Migration, Precarious Work and Emotional Capitalism in Europe and in China

In Europe and in China new generations of migrants are most likely to have to cope with uncertainty and social disqualification on labor markets (Roulleau-Berger, Liu Yuzhao, 2021). They are compressed (Chang, 2017) in a plurality of local and transnational spaces. In Chinese and European societies less-qualified migrants are subjected to domination, symbolic violence, racism, contempt and humiliation in precarious work.. The emotional capitalism (Illouz, 2006) has produced moral “grammars of indecency” within the framework of economic devices that govern the capture of “weak” migrant bodies; these grammars are reinforced by processes of casualization, ethnicization of labor markets and predatory economies. The phenomenon of “precariat” has created global collective disillusionment and anxiety resulting in a structural discrepancy between social aspirations and chances to get social qualification, fracturing subjective identities

In China and in Europe, sociologists have clearly shown that migrants are facing to social and moral risks in economic and social situations of double-bind, how they do refuse precarious work and loss of social status, how they are demanding respect, recognition, and social justice.

If the new migrants are dealing with strong injunctions to self-government in a context of emotional capitalism, they also are able to develop mobilization competences and can produce economic cosmopolitism in material and virtual transnational spaces. To resist to these injunctions and to make their voices audible migrants are also producing local and transnational geographies of protest.

By crossing sociological perspectives on the topic of migration, precarious work and emotional capitalism in Europe and in China, we are using the post-Western theory (Roulleau-Berger, Li, Kim, Yazawa, 2023) to analyze how common knowledge and indigenous knowledge interact between European and Chinese sociologies, to draw theoretical continuities and discontinuities between “Western” and “non-Western” knowledge, and identify assemblages, hybridization, ruptures.