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For the past six decades, Berkeley’s Sociology Department has consistently been ranked among the world’s top sociology departments. Our graduate program is ranked #1 in the latest U.S. News and World Report, and our undergrad degree is currently the best in the US according to College Factual and features on Grad Reports’ Best College List 2020.
Prof. Einstein served graduate students as a model of prudence in remaining unfashionably true to the grand…
Hard Work: Remaking the American Labor Movement
This concise overview of the labor movement in the United States focuses on why American workers have failed to develop the powerful unions that exist in other industrialized countries. Packed with valuable analysis and information, Hard Work explores historical perspectives, examines social and political policies, and brings us inside today's unions, providing an excellent introduction to labor in America. Hard Work begins with a comparison of the very different conditions that prevail for labor in the United States and in Europe. What emerges is a...
Departmental Colloquium Series
Jun Zhou, "Dancing with Metrics: The Digitalization of Women’s Labor in China"
Monday, October 26, 2026 - 2:00 pm
Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
Abstract: Data, the raw material of the digital economy, are often described as exhaust from users’ behavior, left behind as they click, watch, and buy online. This talk goes behind the screen to show how platform data are produced, in part, through gendered labor. Drawing on fifteen months of ethnography in China’s live commerce industry, including my own work as a livestreaming assistant inside agencies that recruit, train, and manage streamers, I trace the labor process behind audience engagement. In the studios, I watched managers engineer femininities and masculinities in real time: metrics guide streamers’ performances, those performances elicit viewers’ clicks, comments, and purchases, and those responses are recorded as data. Setting this fieldwork against archival research on earlier generations of women’s factory and service work, I show what endures and what intensifies. Firms have long organized gender into work and used performance records to direct labor. What changes is the speed, granularity, and scale of feedback: audience responses are recorded and fed back into the labor process while the performance is still unfolding. Within this loop, the record that controls the work becomes the product itself: the same data shape gendered performance and accumulate as assets the platform company keeps and monetizes. Seeing data as made, not merely harvested, turns the central questions about the digital economy—who owns these data, and who profits from them—into questions about work.
Bio: Jun Zhou is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Michigan. Her research sits at the intersection of labor, gender, technology, and political economy. A historically minded ethnographer, Jun studies how digital technologies reorganize gendered labor and, through it, inequality and family life. Her dissertation and book project, Dancing with Metrics: The Digitalization of Women’s Labor in China, draws on fifteen months of fieldwork in China’s live commerce industry, the country’s largest platform labor market for women, and archival research on women’s factory and service work. Her work appears in Work and Occupations and Big Data & Society. Her research has received nine best-paper awards, including from four sections of the American Sociological Association, and has been supported by a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship.