As China’s leading multi-channel network (MCN) institutions become increasingly industrialized and bureaucratic, their operations are paradoxically characterized by intensified emotional dynamics. Drawing on ethnographic research within a women-dominated fashion influencer team, this study identifies a sisterhood-based production model that embeds sisterly ties within hierarchical organizational structures. It traces the formation and collapse of this managed sisterhood. By cultivating an illusion of unity and belonging, intimacy makes labor more governable, obscuring coercion while facilitating the mobilization of emotional, aesthetic, and physical capacities. In this way, sisterhood becomes integral to production, intensifying labor and rendering precarity routine. Under platform capitalism, traditional Chinese sisterhood, once grounded in kinship and flexible resistance, is reconfigured into an occupational form of informal labor control, producing “disposable kinship” in which affective bonds become temporary and replaceable. This study challenges dominant political readings of sisterhood and demonstrates how intimacy itself becomes a mechanism of governance within platform capitalism.
As digital misogyny remains widespread, user intervention is an essential complement to lenient platform governance. Yet, willingness to intervene varies considerably across individuals and cultural contexts. In a cross-national survey conducted in Austria ( n = 791), France ( n = 800), Hungary ( n = 775), and Sweden ( n = 785), we examine how dispositional, attitudinal, and autobiographical characteristics relate to users’ direct and indirect intervention and support for moderation. Empathic anger consistently emerged as the strongest positive predictor of all three outcomes across countries. Perspective-taking, online self-presentation, and victimization experiences showed meaningful positive associations with intervention, while misogynist attitudes were inconsistently related. Toxic disinhibition showed a dual pattern, negatively associated with moderation support but positively associated with direct intervention across all countries, suggesting its potential to be cleverly repurposed toward counterspeech. These findings underscore the importance of emotionally activating literacy programs and highlight the need for culturally sensitive intervention models.
Rapid workplace integration of artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping work practices and challenging employees’ self-efficacy and well-being. This mixed-methods study examines these experiences using national survey data ( N = 2109) and qualitative interviews ( N = 54) with Finnish workers. Frequent AI use, AI-induced identity threat, and organizational AI deployment are associated with higher AI strain, whereas AI self-efficacy relates to frequent use, positive AI attitudes, and subjective well-being. Identity threat moderated several of these associations, highlighting the role of professional identity in AI-related experiences. Analysis drawing on Greimas’ semiotic modalities (must, can, know, and want) explains how these patterns are interpreted and negotiated in practice, revealing tensions between perceived self-efficacy and pressures to integrate AI. AI use was often described as voluntary. However, participants anticipated increasing competence demands and responsibility. The findings emphasize the need for organizational strategies that address identity-related challenges and support employee well-being in AI-driven work transformations.
This article examines #quietquitting on TikTok as a platform-mediated articulation of gendered affective withdrawal. While organisational research interprets quiet quitting as reduced discretionary effort or declining work engagement, this study examines how quiet quitting is articulated as a digitally circulated refusal of feminised emotional labour. Drawing on feminist theories of affective labour and critical platform studies, the analysis explores how workers renegotiate expectations of emotional availability within algorithmically structured visibility regimes. The study is based on a qualitative-dominant mixed-methods analysis of 586 TikTok videos shared under #quietquitting between 2020 and 2026. Combining thematic discourse analysis with descriptive engagement indicators, the findings show that creators frequently frame quiet quitting as a refusal of unpaid relational mediation, emotional management, and workplace care. The article introduces the concept of platformed affective withdrawal to explain how narratives of workplace disengagement circulate through algorithmic visibility systems that amplify and individualise gendered labour inequalities.
This article situates Substack within the platformisation of blogging and the enclosure of cultural production within proprietary infrastructures. Tracing the genealogy of blogging as a decentralised practice that carried within it the seeds of citizen journalism and informal intellectual life, I argue that Substack does not restore an apparently lost cultural practice but renegotiates and interpolates blogging into a platformised logic. Framed as a return to independent, writer-led publishing, Substack instead, as I argue, renders free-labour interaction as a source of rent. I analyse the rhetoric and revolving discourse around Substack’s internal curatorial project, ‘The Substack Post’. Drawing on Jodi Dean’s account of blogs as displaced mediators alongside theories of digital labour and platform capitalism, and approaching Substack as a simultaneously platformised and infrastructuralised formation, I argue that praise operates as a platform-specific form of commodity fetishism, animating the platform while obscuring the labour relations that sustain it.
