Human resource practices and labour process of movie projection in China's rural areas in the digital era
Abstract
Purpose
Regarding human resource and labour relations management, academia focuses mainly on cities; however, rural areas are an integral part of China's economic structure. This study focuses on the movie projection industry in China's rural areas and explores how human resource practices (HRPs) are transformed and the labour process is reconstructed in digital transformation.
Design/methodology/approach
We adopt a case study of a rural movie projection company. The company's HRPs reconstructed the labour process of movie projection, and they have been promoted as national standards. Data were collected from in-depth interviews, files and observations.
Findings
Rural movie projection companies combine high-performance and paternalistic HRPs in the media industry's digital transformation. HRPs and digital technology jointly reconstruct the labour process. First, the HRPs direct labour process practices towards standardisation. Second, the digital supervision platform guides the control style from simple to technical, placing projectionists under pressure while increasing management efficiency. Third, rural movies made using digital technology have disenchanted rural residents. Accordingly, the conventional relationships between the “country and its citizens,” “individuals themselves,” and “models and individuals” have been removed, and a new relationship between “individuals themselves” is formed thanks to the novel HRPs.
Originality/value
This research plays a crucial role in exposing researchers to the labour process of rural movie projection, which is significant in China but often ignored by Western academia and advances the Chinese contextualisation of research on labour relations.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Since submission of this article, the following author(s) have updated their affiliations: Jingfu Lu is at the Faculty of Humanities, Management and Science, Universiti Putra Malaysia.
The research was funded by:
(1) The project of the Ministry of Education in China: “Research on the Evaluation and Enhancement Mechanism of Mainland Chinese Media's Communication Effectiveness in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan Under Neural Network Algorithms” (23YJCGAT001).
(2) Fujian Provincial Social Science Fund: “A current assessment and enhancement mechanism research on Fujian media's communication of the ‘four powers’ to Taiwan under the background of digital transformation” (FJ2023B103).
(3) The Fund of Social Science Planning Project of Guangdong Province of 2022: “Research on the evaluation and promotion mechanism of Mainland media's ‘four forces’ in Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao under the context of one country two systems”(GD22CXW05).
(4) The Guangdong Province Education Science Project (Higher Education Special Fund) of 2022: “Research on the communicating capability, influencing capability, guiding capability and credibility of Guangdong media in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area under ‘One country, Two Systems’”(2022GXJK092).
Citation
Lu, J. and Wan, A. (2024), "Human resource practices and labour process of movie projection in China's rural areas in the digital era", Employee Relations, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/ER-01-2023-0043
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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