Technology Choice of Taxi Drivers under E-hailing: Conventional Occupation Group vs. Post-Fordism Business Organization and Notion

My project is an ethnographic research focusing on the experiences of Mainland Chinese taxi drivers with e-hailing (ride-sharing) technology and business. I’m interested in making sense of the impact of e-hailing technologies on the taxi industry in Mainland China, and how licensed professional taxi drivers are engaging with the dynamics of digital automation promoted by e-hailing companies like Didi Chuxing.

More importantly, I will analyze how licensed taxi drivers’ choices and justifications are related to their engagement or resistance to the promotions of e-hailing, which include notions of ownership, control, independence, equality, automation, mobility, flexibility, etc. Conventional views on the impact of e-hailing draw on a narrative of automation based on an opposition between machine and human, market and people. However, in this research, we will show that the business trend and technology of automation here is more of the “blasting fuse” of the tension between declining professional identity of conventional group and the popular social trend related to on-demand labor and post-Fordism.