The Labour of Standardardization in Trans-territorial Production

Digitalisation has disaggregated production, enabling value creation to unfold across territories through standards that mediate compatibility, legitimacy, and exchange. This paper develops the concept of the labour of standardisation to capture the socio material and geopolitical work sustaining these trans-territorial infrastructures. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies and theories of immaterial labour, it examines how standards emerge not only from formal regulation but from distributed human and technical practices that continually align people, technologies, and institutions.

Empirically, the paper analyses Transsion, a Shenzhen-based mobile phone company whose camera and AI systems are tailored to African contexts. Tracing the development of “African aesthetic standards,” it identifies how data are extracted through Kenyan repair networks, translated into algorithms in Chinese university laboratories, and legitimised through patents and policy awards within China’s innovation ecosystem. These processes reveal how African sensory and linguistic experiences are scientified and reterritorialised into Chinese circuits of value. By conceptualising standardisation as colonial infrastructure, the paper shows how digital capitalism reproduces uneven relations of extraction and authorship across “stitched sites” of production, where cooperation, adaptation, and dependency converge.