Converting donation to transaction: how platform capitalism exploits relational labor in non-profit fundraising

Abstract

Viewing platforms as a new kind of factory and playground, scholars have investigated how the platform economy transforms work and entertainment. As dominant platforms continue to encroach on new markets and sectors, including the non-profit sector, few have examined the ramifications when they serve as a plaza for civic action. Despite the civic orientation of these platform activities, platforms can reconfigure the charity event and mediate civic interaction through the permissive power they possess to extract surplus value from users’ online interactions invisibly. Drawing from the ethnographic fieldwork of the two non-governmental organizations (NGOs) participating in a crowdfunding event in China, I show how the platform company creates a competition-based civic event to mobilize thousands of NGOs to crowdfund on their social media platform. In particular, the platform induced NGO workers working for those organizations to mobilize their networks for fundraising. Performing relational labor to persuade friends, families and acquaintances to give donations as a job responsibility deviated from the norms of reciprocity, which incurred workers’ emotional, social and even financial costs. Invisibly, the platform extracts social capital from workers’ relational labor.