Wei Wei

As part of her Marie Jahoda Visiting Fellowship (2021), Wei Wei investigated ‘Business strategies, work rules and worker outcomes in the Chinese ride-hailing sector’. This project aims to examine digital platform work in the Chinese online ride-hailing sector. Particularly, it highlights the growing significance of new business models and work practices in the ride-hailing sector. Unusually from a Western perspective, there are different business models and various types of companies in the Chinese ride-hailing sector, including B2C (car service companies), C2C (platform start-ups) and aggregation platforms. These different business models adopted various strategies towards employment relations in different stages, which are connected with institutional logics in this sector. Thus, this project not only gains an in-depth understanding of the relationship between business strategies, work rules and employee outcomes in platform work, but also offer a better understanding of the take up and impact of digital technologies by different business models, in different markets and institutional contexts.