Driving as communities: Chinese taxi drivers’ technology, job, and mobility choices under the pressure of e-hailing

Abstract

Focusing on conventional taxis and e-hailing, this paper discusses the technology, job and mobility choices of a conventional occupational group – taxi drivers – faced with an algorithm-enabled mode of mobility. Based on six-month ethnographic fieldwork in Xi’an, China, it shows that taxi drivers generally prefer taxis to e-hailing. Because the e-hailing algorithm treats each driver independently, drivers’ spatio-temporal skills become marginalised and taxi drivers are no longer able to maintain a regular spatio-temporal arrangement that facilitates their community nodes as they do in taxi-driving. Their preference for taxis is a response to the potential threat to their community and social values imposed by algorithm-enabled mobilities. The paper emphasises how workers’ response to algorithmic digital automation are centred around and operationalised by spatio-temporal mobility. It also shows that the impacts of new mobilities are distributed unevenly across groups with different socio-economic backgrounds and life experiences, in this case vis-à-vis the privatisation and urbanisation of Chinese society.