Research On The Emotional Communication Practices Of "Organizer" In The Post-Epidemic Era

With the development of digital platforms and e-commerce,community group-buying platforms have emerged.With the help of efficient logistics capacity and ubiquitous grid warehouses,community group-buying mode can make up for the shortage of traditional online shopping,which takes three to five days to receive goods,and can be delivered the next day.In the severe period of the novel coronavirus epidemic,express logistics is hindered,offline travel is also affected,and the advantages of community group-buying mode become more prominent.Swept by the strong capital,almost all the individual owners of small shops on the street have joined the "army of organizer",and some people with more leisure time choose to do part-time or full-time group-buying organizer.This paper refers to this kind of head collectively as "long-term group-buying organizer",whose main purpose is to make profits.However,in order to ensure the supply of daily necessities during the epidemic period,the head of a partial volunteer is called "temporary group-buying organizer" in this paper.No matter what type of organizer they are,they are people who live in the community and their target customers are members of the community.Community group-buying organizer not only needs to connect with the platform and the delivery driver,but also needs to maintain one-to-one customer relationship.He is the key person in the "last kilometer" of the community group buying and the only person in charge that consumers can contact in general.This study conducted in-depth interviews with ten organizers of community group-buying from provincial capitals,counties,towns and rural areas,and joined five of them in wechat groups for network ethnographic observation.It is found that community group buying organizers will pay more emotional labor than the traditional seller in the process of work.First of all,they need to find ways to increase the popularity of the community group buying wechat group,improve the activity of the group,but not due to excessive marketing will cause customer aversion;Secondly,in addition to the requirements of the platform,they should voluntarily add door-to-door delivery and other services,and set their own rules for group buying and group chat according to the actual situation,so as to create a sincere and positive image of flesh and blood,so as to gain the trust of customers and maintain customer relations.In the emotional labor practice of the organizers,the emotional resources paid by the head sometimes even exceed the monetary returns that can be obtained,and the meaning produced is not limited to the completion of commodity transactions.In addition to community group-buying,the wechat group of the head can provide information support and emotional support among neighbors,which require the organizer’s active guidance in daily life to gather group members.Village organizers can even build emotional Bridges between migrant villagers and their left-behind families,and help elderly people with limited access to the Internet to connect to Internet platforms.Therefore,there is a dual relationship between the organizer and the member of the community group-buying group,which is not only the transactional connection of commodity trading,but also the emotional connection in the acquaintance society.Accordingly,the labor practice carried out by the organizer also has a double meaning: it is not only market-oriented labor in the platform economy,but also involves emotional labor commonly seen in the service industry,and finally forms a community communication network with the organizer as the node.This is a community group-buying relationship network with the nature of the community.What maintains the emotional connection of community members is the exchange of favours implied in "member orders-organizer deliveries",which starts from community group-buying,but does not end in community group-buying.