Platformed distinction work: Rethinking the migration and integration of food delivery workers in China

Abstract

This article describes how Chinese rural migrant workers are subject to the contradictory integrated regimes of capitalist advocates of migration and urbanisation, which are, in reality, distinctive integrating constraints. Online platform work has become a key site for rural migrant workers in China to experience and experiment with obfuscating sets of promotions and disciplines about labour, migration and urbanness. We propose the concept of platformed distinction work to explain how platforms have played a complex and multifunctional role that enhances migrant workers’ participation in the digital economy while concurrently defining and conditioning their labour as disadvantaged distinct work. This dual process of migrant workers’ social integration and distinction in platform work reveal the multilayered, complicated relations between migration and platformisation.