Presenter: Prof. Na Fu. Visiting Lecturer in Political Economy.

Discussant: Prof. Nellie Chu. Assistant Professor of Anthropology.

Abstract: his is a work-in-progress article introduces the concept of “institutions for instability” to analyze how platform-driven manufacturing in China creates institutional configurations that enable perpetual flexibility rather than provide stability. Based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in shoe manufacturing networks, I demonstrate how four institutional forms collectively support “shared labor,” where workers circulate across production sites without stable contracts while connected through digital platforms. Unlike classical institutional theory that assumes institutions reduce uncertainty, these arrangements systematically facilitate precarity while valorizing it as entrepreneurial adaptation. Through ethnographic cases including worker-managed WeChat groups, government-sponsored livestream training facilities, and platform hubs in material markets, I show how platform capitalism extracts “adaptive surplus value” from workers’ continuous reskilling processes. Workers exercise strategic mobility through these digital networks while remaining structurally vulnerable, revealing contradictory dynamics where enhanced individual agency coexists with diminished collective power. This analysis moves beyond seeing institutional degradation in platform economies, instead identifying deliberate institutional reconfiguration where coordination across decentralized actors replaces hierarchical command or welfare provision. The findings contribute to understanding how digital coordination mechanisms and networked institutions constitute coherent ecologies enabling perpetual adaptation while reproducing precarity, with implications for labor organization globally as platform logic extends into manufacturing beyond China. 

Keywords: institutions for instability, platform capitalism, shared labor, digital networks