Journals

This special section brings together ethnographic and sociological work in three Asian countries – China, Cambodia, and Myanmar – to provide a view of different levels and degrees of the platformisation of labor, perspectives on precarity, and narratives around entrepreneurship and work. There is a growing recognition that, amid this techno-economic focus, and lack of regional attention, the voices of vulnerable populations are often obscured or missing. In a 2016 conference held by the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore (from where two of the articles in this special section originate), academics and NGOs including the International Labor Organization, Médicine Sans Frontièrs, and Better Factories Cambodia, NGO aiming to improve the working conditions of garment industry workers in Cambodia were brought together to share reports and analyses of the implications of emerging and disruptive technologies on precarious populations in Asia. Mobile communications emerged as a key theme of the conference in two key senses: First, mobile communication has emerged as pivotal. It mediates technologies in the development and integration of digital platforms across the region. Second, mobile communications afford mobility physically, geographically, and economically. Mobile communications are, as a result, inseparable from other forms of technological change which they both shape and by which they are shaped.

From ARI Conference on “The Industrial Revolution 4.0: Preparing for Disruptive Technologies in 21st Century Asia”, 26-27 October 2017.