The Changing Temporality of Local Quick Commerce in India: Delivery Workers and the Post-Pandemic Everyday.

This article examines the significance of the post-pandemic 10-minute guaranteed delivery model of quick commerce in reconfiguring spatiality and temporality through mediatised network spaces in urban metropolitan Indian cities by disrupting conventional models of economic and territorial space and dynamics in the social field. Using ethnographic data, it demonstrates the significance of the technologically driven mediatised “darkstore to consumer” quick commerce in reconfiguring the fluidity of network spaces, spatiality, and temporality in urban India. It highlights the resulting layered simultaneity of enhancing the affective and temporal urban network space for the urban quick commerce customers while reconfiguring the precarious urban labour practices embedded within these network spaces along the existing fissures of social inequality for the delivery workers.

Authors

Publication Details

Journal
Historical social research
Published
2026-03-20
DOI
https://doi.org/10.12759/hsr.51.2026.02
Primary Topic
Digital Economy and Work Transformation
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
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article

The Changing Temporality of Local Quick Commerce in India: Delivery Workers and the Post-Pandemic Everyday.

Priyasha Kaul
Historical social research
Digital Economy and Work Transformation
article

The Changing Temporality of Local Quick Commerce in India: Delivery Workers and the Post-Pandemic Everyday.

Priyasha Kaul
article en

Abstract

This article examines the significance of the post-pandemic 10-minute guaranteed delivery model of quick commerce in reconfiguring spatiality and temporality through mediatised network spaces in urban metropolitan Indian cities by disrupting conventional models of economic and territorial space and dynamics in the social field. Using ethnographic data, it demonstrates the significance of the technologically driven mediatised “darkstore to consumer” quick commerce in reconfiguring the fluidity of network spaces, spatiality, and temporality in urban India. It highlights the resulting layered simultaneity of enhancing the affective and temporal urban network space for the urban quick commerce customers while reconfiguring the precarious urban labour practices embedded within these network spaces along the existing fissures of social inequality for the delivery workers.

Historical social research
Openalex Percentile: Top 13%
Digital Economy and Work Transformation
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