This symposium features the work of two scholars whose research offers close studies of just-in-time platforms, management, and labour: Dr. Rutvica Andrijasevic and Dr. Julie Yujie Chen.

The authors approach key instances of the industrial and service economies – labour mediators in electronics manufacturing in Central and Eastern Europe, and app-based food delivery platforms in China – to push media studies, platform studies, and management studies in new directions. In doing so, they offer insight on the future of just-in-time labour and just-in-time media that inevitably require attention to developments across various geographies. Highlighting the roles of Temporary Worker Agencies and government policies in the manufacture and operation of platforms, Dr. Andrijasevic and Dr. Chen focus our attention on labour’s mediations of and by platforms. Focusing on the making of the electronic devices that keep us working and the food delivery apps that keeps us fed, this symposium also sheds light on the platform-mediated, just-in-time logistics that have only become more essential and more visible under COVID-19.

Rutvica Andrijasevic, based at the University of Bristol (UK), is an activist scholar with research interests in international labour migration and business. Her texts on transnational production, labour migration and human trafficking have appeared in a variety of top international journals and edited volumes and have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Italian, Czech, Greek, Croatian and Mandarin.  

Julie Yujie Chen is an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology (ICCIT) and holds a graduate appointment at the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is the lead author of Super-sticky WeChat and Chinese Society (Emerald, 2018).