuxing in China (which purchased Uber China). Chinese taxi drivers entered the on-demand labour platforms before private car drivers. Based on a nationwide data survey, the article argues that the technological power of Didi took shape by reinforcing inequalities facing informally employed taxi drivers prior to the emergence of ride-hailing apps. Drivers, far from being passive app users, have counteracted the changes in the work environment that resulted from platformisation in new and evolving ways, from strikes to algorithmic activism. This study suggests that online platforms are contested spaces where digital labour politics penetrate beyond the purported algorithmic power of the technology. The article enriches researches on on-demand labour by deconstructing the distinction between taxi drivers and private gig drivers and by pointing to the unfolding new grounds for digital labour activism.
This article, develops the critical concept of digital utility through studying the case of DiDi Chuxing and the platformization of transport services in urban China. By examining DiDi's business model, its datafication strategies, its relations with the Chinese government, and its labor management systems, the platformization of transport is demonstrated to be representative of a private Internet company's transformation to a digital utility provider. With technological imagination and practical inconsistency, this process is conducted to remediate service delivery while reworking infrastructures and redefining the access to public and private services. We argue that platform companies are able to become digital utility suppliers because of their capacity to straddle the public and the private sectors, their aspiration to become "ecosystem builders," and their heavy reliance on the constant intensive labor of users, particularly drivers, to produce data. However, because of these factors, instability is a definitive feature of digital utility companies in their present condition. Morphing into the terrain of utilities is a common undertaking by DiDi and similar platform companies. To problematize the logics of digital utility, especially its labor-intensive datafication processes and its complex relations with regulators, provides a conceptual anchor for further debates on the infrastructuralization of platforms and the platformization of society.
This article examines how on-demand service workers on digital platforms make and live their time in the case of China’s food delivery industry. Using ethnographic data, the study elucidated multiple facets of couriers’ temporality in their struggle to meet the exacting delivery time imposed by platforms while moving through biased urban spaces as marginalized temporal subjects. It is argued that a new temporal order, referred to as temporal arbitrage in this study, has been normalized in the recent platform economy. It shifts the customer’s cultural expectation to on-demand service at the expense of an increasingly hectic tempo for the workers. We demonstrate the mundane, and sometimes opportunistic, tactics deployed by workers to reconstruct their temporality. The article connects the workers’ temporality to the urban spaces, digital work process, and socioeconomic structures. It fills an important research gap by addressing the under-explored yet essential temporal dimensions in the expanding “just-in-time” labor force.
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