With profound and rapid development of the Internet industry in China, people have gradually developed two polar opposite views towards jobs in this field: on the one hand, the Internet industry is regarded as offering bountiful personal development opportunities and generous benefits and compensations, making it one of the most attractive employment sector in the 21st century; on the other hand, the cost and challenges behind the dividends of the industry, such as the “karoshi” incidences and the uproar over the “996.ICU” repeatedly hit the headlines, have also been exposed. Focusing on the above-mentioned cognitive strain towards the Internet industry, this book starts with a classical work stress model to qualitatively examine the changes in work stress in an Internet company from the labor sociological perspective. The research attempts to present the formation mechanism and characteristics of work stress across multiple dimensions such as individuals and enterprise organizations at the microscopic level and the capital market and societal culture at the macroscopic level with rich details and in-depth comparative analyses.  

At the enterprise organization level, this book argues that Internet companies have undertaken substantial reforms in working time and conditions, as exemplified by their adoption of a virtual team method that weakens hierarchies and team boundaries and a flexible working hour system, to arguably transform themselves into a new Internet working environment; however, these companies are still designed based on a classical work stress model in terms of advancing and managing work processes and work performances. Specifically, an effort-reward model is adopted in terms of performance and compensation management. The core of the model is the notion that efforts made by employees at work should be rewarded by high-standard promotional opportunities or compensations and benefits, thereby driving them to continue their efforts and development and helping relieving the overall work stress level. The labor process of Internet companies is mainly manifested by a job demands-resources model. The model argues that employees are confronted with highly difficult and quantitative performance targets on the one hand, and a corporate culture resembling that of the engineer culture highlighting “equality” and “freedom” is implemented across the organization, and in the meantime, a flattened hierarchical structure and a virtual team working method and flexible working hour system prizing cross-team cooperation are adopted with a view to construct ideal jobs in the job demands-resources model, that is, high demand-high control jobs, on the other. Therefore, Internet companies are generally based upon a classical work stress model, hoping to eventually promote workers’ amount of effort and output efficiency and in the same time alleviate their stresses through appropriate design of management strategies and labor processes.

However, as revealed by our analysis and discussion on the effect of the “wolf culture” campaign pursued by the researched company, the classical model needs to be supported by multiple factors if it is to theoretically relieve stress; in practices, however, the conditions supporting the functionality of the model would be changed after corporate operationalization, differentiation and refinement of the factors, resulting in a substantively different effect. Take the flexible working hour system as an example. The system was originally designed as a resource factor in the job demands-resources model, but in reality, it becomes a factor inducing voluntary or passive overtime work among employees.  The reason for such a contradiction is that the flexible working system not just improves the flexibility of working time arrangements, but in the meantime, it also blurs the boundary between work and life, thereby increasing the permeability of the time boundary. Thus, when the performance factor in job demands is significantly increased, the ambiguity of time boundary instead becomes a potential condition for the emergence of overtime behaviors, facilitating work stress to disperse towards both work and life.  

An analysis of the internal stress mechanism of an enterprise may explain how stress is transmitted in a top-down manner, but it is still inadequate to answer question as to how stress in the industry is significantly higher than that in other industry; why such tremendous development stress persists in an increasingly prosperous sunrise industry. Just as Sisyphus who was forced by Zeus to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity, stress in the industry seems to have no end. Departing from the constraints of conventional work stress research which mainly focuses on the mesoscopic organizational mechanisms, this book introduces a stress source at the macroscopic level - the global financial and capital, with an attempt to explore the macroscopic mechanism behind work stress in the Internet industry from the fundamental perspective of industrial development mode.

It is widely acknowledged that the origination and development of the Internet industry has been closely related to the financial and capital market. Since the 1990s, the industry has gained intense popularity in the Wall Street, causing a distinct characteristic of the capital market amid the development process of Internet companies. Focusing on multiple rounds of interactions between the researched company and the Wall Street, this book attempts to analyze how the macroscopic stress originating from the financial and capital market was transmitted to the researched company, and in return, how the subsequent response of the researched company managed to establish a transmission mechanism of work stress from the macroscopic level to the mesoscopic organization and eventually to microscopic individuals.

In general, the influence of the financial capital is mainly fulfilled through a compulsory structure and game-based interactions. The former refers to a macroscopic financial ecosystem created by Wall Street through establishing the financial market ecology and game rules to constantly subject enterprises to intense capital requirements and development stress, thereby transforming the industry into an environment characterized by high work stress. Such a relationship is evidently built upon a compulsory structure. With the game of stock market performances among these companies, the financial market is able to influence a company's management strategies and development goals by means of publishing biased comments and manipulating stock prices on the one hand, and engaging in direct negotiations with companies on the other; in the meantime, these measures would also provoke a series of countermeasures from companies, such as adjustments to their capital allocation and performance targets. Thus, a multi-dimensional and complicated cooperative relationship is formed between the financial and capital market and companies, that is, game-based interactions.  These two approaches allow Wall Street to transmit its expectations directly and indirectly towards specific companies; as a response to the stress from the capital market, enterprise organizations would further raise their expected performance and work outcomes on individual employees through the two above-mentioned classical work stress models.   

As such, when overtime work in Internet companies is discussed in the public arena, solely focusing on management and control at the organizational level is evidently insufficient to explain the full picture of the sources of work stress. The temporal and spatial distance of the international financial and capital market from us provides it with a certain level of invisibility, making its influences easily overlooked. Indeed, in the context of a globalized financial market, the macroscopic interactive mechanism between the financial and capital market and Internet companies has become one of the most important sources of the stress felt by the industry.  Thus, when we focus on the overtime work phenomenon in the Internet industry, it is imperative to incorporate the said mechanism into the analytical framework if we are to find the essence and root cause of overtime work from an overall perspective.  

Additionally, the final part of this book also provides cases of a new generation of Internet companies emerging in the realm of APP platforms thanks to the increasing trend of the Internet migrating from PC ends towards mobile devices like smart phones. By doing so, this book is able to present a comparison of work stress mechanism with the researched company, thereby highlighting the local trend and characteristics of work stress mechanism in the industry.