Service outsourcing and labour mobility in a digital age: transnational linkages between Japan and Dalian, China

What is it about?

In this article, I examine the transnational mobility of digital workers and the control of their labour across multiple production sites. Based on ethnographic findings, I argue that in the global digital economy, digital services are rendered exploitable through their transnational mobility and that this form of labour migration has developed because of the partial, fluid and contingent nature of the transnational links between Japan and China.

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Why is it important?

The digitalization of work has progressively allowed businesses to outsource IT-enabled service jobs to cheaper production sites offshore. The growth of the ‘offshore outsourcing' of white-collar service jobs in East Asia has produced the trans-regional mobility of young educated people who provide cheap digital labour.