Sociotechnical matching: Furniture manufacturers at the peripheries of Chinese economic reform

Informatization is often said to transform economies and industries, but what does the claimed transformation really look like? What is the character of experience? What works and what fails? Who benefits and who bears costs? This dissertation explores these questions based on a year-long ethnography of furniture manufacturers in a Chinese peri-urban town under the current information and communication technology (ICT)-driven economic reform. My analysis highlights how the technological imagination’s ignorance of social and material complexities is often intensifying, rather than mitigating, the challenges facing the local economy, businesses, and workers. I discuss 1) how e-commerce platforms’ scale-oriented technocratic approach to matchmaking transfers the risks and burdens of rapid expansion to participating manufacturers, 2) how the economic reform introduces rules - with decoupling and exception in practice- to allow leading companies to exploit on-demand labor of smaller manufacturers and externalize less profitable work, and 3) how the accounts of ICT-enabled management make assumptions about manufacturing work and workers to which the reality of smaller manufacturers is little similar, obscuring the roles smaller manufacturers play in enabling the local industry. Based on this research, I also develop the concept of “matching” as a useful lens to examine the gaps between frictionless technological imaginations and the messy reality and better understand the externalities and social consequences of technological systems in various forms. With this dissertation, I aim to present a reconstructed account of the technology-driven economic development with a focus on marginalized experiences and overlooked processes and contribute to the broader debates about the social implications of informatization and the interaction between ICTs and different communities.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Informatics

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Liu, Chang

Contributors dc:contributor

• Sanfilippo, Madelyn R
• Chan, Anita S
• Twidale, Michael
• Hong, Yu

• Informatization
• Matching
• Sociotechnical
• Ethnography
• China
• Supply Chains
• Manufacturing

Statement dc:rights

• © 2022 Chang Liu

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/117651

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F117651