June Article of the Month

Internships are not new, or even newly controversial. However, from being a peripheral phenomenon that occurred only in certain professions in Western economies, in recent years the number of internships occurring across the globe has exploded, and internships seem set to become a structurally significant element of many industries and economies. In this article published by the ELRR in 2019, Bingqing Xia addresses a gap between research on internships and research on digital labour. She raises questions of interns' rights, power dynamics and the potential for digital labour theories in understanding these phenomena. She draws on empirical research at two Chinese internet companies that details interns' experiences of poor working conditions and difficult living conditions and shows convincingly that both the internet companies and the Chinese higher education system engage in forms of coercion and alienation. Further and importantly, she alleges that the outcomes are produced by a degree of cooperation between internet companies and the Chinese higher education system. This is an excellent article, both in shining a light on an important instance of industrial relations skewed by a set of power imbalances and understanding it in its specificity. But it also stands as a powerful intervention on digital labour studies. Xia urges scholars to take greater account of the lived experiences of precarious workers in the new media industries.