Relational work and employee agency in informal work: Hui interpreters in China's informal trade brokerage economy


Man Xu, University of Toronto

This research examines the exercise of agency by Hui Muslims who work as interpreters and brokers within China’s informal transnational trade economy. The extant literature on interactive service jobs has largely conceptualized the labor process in marketized and contractual terms, focusing mainly on how organizational rules and institutional process shape the labor process and employee’s agency. This perspective falls short in explaining the dynamics of power within informal work, where employers, workers and customers form interpersonal relationships and accomplish economic activities based on norms of trust and reciprocity. This chapter addresses this gap by investigating how interpersonal dynamics and moral codes influence work relationships and workers responses to inequalities in the informal trade sector. It examines three questions: how do interpreters negotiate the meaning and boundary of service relationships to navigate or improve their work conditions? How does an individual’s social location, such as ethno-religious identity and gender shape this negotiation? What do interpreters’ labor practices reveal about the production of social inequalities in informal work? Drawing on the theory of relational work, I argue that when labor relations are framed in terms of relational package, service workers’ interpretation of the meaning and boundaries of their relationships with other actors in the service encounters shape their response to unequal balance of power at work. The paper also reveals that individual’s labor strategies are motivated by various goals other than material interests, such as maintaining moral integrity and sustaining social relationships and status. The relational work in the labor process has complex implications for the producing of inequalities through informal work. On the one hand, the development of reciprocal ties between workers and other actors in the service encounters conceals exploitative and unequal power dynamics at work, by framing labor practices as gift giving or skill accumulation. On the other hand, the blurring of boundaries between work and personal ties creates intrinsic rewards for workers. Moreover, in informal work, social and moral codes of mutuality, reciprocity, respect and care become symbolic resources for workers to exert a degree of normative control over other economic actors in the service relationship. However, utilizing social ties to improve labor practices also serves to reproduce existing structures of inequality and entail subjective costs for the worker. Informal workers often rely on social networks and connections rather than formal regulations and benefits as their social safety net. The interpreters in this research strategically increased incomes and advanced their labor market positions through informal transactions that were disguised as gift-giving. While this relational work signifies the agency of workers to manage conditions of precarity, it also contributes to the perpetuation of precarious labor arrangement. Additionally, relational work involves psychological costs for the actors. Workers may experience self-estrangement or moral distress when their moral belief and social roles clash with interest-drive labor strategies. Taken together, the paper contributes to the theorization of worker agency in service jobs, by highlighting relational work as a crucial yet underexamined dimension of workers’ negotiation of power in the labor process. The relational perspective is valuable for understanding contemporary labor processes, which have become increasingly casualized and contingent around the globe.

This paper will be presented at the following session: