The authors, Dr. Rutvica Andrijasevic and Dr. Julie Yujie Chen, approach key instances of the industrial and service economies – labour mediators in electronics manufacturing in Central and Eastern Europe, and app-based food delivery platforms in China – to push media studies, platform studies, and management studies in new directions. In doing so, they offer insight on the future of just-in-time labour and just-in-time media that inevitably require attention to developments across various geographies. Highlighting the roles of Temporary Worker Agencies and government policies in the manufacture and operation of platforms, Dr. Andrijasevic and Dr. Chen focus our attention on labour’s mediations of and by platforms. Focusing on the making of the electronic devices that keep us working and the food delivery apps that keeps us fed, this symposium also sheds light on the platform-mediated, just-in-time logistics that have only become more essential and more visible under COVID-19.

We ask participants to come having read Dr. Andrijasevic and Dr. Chen’s contributions to the volume Media and Management (forthcoming 2021, co-written with Dr. Marc Steinberg and Dr. Melissa Gregg): “‘Just-in-time labour’: Time-based management in the age of on-demand manufacturing” and “Spaces of Labor Mediation: Policy, Platform, and Media.” These texts will be distributed to participants.

Dr. Melissa Gregg will be a respondent to the papers and Dr. Marc Steinberg will be moderator and lead discussion.

Rutvica Andrijasevic, based at the University of Bristol (UK), is an activist scholar with research interests in international labour migration and business. Her texts on transnational production, labour migration and human trafficking have appeared in a variety of top international journals and edited volumes and have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Italian, Czech, Greek, Croatian and Mandarin.

Julie Yujie Chen is an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology (ICCIT) and holds a graduate appointment at the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is the lead author of Super-sticky WeChat and Chinese Society (Emerald, 2018).

Melissa Gregg leads user experience and sustainability in the Client Computing Group at Intel. Her previous books include Counterproductive (Duke, 2018), Work’s Intimacy (Wiley, 2011) and The Affect Theory Reader (Duke, 2009).

Marc Steinberg is associate professor of film studies at Concordia University. He is the author of Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan (University of Minnesota Press, 2012) and The Platform Economy: How Japan Transformed the Commercial Internet (University of Minnesota Press, 2019).