How do collective identities gain salience in the workplace? How are new "capitals" created in the process? To answer these question, this study examines the confrontation of two distinctly positioned socioeconomic groups that for the first time labor as co-workers in urban China, in a new type of workspace; the modern retail store. One group is the urban service proletariat, who struggle to earn a living in precarious service jobs but have legal entitlement to urban residence and urban services. The other group is migrant employees who, as part of the largest migration in human history, join a tide of workers who originally departed their rural villages in the 1980s to work in foreign-invested factories on China's southeast coast, as well as in urban constructionl. These early migrants were largely sequestered from urbanites and excluded from permanent legal residence. Drawing on data from eleven weeks of ethnographic research in a retail work setting, we examine the process through which the spatial boundaries that once separated urbanites and rural migrants become socio-cultural boundaries. The process involves three conversion mechanisms: administratively determined division of jobs, extra-organizational collective identities that some workers draw on to valorize their labor, and third party (customer) preferences. We link these micro-level dynamics to state institutions and discourses. We show that workplace culture follows the contours of boundary formation, an organizational process in which workers collectively compete for status and material resources by converting their extramural identity to workplace recognition. These conversions produce "service capital" a resource that benefits urban workers. Through this boundary work, job tasks take on meaning beyond their bureaucratic designation, and job-based identities gain meaning in everyday life that become the cultural skin in which workers live.

Skill is central to inequality in the workplace, as a basis of material reward and status recognition. While much research treats skill as a set of abilities possessed—or not—by a worker, scholars have yet to grasp the organizational processes whereby jobs come to be taken as rudimentary and the worker performing them unskilled and therefore deficient. To illuminate these processes, we travel to Beijing, China, where workers are loquacious about inequalities confronted in relatively new forms of labor. By juxtaposing two service workplaces where similar sets of work tasks carry contradictory value, we discover the social relations that demote workers and their jobs based on identities, femininity in one workplace, rurality in another. We argue that formulating job tasks as skilled or unskilled is itself a kind of organizational work, which recruits the efforts of managers, colleagues, and customers. Unskilled workers do not appear in the workplace already deficient, but become so through organizational processes.

The U.S. tech industry has been going through a re‐shuffling of labour forces, which destabilises the previous masculine structure. Drawing on 11 months of ethnographic work and 46 interviews, this study finds that labour games have become a contested terrain where different groups of engineers promote their masculine selves. Brogrammers highlight their brogramming masculine habitus through initiating ‘pranking‐games’. Tech hobbyists embodied with video‐gaming habitus invest in the ‘number games’ through which they display their technological masculinity. Despite the divergent motives, two minority groups—coding peasants and female workers—choose to distance themselves from these labour games, which reinforce their marginalised status. These findings contribute to masculinity scholarship and the study of labour games by demonstrating how labour games organised on the engineering floor have become a crucial milieu for the construction of masculinities.

This article examines Chinese immigrant engineers’ navigation in the highly flexible information technology (IT) industry in the United States and their strategies of utilizing the high-velocity labour market to their advantage. Flexible employment has grown both in prevalence and prominence in the study of the American IT industry. What flexibility theorists fail to attend to, however, is the ethnicised demission of the high-velocity labour market in the IT sector. To address this vacancy, the researcher conducted a 13-month ethnography at a leading internet-services firm in the United States and 66 additional interviews with engineers from eight leading tech companies. The ethnographic work showed that inequality that emerged within the tech firms (e.g. ‘bamboo ceilings’) disadvantaged Chinese engineers’ career development. The ‘bamboo ceiling’ stimulated Chinese immigrants to use the high-velocity labour market to normalize their job-hopping practices, in order to circumvent their career disadvantage. To facilitate their job-hopping, Chinese engineers developed university-based networks. This study concludes that, with help of their university network, Chinese immigrants became the most mobile group in the US tech industry, which further preserved the industry’s flexibility. JELcodes D23, L16

The Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) metric, which has become a parameter for investors to evaluate sustainability performance, is putting increasing pressure on international technology corporates. As a result, there is an increasing demand for corporate social reporting to address gender diversity, that lies within the social spectrum of this evaluator. This paper analyses the extent and causes of the absence of gender diversity in the most recent annual ESG (CSR) report of China's top ten technology corporates. It aims to evaluate the current situation of diversity in the Chinese business ecosystem, and then proposes improvements as an analytical response.