This work benefited from its integration into the Urban DiverCities program (2021–2022), funded by the Global Research Institute of Paris (GRIP). I would like to thank Master’s students Mr. Guillaume Tran Huu (from University Paris Cité) and Ms. Dinh Quê Trân (from the University of Social Sciences and Humanities of Ho Chi Minh City) for their contribution to data collection.
1The service-led growth of capitalism is giving rise to new modes of urban labor organized through digital platforms, commonly referred to as the “gig economy.” This shift from manufacturing to a task-oriented service industry leads to “platform-conditioned lives” and changes the conditions and meaning of work (Graham & Ferrari 2022). This process was initially analyzed from a Global North perspective and explained as a trend toward the informalization of labor through the erosion of the employment relationship, algorithm-controlled management, the preclusion of welfare rights, and the fragmentation of working-class politics (Rosenblat 2018; Ravenelle 2019; Chen et al. 2019). Indeed, the “gig economy” emerged as an index of labor flexibilization among the Western middle and upper-middle classes (Brown 2009) and has even been identified as a “becoming South of the urban world,” with the “ability to propel the rise of an informal, improvised entrepreneurship” (Rossi & Wang 2020: 484).
2However, research conducted in Global South contexts complicates this narrative. Athique and Parthasarathi (2020) point out that, while the “sharing economy” paradigm in the Global North mobilizes private spare capacity (in both labor force and resources), platforms in the Global South primarily disrupt and capture existing informal economic activity. Consequently, in Southern contexts, platformization is conversely seen as helping to formalize urban work (Kring & Leung 2021: 1; Weber et al. 2021; Ayentimi, Abadi & Burgess 2023; Carmody et al. 2024) through tax inclusion, improved certification for clients, the removal of face-to-face haggling over trip prices, and formal access to credit for workers, for instance. The growing body of empirical work on platformization in the Global South agrees that this process contributes to questioning and blurring the formal-informal divide (Frey 2020; Sopranzetti 2021; Cieslik et al. 2022; Nair 2022; Ray 2024). Yet, debates remain heated about the nature of the formalization that platformization actually offers informal workers in such contexts. For instance, Rich Mallett denounces a “fallacy of plat-formalization” and elaborates his argument by pointing to the “aesthetics of formality” (Mallett 2026: 31). However, his argument is mainly based on economic considerations and criteria. Indeed, while the political dimension of informality is now well established in critical scholarship (Roy 2011 and 2018; Clerc 2024), it remains largely overlooked in analyses of how platformization reshapes the formal-informal divide. As a result, debates on platform work in informal economies tend to emphasize economic and regulatory outcomes, narrowing the analytical scope of the issues at stake.
3To fill this gap, this article advances a conceptual shift by approaching platform work not only as a labor arrangement but also as a site of political subject formation and contested legitimacy for platform workers. Thus, it revisits the notion of “plat-formalization” and examines more specifically how, and under what specific conditions, digital platform workers can develop political capacities and claims-making practices vis-à-vis both state institutions and platform authorities. In doing so, I highlight the socio-political aspects of work, in terms of legitimacy, political empowerment, and the right to assert their own citizenship.
4I ground my understanding of the paradoxical effects of platform work in the context of Vietnam, where informal labor remains a distinctive feature of the urban economy. As a communist single-party state, Vietnam recasts the gig economy story. In particular, it challenges dominant discourse around platformization that tends to regard it as disempowering for workers. This engenders, in turn, a more nuanced understanding of the platform economy in relation to urban governance and statecraft. I focus more specifically on the variegated effects of the entry of the Grab app into the motorbike taxi and delivery sectors in Vietnam since November 2014. The Singapore-headquartered platform is the unchallenged leader in the Southeast Asian ride-hailing sector, as evidenced by the omnipresence of its green logo in cities across the region. Grab embodies the success story of digital modernization in Southeast Asia, having acquired a near-monopoly over the flourishing ride-hailing market (Buckley 2023), after pushing Uber out of the region in 2018 and Gojek in 2024.
5In this paper, I consider the Grab platform to be a form of infrastructural power that contributes to the restructuring of governance practices in Vietnam. In particular, I explore how platformization challenges the performative practices of citizenship and statecraft in Vietnam today. Drawing on this conceptualization, I posit that the platform economy has generated what I refer to as a “three-body problem” in Vietnamese urban power relationships. By entering the market, international private apps have disrupted the historical bilateral relationship between the Vietnamese state and small, informal entrepreneurs. This has created a new triangular configuration with unforeseen interstices of negotiation and leading to unprecedented political subjectivities in the urban Vietnamese context. My research methodology encompasses a four-pronged ethnographic approach. First, an exploratory “digital ethnography” of Facebook pages of various Grab driver groups since 2018. Given that temporalities form a key element in this study, the longitudinal span from 2018 to 2024—a period in which ride-hailing platforms and motorbike taxis became omnipresent in the city—allows us to analyze major changes in the sophistication of the Grab app and its algorithm, as well as the strategic evolution of the drivers’ individual and collective responses, on the one hand, and the state’s position on the other. Second, 50 in-depth interviews with moto-taxi Grab drivers of diverse social profiles in Ho Chi Minh City between 2018 and 2022, as well as repeated in-depth interviews and regular casual exchanges with three Grab team leaders between 2022 and 2024. Third, participatory observations of Grab drivers’ communities throughout 2022 and 2023. Fourth, interviews with state representatives responsible for public transportation in Ho Chi Minh City in 2022.
6The article proceeds in five sections. Section 1 engages critically with the literature on informal work in the platform age and calls for conceptualizing platform work not merely as a novel employment arrangement, but also as a potential site of political subject formation and contested legitimacy for precarious workers. Section 2 situates the analysis within the specific political economy of Vietnam, examining the articulation between informal work and the expansion of digital platforms in the context of an authoritarian single-party regime in the Global South. Section 3 details the qualitative methodology and data-collection process, outlining the empirical foundations of the study. Section 4 explores the experiences of Grab drivers in Ho Chi Minh City, shedding light on their collective coping mechanisms and development of unprecedented political subjectivities through their affiliation with the app. Finally, Section 5 turns to the restructuring of governance practices in the platform age. I posit that the platform economy generates a “three-body problem” in Vietnamese urban power relationships at the digitized nexus of precarious work, citizenship, and statecraft.
7Informal work has long been a “recognizable frame through which the cities of the Global South are perceived and understood, their difference mapped and located” (Nuttall & Mbembe 2005: 193). According to conventional definitions, informal work can be understood broadly as “economic activities that lie outside the formal system of recording, remuneration, labor organization and state control” (Bunnell & Harris 2012: 339). For several decades, the dominant policy paradigm addressing informal work has centered on its eradication, positioning formalization as the “preferred trajectory” (Walker, Rigon & Koroma 2022: 235) from a prescriptive perspective. Arguments for such formalization range from broadening the tax base to extending employment benefits and collective bargaining rights to previously insecure, unprotected workers (Bromley & Wilson 2018).
8However, critical geography has called into question these narrow, strictly economic understandings of informality by showing that informality is not what escapes state control but is, on the contrary, performatively produced by the state, a process that dates back to the colonial period (Morange & Didier 2024). As Annanya Roy puts it in her seminal article on “slumdog cities” and subaltern urbanism, informality is the “‘constitutive outside’ of contemporary urban studies, existing in a relationship of difference with the dominant norm of the ‘global city’” (2011: 224). Informality, as she argues, remains an inherently relational notion, constructed in opposition to an allegedly formal order. Roy thus invites us to consider informality as a heuristic device:
that uncovers the ever-shifting urban relationship between the legal and illegal, legitimate and illegitimate, authorized and unauthorized. This relationship is both arbitrary and fickle and yet is the site of considerable state power and violence. (Ibid.: 233.)
9This conceptualization of informality as “a form of rule” (Roy 2018: 1) compels us to apprehend informal livelihoods not as residual or extralegal phenomena but as effects produced through state practices. Such a perspective necessitates sustained analytical attention to the relational dynamics between the state and those categorized as “encroachers” (Bayat 1997: 57). As a constitutive function of state power, work regulation operates through routinized practices of exception, deregulation, and strategic ambiguity. These modalities are continually reworked through quotidian negotiations, which collectively materialize as forms of statecraft:
It is through this logic of informality that the state polices an arbitrary and fickle line between legality and illegality, creating a territorialized flexibility and demonstrating its political potency. (Roy 2018: 2243.)
10This paper aims to harness this heuristic perspective on the state-informality nexus in the platform age. It argues that the recent platformization of informal urban services in the Global South invites us to rethink the constant negotiation processes shaping platform work at the shifting boundaries between the acceptable and unacceptable, legal and illegal. Moving beyond narrowly economistic interpretations, such an analysis foregrounds the broader political and regulatory stakes embedded in these transformations.
11When examined in Global South contexts, platform work has generated two dominant—yet partially opposed—interpretative frameworks: it is understood either as a new modality of dispossession for informal workers or, conversely, as a vector of their partial formalization.
12The first line of argument emphasizes processes of competitive restructuring and dispossession. Athique and Parthasarathi (2020) underline how platforms disrupt pre-existing informal economic arrangements by appropriating and reorganizing service provision. Empirical research has therefore often focused on direct competition between platform workers and incumbent informal workers operating in the same sectors, a dynamic that has, in some cases, escalated into urban conflict. In India’s waste-collection sector, for instance, platform-based services have reportedly undermined and delegitimized established informal intermediaries in recycling markets, a phenomenon conceptualized as “dispossession by platformization” (Luthra, Lowe & Ochoa Berkley 2023). Similar patterns of tension, including violent confrontations, have been documented between ride-hailing drivers and “traditional” moto-taxi operators in Bangkok (Sopranzetti 2021) and Hanoi (Turner & Ngo 2019; Turner 2020).
13Such studies underscore how platformization entails a profound transformation of business models within the same urban service sectors. In the traditional informal model, making a living as a moto-taxi driver depended on the driver’s ability to secure access to strategic public spaces, such as central street corners, where reputation, seniority, and localized social ties were decisive assets. By contrast, the algorithmic “black box” at the core of ride-hailing applications effectively deterritorializes access to work: rides are allocated digitally, reducing the importance of embeddedness in local social networks and intimate knowledge of the city. Barriers to entry are lowered, particularly benefiting younger and more technologically literate workers, while marginalizing older drivers whose livelihoods were tied to territorially anchored practices. At the same time, platforms impose non-negotiable pricing structures, often undercutting fares historically negotiated by traditional drivers (Nguyen & Ha 2022). Combined with a cultivated image of modernity, safety, and convenience, contrasting with the stigmatized perception of informal moto-taxi services, these features have reinforced consumer demand for platform-mediated transport.
14A second body of scholarship, however, highlights the more paradoxical and ambivalent effects of platform affiliation for informal workers. From this perspective, platform work appears not merely as dispossession but also as opportunity: a coping strategy in contexts of structural unemployment and underemployment, and even a potential pathway for upgrading existing informal activities (Carmody et al. 2023). Platforms have thus been framed as a “technological fix” capable of mitigating structural constraints that characterize labor markets across much of the Global South (Anwar 2022: 750). This narrative has been echoed by international development institutions, including the World Bank (2019) and the International Labour Organization (Kring & Leung 2021), which present digital labor platforms as harbingers of the “future of work.”
15Proponents of this view typically emphasize enhanced access to inputs, market information, credit, and consumer markets (Ayentimi, Abadi & Burgess 2023). In low-income settings, low-skill-biased digital technologies—through instructional interfaces and user-friendly applications—may enable workers to acquire new competencies, standardize service provision, and expand their client base. Platforms’ “supportive guidance,” encouraging compliance with regulatory requirements, and their embedded “control mechanisms,” deterring malfeasance, are often cited as evidence of an incipient formalization process (Weber et al. 2021: 1336). The integration of digital payments, tax contributions, record-keeping practices, certification procedures, and standardized pricing mechanisms further supports the claim that platforms may “counteract informal economic activity” (ibid.: 1338). Under this interpretation, “plat-formalization” signals incorporation into more regulated and legible economic circuits.
16Yet this optimistic account has been forcefully challenged. Rich Mallett critiques what he terms the “plat-formalization fallacy,” arguing—based on research on Uganda’s motorcycle-taxi sector—that platforms produce only an “aesthetics of formality at the surface” (2026). Despite procedural markers of formalization, platforms retain unilateral authority while assuming minimal legal responsibility for workers’ welfare and safety. From this perspective, platformization cannot plausibly constitute a sustainable pathway out of poverty for precarious workers. Similar concerns are raised in Latin American contexts, where Arriagada et al. (2023) show how narratives of “collaborative” entrepreneurship obscure the transfer of risk and costs onto workers. Cruz and de la Cruz likewise argue that platform work engenders a distinct experience of socio-economic marginality that “re-arrange[s] urban vulnerabilities” beyond the formal-informal dichotomy (2023: 274).
17While these critiques of the “false promises” of platform work for precarious workers are valuable, they largely assess platformization through economic and regulatory metrics—income stability, contractual status, access to social protection—thereby narrowing the analytical scope. The political dimension of informality, extensively theorized in critical urban scholarship, remains comparatively underexplored. By focusing primarily on whether platforms “truly” formalize work in legal or economic terms, existing debates risk overlooking how platformization reshapes relations of authority, recognition, and claims-making.
18Drawing on empirical research in Vietnam, this article complicates these polarized narratives. Rather than treating platform work solely as a labor arrangement, whether dispossessing or formalizing, I reconceptualize it as a site of political subject formation and contested legitimacy. Specifically, I examine how digital platform workers develop political capacities and articulate claims vis-à-vis both state institutions and platform authorities under conditions of accelerated digitization. In doing so, I seek to reframe the debate on “plat-formalization” by foregrounding its political stakes: how new forms of labor mediation reconfigure not only economic incorporation but also the modalities of citizenship and statecraft in contemporary urban regimes.
19Going beyond dominant interpretations of the platform economy, the case of Vietnam offers a fruitful counter-narrative from which to learn, often in unexpected ways, how we conceive of platformization, notably in terms of its implications for everyday politics. As one of the world’s few remaining party-states, Vietnam challenges our understanding of platform work in relation not only to informality but also to state power.
20Informal work remains a distinctive, structural feature of the Vietnamese labor market. Yet, despite the September 2019 publication of an updated framework by the Vietnam General Statistics Office (Công văn số 1127/TCTK-TKQG), the “informal sector” (khu vực phi chính thức) remains vast and ill-defined. Its persistence is inseparable from Vietnam’s trajectory as a post-socialist polity that transitioned, following the 1986 Đổi mới (Renewal) reforms, toward a “socialist-oriented market economy.” The shift from a centrally planned, state-controlled economy to a market-oriented system generated large-scale unemployment and required the rapid absorption of surplus labor. In this context, Article 2 of the 1991 Decree 66/HDBT exempted specific categories of small private (often family-based) enterprises from formal registration, provided that their profits remained below thresholds determined at the district level. Similar exemptions applied to moto-taxi drivers and street vendors. While small-scale informal trade predated Đổi mới, the reform process facilitated the re-emergence of private economic practices during late socialism. The reforms institutionalized and expanded these activities on an unprecedented scale. In the early 1990s, the informal sector accounted for up to 85% of the country’s GDP, attesting to the growth potential of the country’s private sector (Shale 1995: 33).
21Importantly, the 1991 decree remains in force, meaning that informal moto-taxi drivers are not illegal per se. Moreover, those engaged in street vending and moto-taxi services rarely self-identify as “informal workers.” Instead, they describe themselves as lao động tự do (“freelance” or “independent” workers) without formal contracts. This semantic distinction is not merely descriptive but reflects a particular moral economy of labor, centered on autonomy, self-reliance, and flexibility. Far from constituting a homogeneous category, these workers form a socially differentiated milieu marked by strong internal hierarchies. Livelihood strategies are predominantly individualized or embedded in interpersonal networks within a highly competitive urban environment (Agergaard & Thao 2011; Kim 2015; Nguyen 2018). Despite representing a substantial share of the urban workforce, they lack durable forms of collective organization and remain largely outside formal trade-union structures.
22The Vietnamese state’s relationship to informal workers has nevertheless evolved significantly since the late 1980s. Initially tolerated, and even indirectly encouraged as a pragmatic solution to labor absorption and private-sector revival, informal activities have increasingly been reframed as sources of urban disorder and indicators of developmental lag. In rapidly transforming cities, the ubiquity of informal practices simultaneously sustains urban economies and unsettles state authority, exemplifying what Janin describes as a “presence-absence” of the state (2001: 184): a form of governance characterized by selective enforcement, ambiguity, and negotiated compliance. Although recent decades have witnessed stricter regulatory frameworks and recurrent “cleaning campaigns” aimed at disciplining street-based activities (Davis 2017; Thịnh 2020; Thanh 2023), everyday governance remains mediated through discretionary practices and informal negotiations, particularly at the local level (Vasavakul 2019; Gibert-Flutre 2022; Thinh, Peimani & Kamalipour 2025).
23In line with Roy’s (2011) heuristic understanding of informality as a mode of governance rather than a sectoral residual, the Vietnamese case illustrates the fluid continuum that stretches from legality to tacit acceptance and outright illegality. This continuum is neither fixed nor binary; it is constantly reworked through administrative discretion, local accommodations, and shifting political priorities (Gibert & Segard 2015). Rapid economic digitization further complicates these boundaries, introducing new modalities of legibility, surveillance, and incorporation that reconfigure the long-standing ambiguities at the heart of Vietnam’s informal urban economy.
24Smartphones are the most potent instruments in the ongoing digitization of the Vietnamese economy, with a penetration rate among the adult population of 93% in 2020, one of the highest rates in Southeast Asia (Nguyen 2020). Grab, the ride-hailing app originating in Singapore, is the most ubiquitous embodiment of platformization in urban Vietnam. In Ho Chi Minh City, public transport accounts for less than 5% of daily commutes: the city has an extremely dense urban morphology, with a proliferation of narrow alleys that leaves residents heavily reliant on motorbikes (Turner & Ngo 2019; Jamme 2023). It is not surprising, then, that Grab entered the urban transport market in November 2014 with a distinctive moto-taxi app.
25Grab’s arrival in Vietnam significantly disrupted the organization of existing informal motor-taxi drivers (xe ôm), at times leading to violent conflicts (Khánh, Tiêu & Trần 2017; Turner & Ngo 2019; Turner 2020). While xe ôm drivers are now viewed as old-fashioned and “uncivilized” (không văn minh), Grab drivers—who identified themselves in interviews as “technological drivers” (lái xe công nghệ)—are seen as informal entrepreneurs with a modern and relatively positive image in Vietnamese society. My fieldwork shows that, at least in the initial years of the app’s operation, Grab drivers tended to be younger than xe ôm, not least because the platform does not accept applications from drivers over the age of 55. They also come from more diverse backgrounds. Some switched from elsewhere in the informal sector, such as former xe ôm or other types of vendors. Others came from construction or factory work, where they were subjected to harsh working conditions, lack of flexibility, and limited incomes with no prospect of status or salary advancement. Many of my interviewees were drawn to Grab by the possibility of working during their free time, in addition to other professional activities. Like informal workers in general, Grab drivers tend to be rural migrants, among whom platform jobs are seen as accessible entry points into the urban economy.
26For its part, Grab calls its drivers “driver-partners” (đối tác), emphasizing that they are not employees but—as in the global platform-economy model—freelancers. Although the platform is secretive about its number of drivers, it reported around 200,000 driver-partners in Vietnam in 2019 (before the Covid-19 pandemic). Drivers join the platform after registering their ID and driving license at their local office and signing a formal commitment document. Thus, despite the largely digital management, joining still requires a physical appointment, much like entry into more formal forms of employment. By signing, drivers commit to not working for other platforms, even though they are responsible for buying and maintaining their own motorbikes, fuel, and uniform. Although they do not benefit from insurance, pension, or social security, they are, in the eyes of the state, treated as formal workers. This formalization process is made visible through the uniform, which has become highly distinctive in Vietnamese cities. In short, platform work benefits from a form of state recognition that provides workers with a sense of upward mobility. This nuances interpretations of platform work as purely exploitative; it also appears to offer opportunities, and to some degree even status and agency, in otherwise disempowered situations. My fieldwork therefore aimed to unpack the conditions of this potential empowerment and how it relates to shifting power relations in the Vietnamese context.
27This article draws on a four-pronged ethnographic approach conducted in the urban context of Ho Chi Minh City. I began studying Grab’s disruption of the moto-taxi sector in 2018 with an exploratory “digital ethnography” of the Facebook pages of various Grab driver groups. The research team I set up with Guillaume Tran Huu (2022) and Dinh Quê Trân, two Master’s degree students from France and Vietnam, was soon granted access to two private groups: the Community of Grab 2 Wheels HCMC Partners (Cộng đồng Đối tác Grab 2 bánh HCM), created in January 2017, with 106,400 members; and the Grab Bike Community/Grab 2 Wheel Driver Partners of HCMC (Cộng Đồng Grab Bike/Đối Tác Tài Xế Grab 2 Bánh TP HCM), created in July 2019, with 32,650 members. Using textual analysis, we scrutinized and classified all topics of conversation and associated comments in these two groups, focusing on three key periods: the Grab drivers’ strike of December 2020, the Covid-19 lockdown during the summer and fall of 2021, and the first six months of 2022. Beyond the analysis of discourse and narratives formulated by the drivers, this digital study also served as a basis for engaging with individual drivers during the interview phase.
28Next, we conducted 50 in-depth interviews with Grab moto-taxi drivers with diverse social profiles in Ho Chi Minh City between 2018 and 2022, followed by repeated in-depth interviews and regular casual exchanges with three Grab team leaders between 2022 and 2024. The majority of my interviewees were men, reflecting the male-dominated nature of the work (Turner & Ngo 2019; Turner & Hạnh 2026), though five interviewees and one driver leader were women. The interviews were semi-structured, with themes covering drivers’ backgrounds, motivations (livelihood, etc.), everyday challenges at work, and their individual or collective coping mechanisms. These frequent exchanges allowed for participatory observations of Grab drivers’ communities during the second half of 2022 and 2023. I gained privileged access to a private message group on Zalo. Our team was also invited to several events, ranging from a festive picnic organized for drivers and their families in June 2022 to meetings with Grab representatives and driver leaders.
29Finally, to complement the study of the drivers’ experiences, in December 2022 I interviewed three representatives of the Vietnamese state in charge of public transportation in Ho Chi Minh City. The aim of these interviews was to investigate their relationships and interactions both with Grab as a company and with the city’s moto-taxi drivers, whether independent informal drivers or those affiliated with Grab.
30Contrary to research on app workers in the West, which tends to highlight the enhanced individualization and atomization of work (Webster 2016; Abdelnour & Méda 2019), Grab drivers in Vietnam show a strong sense of belonging to the same community, with forms of socialization and organization that generate collective awareness. This sense of belonging first arose in opposition to traditional xe ôm, who accused them of stealing their “bowl of rice” and occasionally engaged in violence. As reported in the local press, some xe ôm booked rides on Grab that led drivers to remote neighborhoods in order to beat them (Khánh et al. 2017; Trang 2017). It was this risk that first led Grab drivers to cultivate entrepreneurial solidarities to support one another and share individual coping strategies.
31Corresponding to what Cruz and de la Cruz (2023: 279) call “micropolitical strategies,” drivers’ solidarity practices emerge at the interface of urban public spaces and online forums, such as Facebook pages and Zalo groups. In the first instance, drivers gather in public spaces, such as well-equipped parks (e.g. with shade and public toilets), strategic sidewalks (in central areas of the city, around shopping malls or bus stations), or coffee shops, which, in Vietnam, often open onto the street and overflow onto the sidewalk. Coffee shops in particular are strategic places to start the workday and share information with other drivers: security concerns, advice, and updates on the functioning of the app. This gives rise to a feeling of belonging to a collective of workers. Most of the 40 Grab drivers we interviewed in April 2022 began their day at local coffee shops, where they met other drivers and formed informal support groups outside the app’s control. These casual meetings are particularly noteworthy in the Vietnamese context, where informal taxi drivers were long unable to build a genuine community of interest.
32The functions served by coffee shops and sidewalks are, furthermore, reinforced by Facebook pages and Zalo message groups. Almost all the drivers we interviewed regularly use these platforms to acquire information, even if they never post. Moreover, these digital groups became central to the construction and visibility of the driver community, both among themselves and in Vietnamese society. The online discussions in the two private Grab drivers’ Facebook groups to which we were granted access mostly revolved around sharing the latest practical advice (how to recognize and avoid dishonest customers, where to wait for clients, where to park for free when collecting a food-delivery order, etc.). However, they addressed more general issues, such as their frequently critical views of the notion of “driver partners” (đối tác). Through posts and ensuing comments, the participants collectively deciphered what they often described, in light of the company’s economic and symbolic gains, as unfair working conditions. They discussed their claims to a status with greater protection and more social benefits, and strategized about ways to make their voices heard. The debates were often animated and revealed a multiplicity of driver views. They were also extensive (with individual threads often attracting hundreds of posts and comments), and as such made an unprecedented contribution to group awareness and the political awakening of many precarious drivers. In this sense, social media are not merely passive backdrops, but actively support the development of political subjectivities. Grab drivers find one another on these networks easily as they represent a demarcated group not only in the eyes of the urban population and the authorities, but also among themselves.
33Research on platform workers in the Global North underlines the role of external actors, such as NGOs, lawyers, and trade-union leaders, in the sociopolitical struggles of ride-hailing platform workers (Vandaele 2018; Nizzoli 2021). Such actors draw the public’s attention to the status of platform workers, politicizing their working conditions and holding them up as emblematic of the struggles of the contemporary labor force. In Vietnam, this process is largely absent. Instead, Grab drivers themselves have initiated ways to make themselves heard, culminating in December 2020 in the first strikes and public demonstrations in a country where all forms of social opposition are tightly controlled and severely condemned (Trọng 2020).
34The most compelling elements of my fieldwork on the drivers’ collective strategies to circumvent the disciplinary controls of their platform-labor arrangements were the self-help groups that emerged spontaneously both in public spaces and online. These groups of hundreds of drivers sprang up informally around self-identified “leaders,” chosen through opaque processes reliant on charisma, insider knowledge, availability, and the efficiency of their collective engagement. Our interviews revealed that in Ho Chi Minh City, some leaders have close ties to the underground world; as such, they are respected by the other drivers, who refer to them as “big brothers” (đại ca). These leaders initially stood up to the violence caused by xe ôm drivers, and over time began to collect and articulate the everyday grievances of their fellow Grab drivers.
35Surprisingly, Grab acknowledged and formalized the existence of these spontaneously selected leaders by officially endorsing several “Grab teams” in the city in 2016. This came about at a time when Grab was facing fierce competition from other apps to retain its drivers and ensure the shortest waiting time for its customers. Before the Covid-19 crisis, there were reportedly 10 Grab teams in Ho Chi Minh City, according to a leader of a group of more than 400 drivers, whom we interviewed and observed multiple times. These teams mediate between the app and the drivers, and provide a space for drivers to support one another, echoing what Nowak calls the “social lives of network effects” when analyzing the self-constructed driver network in Greater Jakarta (2023). They are sometimes delineated along functional lines; given the specific risks of working at night, for instance, there is a team for night drivers. Nonetheless, the majority of teams emerged spontaneously around leading figures. The charismatic team leader we interviewed explained that Grab had no choice but to accept and endorse these leaders because of their sway over the other drivers. The role and image of the team leaders remain ambiguous; some drivers—particularly those who avoid collective organization—view them as a way for the company to monitor drivers and control opposition. After attending several of their meetings, however, we concluded that they function as informal, but relatively efficient de facto unions in a country where unionization is fully controlled by the state and remains nonexistent in the service sector (Buckley 2022).
36Grab teams directly challenge the atomization often associated with platform labor. The United team (Liên đội Đoàn Kết) also known as “Biker United” has its own logo for drivers’ motorbikes and clothes (Fig. 1) and goes beyond merely dealing with practical needs and liaising in the everyday relations between drivers and the platform. By organizing regular joint initiatives, it contributes to the drivers’ emergent capacity to organize outside the scope of the app’s control. The team played a particularly crucial role during the pandemic. During the strict lockdown in Ho Chi Minh City in the summer of 2021, Grab teams organized charity campaigns to help the families of the affected drivers at a time when state initiatives were inadequate. The pandemic thus emerges as a key moment that reinforced the drivers’ collective identity and their pride in belonging to it.
Fig. 1. The logo of the Grab team Liên đội Đoàn kết/ Biker United
The logo on the left is the original logo of the Grab team Grab Liên đội Đoàn kết/Biker United. It is centered around clasped hands symbolizing solidarity, placed beneath five stars representing success on Grab—five stars being the highest rating a customer can give a ride. The logo on the right builds on the original design by adding wings, symbolizing drivers who work at night for Grab and the “night eagles” subgroup (đại bàng đêm).
Credit: Guillaume Tran Huu, June 2022
37Further, on June 19, 2022, we were privy to a revealing team event: a festive picnic organized for the drivers and their families. One participant explained what it meant to him to bring his wife to such a recreational outing, when he had previously been rather ashamed to be a xe ôm driver. The team leader stressed that the event was supported exclusively by donations from the drivers, who did not wish to rely on sponsors. The picnic brought together almost 100 participants and was carefully organized, with great care put into the staging—and subsequent recording and dissemination on social media—of the drivers’ arrival. Wearing their Grab shirts (which is forbidden when off duty), the drivers gathered at different meeting points and then traveled the final section of the road together, a collective performance that reflected their pride in forming a recognizable team. The day involved a mixture of entertaining activities and political speeches (Fig. 2).
Fig. 2. A political speech during the festive picnic of the Biker United Grab team in July 2022
Credit: Dinh Quê Trân, June 2022
38During the picnic, the team leader also presented a plan for two upcoming joint trips by motorbike. The first involved the delivery of donations collected by Saigonese Grab drivers for ethnic minority children in the Đắk Lắk Province. This trip took place a few weeks after the picnic, on July 1, 2022, and was heavily promoted via the team’s social media, including the “Biker United” Facebook page and Zalo groups. Videos of drivers wearing green shirts driving together and delivering donations were widely shared online. By showing precarious workers reinventing themselves as agents of collective solidarity, helping others worse off than themselves, these videos were highly effective in strengthening their collective pride and reinforcing group cohesion through visible forms of empowerment (Fig. 3).
Fig. 3. The digital promotion of the school supplies donation for children in Đắk Lắk on Facebook by the Grab team Liên đội Đoàn Kết/Biker United
The Grab driver teams Liên đội Đoàn Kết/Biker United from Ho Chi Minh City and drivers from Đắk Lắk showcase their collaboration through banners featuring their logos, both on social media and on the school supplies being distributed.
Source and credit: Facebook page of the Grab team Liên đội Đoàn Kết/Biker United, 2022
39The second trip took on an even more political dimension. The goal was to organize a collective motorbike trip from Saigon to Hanoi, gathering Grab drivers in each province along the way, to submit a formal petition to the Ministry of Finance in Hanoi. An initial petition had been submitted in 2019, but went unanswered when the Covid-19 crisis struck just a few weeks later. These initiatives illustrate how the collective actions of Grab drivers in Ho Chi Minh City go far beyond hidden resistances (Scott 1990) or “labor arbitrages” (Beerepoot & Lambregts 2015: 241), instead navigating and circumventing platform controls to “game a system that they feel games them as well” (Soriano & Cabanes 2020: 2).
40By entering the market, Grab disrupted the historical bilateral relationship between the Vietnamese state and informal urban entrepreneurs. This led to an unprecedented triangle configuration between a foreign private platform, the state, and precarious freelance entrepreneurs, which I call the “three-body problem” in Vietnamese urban power relations. This expression, borrowed from physics and classical mechanics, refers to the challenge of taking the initial positions and velocities of three celestial bodies and solving for their subsequent motion using Newton’s laws of motion and universal gravitation. Unlike in two-body problems, no general closed-form solution exists, and the resulting dynamic system is chaotic and unpredictable. Analogously, while the evolving relationships between the state and informal small entrepreneurs in Vietnam—ranging from negotiated tolerance to strict opposition—have long been studied (Endres & Leshkowich 2018; Turner 2020; Pham 2024), the arrival of Grab opened up an era of unforeseen (re)negotiations and (re)arrangements between these actors.
41First, Grab operates in a highly competitive context. That a transnational company must secure the legal capacity to operate from the Vietnamese state illustrates the reliance of global capital on the support of national governments and labor regimes. Moreover, despite its regional economic power, the company’s local sustainability is not a given, as shown by the case of neighboring Thailand. In his study of the Bangkok moto-taxi business, where Grab entered the local market in 2016, Sopranzetti describes the local debates and shifting conceptualizations of the notion of “informality”:
Conflicts over whether the business should be understood as informal, who gets to control its operations, define its rules and costs, and obtain access to its profit remain rampant, with frequent outbursts of violence, both between drivers and among drivers, businesspeople, users, and state forces […] Older drivers defended their rights to expel GrabBike drivers from their area by calling them “outside the system” and asking the government to enforce the ban on ride-hailing apps that was theoretically introduced in May of 2016 but was never really implemented by officials or taken seriously by passengers. (Sopranzetti 2021: 294.)
42My study in Vietnam reveals a different interpretation and vision of platform labor by the authorities. Rather than as merely another manifestation of informal labor, it is envisioned as a formalization of small entrepreneurship, brought about by the entrance of a private international company into the governance game.
43Additionally, Grab has to constantly refine and adapt its business model to ensure its own development. The platform negotiates continuously: both with the state, to consolidate its institutional support; and with drivers, to secure a larger supply of loyal drivers, reduce waiting times for clients, and thus outperform competing platforms. Our research shows constantly shifting commercial strategies in how the platform attracts drivers, such as using a rewards system that taps the benefits of gamification. To increase the appeal of low per-ride rates, Grab offers drivers bonuses when they complete more than 15 or 20 rides per day. This encourages them to work long hours—most work an average of 10 to 12 hours per day—and discourages them from refusing rides. During interviews, many drivers explained that getting these rewards was the only way of making a decent living. Refusing rides also results in being downgraded by the platform’s ride-distribution algorithm. In essence, Grab’s power lies in its exclusive control over the timing and pace of updates to the rules of the “game.” The app can update its terms and conditions for not only clients but also its “driver partners” at any time, without notice or negotiation.
44But drivers are not passive. They actively deploy their own capacities for negotiation within this new three-body problem configuration. For instance, during our fieldwork period, Grab drivers in Ho Chi Minh City began to refine their own organization. Confronted with new app regulations, they formed informal support teams that have become increasingly powerful in their capacity to reach drivers and pressure the company. These Grab teams developed at the interface of the offline and online worlds. Because they also, paradoxically, illustrate the drivers’ loyalty to the app, rather than suppressing the teams, Grab opted to endorse them. This unforeseen formalization of what was initially a local initiative among Ho Chi Minh City drivers even led to a national endorsement of Grab teams in every city where Grab operates. Their existence is now featured on the official Grab Vietnam website (Grab Vietnam website 2023). This unprecedented initiative exemplifies how Grab drivers, bolstered by their newly acquired status as “technological drivers,” have been able to assert their rights on specific labor issues and, more broadly, their place in the urban economy and society, while simultaneously “decentering the platform’s vision as the sole arbiter of change and optimization in the city” (Qadri & D’Ignazio 2022: 1).
45Beyond such acts of micro-political resistance, Grab drivers have also used strikes and petitions to directly challenge both the Vietnamese state and/or the company, illustrating the abovementioned triangular configuration. Yet, in contrast to the authorities’ opposition to xe ôm drivers and informal vendors, who are viewed as an obstacle to “clean public spaces,” the Vietnamese party-state treats Grab drivers relatively benevolently, even as they likewise occupy sidewalks while waiting for clients. This is presumably because the state benefits directly from the company’s capacity to address two major urban issues: inadequate public transport and informal—hence untaxed—urban work. Today, fewer than 5% of daily urban commutes in Ho Chi Minh City involve public transport. Beyond assisting with transportation issues, Grab offers the Vietnamese state an efficient way of dealing with informality in the transport sector. By working as taxed partners, though not official employees, Grab drivers are envisioned by the state as formal elements of a highly regarded digital economy.
46At the heart of negotiations between the three actors is the system of taxation. In late 2020, the unilateral increase of the app’s commission per ride (currently 27%), itself justified by increased government taxes, led to strikes and street demonstrations by Grab drivers. Public protests are generally forbidden in Vietnam, but were tolerated in this case as they targeted a private foreign company. The online discussion around these strikes shows how Grab drivers address political issues by targeting the company itself. Striking does not, of course, require unanimity among drivers. Indeed, the strikes provoked tensions between drivers who did and did not strike, while also triggering broader, impassioned debates about the place assigned to platform workers in the urban economy and different approaches to fighting for a decent livelihood and working conditions.
47Some Grab drivers prefer to confront the state about their working conditions rather than the app. A team leader we interviewed several times, for instance, said he was wary of criticizing the company, and always strategically balanced his criticisms between Grab and the state. He declined to join the 2020 strike and, tellingly, compared his fight to the historical Three Kingdoms war: a contemporary battle between Grab, the state, and the drivers. He even went by the nickname Zhao Yun, from a character in the Three Kingdoms novel. As mentioned above, in late 2019 he traveled to Hanoi to personally deliver a petition to the Ministry of Finance, an act he repeated in late 2022 after Covid-19 prevented the ministry from replying. Despite his lack of success to date, the mere act of submitting such a petition illustrates the formalized and legitimate image of Grab drivers (especially when contrasted with xe ôm drivers). This leader’s strategy is to persuade the state to decrease taxes on platform work in order to stimulate the digital economy; in turn, the app could then decrease its own commission per ride. This illustrates the drivers’ ability to “play” with the opportunities presented by the three-body problem, as well as their tendency to protest against governmental clampdowns on platform operations rather than against the precarious labor conditions imposed by the platform itself.
48By examining platform work through the Vietnamese case, this article has sought to move beyond dominant readings of the platform economy as either a new wave of informalization or a technocratic pathway to formalization. Instead, it has conceptualized platform work as a site of political subject formation unfolding within a regime-specific configuration of power relations. In doing so, it has revisited the notion of “plat-formalization” not as a purely economic or regulatory process, but as a socio-political reconfiguration of legitimacy, recognition, and claims-making.
49Situated within a single-party socialist state characterized by historically high levels of informal urban labor, Vietnam provides a critical vantage point from which to reassess the political implications of platformization. The empirical findings show that the entry of Grab into the motorbike taxi and delivery sectors introduced a new infrastructural actor into an already negotiated relationship between small entrepreneurs and the party-state. In this sense, platformization must be understood as the consolidation of a novel form of “infrastructural power” (Mann 1984), one that reorganizes visibility, coordination, taxation, and accountability, while simultaneously generating new arenas of friction and negotiation. Despite the authoritarian nature of the Vietnamese regime, my fieldwork reveals new interdependencies in a regulatory gray area and reaffirms the idea of platforms as an infrastructural power, operating across multiple “battlefields” (Benvegnù et al. 2021). Revisiting Michael Mann’s concept of “infrastructural power” (ibid.) in the age of platforms allows us to see that digital corporations do not merely operate within regulatory environments; they actively participate in reshaping them. In Vietnam, where the regulatory frameworks governing both informal and platform labor long remained fragmented, the consolidation of platform power unfolded through experimentation, improvisation, and iterative adjustment. The result is not the linear imposition of a global digital model, but a contingent encounter between transnational corporate logics and a locally embedded authoritarian state apparatus.
50To capture this structural instability, the article advanced the concept of a “three-body problem” in Vietnamese urban governance. By entering the market, international platforms disrupted the historically bilateral relationship between the state and informal entrepreneurs, producing a triangular configuration among the socialist state, foreign digital corporations, and precarious drivers. As in its physical analogue, the interaction of three forces generates nonlinear and unpredictable trajectories. Power does not stabilize around a single dominant actor; rather, it circulates through ongoing bargaining, tactical accommodations, and moments of resistance. Most significantly, this triangular configuration has reshaped the political capacities of platform workers themselves. While their economic precarity persists and their “plat-formalization” remains partial, the infrastructural mediation of their labor has produced new conditions of legibility and collective articulation. Registration, traceability, and integration into fiscal and regulatory circuits have paradoxically enabled forms of organization and public claims-making that were previously unthinkable for informal workers in an authoritarian setting. Platform affiliation thus emerges as both a technology of control and a resource for political subjectivation.
51In this respect, the Vietnamese case compels us to rethink urban informality in the digital age. Building on Roy’s heuristic understanding of informality as a mode of governance rather than a residual sector (2011 and 2018), the findings show that platformization does not resolve the formal/informal divide. Instead, it rearticulates its boundaries within a digitized nexus of precarious work, citizenship, and statecraft. Informality appears less as a condition to be overcome than as a relational field continuously renegotiated among state authorities, private platforms, and workers themselves. By foregrounding the political dimension of platform work, this article contributes to a broader theorization of how digital infrastructures reshape authoritarian governance in the Global South. The future of informal work under platform capitalism, the Vietnamese case suggests, will not be determined solely by economic incorporation or exclusion, but by unstable and negotiated reconfigurations of power at the intersection of labor, technology, and the party-state. The Vietnamese case therefore speaks beyond itself: it invites a comparative research agenda attentive to how digital infrastructures reshape labor politics across diverse regime types, and to how workers navigate, and sometimes appropriate, the infrastructural logics that seek to govern them.
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