Institutionalizing Precarity: State Regulation and the Changing Ride-Hail Work Organization in China

Over the past decade, while China’s ride-hail industry prospered, its platform work organization has evolved significantly. Drawing on ethnographic data, this article explores the role of state regulations in shaping the form of ride-hail work organization in China. We argue that platform work organization, characterized by dual bureaucratic-algorithmic control in China’s ride-hail sector, is contingently shaped by the interactions between state regulations and the responses from ride-hail platforms, car-leasing companies, and drivers. In the meantime, the costs of regulatory compliance have been shifted down to drivers, leading to an institutionalized form of precarious labor. This article makes two contributions to Chinese platform labor studies: (1) it demonstrates that, rather than being technologically determined, platform work organization is also shaped by Chinese state regulation; (2) instead of seeing precarity as a defined list of insecurities or a historical trend, this study promotes a relational approach to examine the concrete formation of precarity as outcomes of regulatory struggles between stakeholders in and beyond China.