Visibility Distribution and Dual Vulnerability: Governing Differences in Outsourced Digital Work via Social Media Platforms

• In Event: Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 2. Visibility, disability, & Telegram

Abstract

This study examines how bodily difference is governed in platform-mediated labor and proposes visibility distribution as a mechanism for understanding how organizations selectively activate, suppress, and reframe difference. Drawing on three years of ethnographic research (2018–2021) in China’s data-labeling industry, the analysis centers on a midsized subcontractor that recruited disabled workers and is complemented by comparative investigation to five additional firms. The study traces how organizations modulate visibility in everyday practices and identifies three configurations—shadows emergence, interface amplification, and organizational redistribution—through which the governance of visibility generates both precarious inclusion for workers and fragile flexibility for management. It contributes to the politics of visibility in disability by showing how recognition becomes a mode of organizational governance and reveals how bodily and social differences are governed, valued, and stratified across hierarchies of capital, illuminating the structural conditions under which inclusion and vulnerability are co-produced in the platform economy.

Author

• Aura Dan Huang, South China Normal University