Great Expectations? Career Ideals and Junior Labor in Chinese Architectural Firms

• In Event: Labor and Labor Movements Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Roundtable 4: Devotion, Discipline, and Inequality in Contemporary Labor Regimes

Abstract

Architectural firms are often portrayed as spaces of creativity and professional autonomy, yet their labor processes are marked by long hours, intense deadlines, and unequal divisions of work. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with junior designers, architects, project leaders, and firm managers in multiple Chinese cities, this paper examines the everyday labor of junior drafting staff (“drawers”) who perform much of the routine production work. It analyzes how drafting labor is organized and normalized through firm hierarchies, project-based workflows, and professional ideologies. Building on labor process theory and Gramscian perspectives, the study shows how the promise of becoming an architect functions as a career ideal that secures consent to overwork by framing endurance as professional training. The Chinese case highlights how differences between state-owned institutes and private firms, ties between academia and management, and fragmented regulation shape labor conditions. By centering routine production work, this study contributes to debates on professional labor, creative work, and precarity by showing how career identities operate as a mechanism of consent.

Author

• Xinyu Huang, Zhejiang University