Emotional Labor as a Situated Social Practice: Investigating the Performance of Emotional Labor by Women Migrant Workers in China’s Platform-based Gig Economy

How has the platform-based gig economy affected the performance of emotional labor? This study addresses gaps in prior scholarship, which has focused primarily on the organizational processes or has used a traditional intersectional lens. This article, therefore, proposes reconceptualizing emotional labor as a situated social practice through a cumulative and multi-scalar intersectional lens. Drawing on 47 in-depth interviews with women rural migrant housecleaners in Shanghai, our study explores how algorithmic management, diverse urban work environments, and intersecting material and symbolic hierarchies affect emotional labor. The findings reveal how the intensity and nature of emotional labor vary in response to algorithmic control, disciplinary practices, and the characteristics of urban households. Gendered dimensions of emotional labor also emerge, from performing apology rituals to navigating age, class, and gender hierarchies, and deploying defensive strategies to mitigate sexual harassment risks. The study advances theoretical understanding by proposing emotional labor as a social practice situated within multi-scalar intersectional hierarchies of hukou (China’s Household Registration System) socioeconomic status, and gender and cultural systems of age and language. It further examines how these hierarchies become embedded in meso-level work environments, creating cumulative oppressions. Emotional labor performed by these rural migrant workers, therefore, emerges as a situated practice that responds and contests a complex matrix of oppression and power dynamics of China’s platform economy.