Ngai PUN

Many image-conscious technology companies, probably none more than Apple in our digital age, have professed ideals of corporate citizenship, environmental, labour and social responsibility in their supplier codes of conduct. This is in part a response to the growing anti-sweatshop movement in the electronics industry from within the United States, Europe, and more recently Greater China (Smith et al. 2006; Litzinger 2013). Violations of factory workers’ fundamental rights in export-oriented industry nevertheless remain intractable, prompting scholars and practitioners in corporate responsibility to promote the leverage of private and public power to create ‘just supply chains’ (Locke 2013; Mayer and Gereffi 2010; Boston Review 2013). The main effort of public–private partnerships is to call on a shared commitment of the national governments, transnational corporations and non-governmental labour organizations to better protect workers

Negli scorsi 25 anni, più di 150 milioni di giovani migranti si sono mossi dalle campagne verso le periferie industriali della Cina. Per dimensioni e rapidità, una migrazione senza precedenti. Su imposizione dei giganti dell’industria globale, ossia dei committenti che hanno stretto accordi con fornitori cinesi, i lavoratori affrontano orari, ritmi di lavoro e condizioni di vita che non concedono respiro. Sono in particolare i grandi marchi dell’elettronica che attingono al lavoro vivo di queste persone, con l’obiettivo di lanciare sul mercato nuovi prodotti a getto continuo. Qui si mette a fuoco il caso più eclatante: il legame della committente statunitense Apple con la cinese Foxconn. Entrambe hanno fondato le proprie fortune sul regime di fabbrica-dormitorio, destinato a lasciare tracce profonde nella società cinese e nel resto del mondo. Questo libro è il risultato di ricerche sulle vite e sulle aspirazioni dei migranti cinesi inurbati che lavorano per la Foxconn, e ancor più per la Apple, sulle lotte di giovani diventati adulti in fretta che raccontano in prima persona la loro situazione, cercando di rompere il loro isolamento sociale.

The informalised character of labour relations is an overarching theme within studies of labour relations in the Global South. Some scholars emphasise the commonalities in labour processes and labour conditions created by flexibilisation and informalisation while others focus on the specifics of such relations. The aim here is to take the specifics of informalised labour relations as a prism through which to understand general aspects of labour relations in the South.

In Europe, as elsewhere in the global North, the label “Made in China” has become synonymous with low wages, excessive overtime, and exploitative working conditions. Conventional literature on the international division of labor reifies the North–South divide in particular with respect to class formation and labor agency. Contrasting the working conditions in China to those in Europe sets these up as opposites in their managerial practices and treatment of the workforce. This article challenges such dualism and makes visible the commonalities of contemporary global capitalism. It does so by examining Foxconn’s production regimes in China and the Czech Republic and identifying a specific set of strategies on the part of the firm that enable its global organization of production. In indicating which practices Foxconn imported from China and which are an outcome of global extended production, the article challenges the Chinese political economy literature that posits the “Chinese model...

This article aims to provide insight into the employment relations in China-based multinational companies internationalising to Europe, a still relatively unexplored topic. We investigate the transfer of work and employment practices from Foxconn’s manufacturing headquarters in mainland China to its subsidiaries in Czechia and the factors that influence the firm’s internationalisation of production. By drawing upon original ethnographic fieldwork, the study makes a two-fold contribution. First, it shows the analytical inadequacy of the ‘latecomer’ model which assumes that the Chinese firm is an asset seeker. Second, it illustrates the relevance of diversity of labour and non-institutionalised forms of workers’ agency for theorisation of internationalisation. These topics are still insufficiently addressed by the literature that favours managerial agency and the model of distinctive and stable national labour forces. The study contributes to the theoretical debates on internationalis...

In refuting Guy Standing’s precariat as a class, we highlight that employment situation, worker identity and legal rights are mistakenly taken as theoretical components of class formation. Returning to theories of class we use Dahrendorf’s reading of Marx where three components of classes, the objective, the subjective and political struggle, are used to define the current formation of the working class in China. Class is not defined by status, identity or legal rights, but location in the sphere of production embedded within conflictual capital–labour relations. By engaging with the heated debates on the rise of a new working class in China, we argue that the blending of employment situation and rights in the West with the idea of precarity of migrant workers in China is misleading. Deconstructing the relationship between class and precarity, what we see as an unhappy coupling, is central to the article.

Globalization of capital accumulation and transnational production highlight a shifting paradigm in labour process theory, which requires a theorization on the spatial politics of production.The shift from Taylorism and Fordism (mass production and welfare-state interventions) to flexible accumulation (flexible production, casual labour, deregulation and privatization) may be a periodization that has become increasingly problematic. What is emerging is the transnational political economy of production that links not only to a new scale of the economic, but a new economy of scale, in which mass production and the space of work-residence are extensively reconfigured for capital accumulation on a global scale.This article aims to explore a new spatial politics of transnational labour process in China at the time of its rapid incorporation into the world economy. We study a distinctive form of labour regime, the dormitory labour regime in China, and explore the articulation of productio...

What are the implications for global public sociology and labor studies when more than a score of Foxconn workers jump to their death and when a wave of protests, riots and strikes occur in their wake? This article documents the formation of a cross-border sociological intervention project and illustrates how sociological research fueled regional campaigns that gradually developed into a global campaign. This experience confirms the premise that ‘social science’ should never be separated from ‘politics.’ The authors also shed light on how social and economic injustice was creatively challenged by combining the strengths of workers, researchers and transnational movement activists. The study uses both quantitative (semi-structured questionnaires) and qualitative (in-depth interviews and participation observation) methods to gain insights concerning the experiences, world views and collective agency of Chinese workers who are struggling to make sense of the global production regime th...

Pun Ngai, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace. Durham, London, Hong Kong: Duke University Press and Hong Kong University Press, 2005, 227 pp. In Made in China Pun Ngai explores what globalization means for the lives of global capitalism's laborers by focusing on the lives of young Chinese women working in a factory. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in which Pun lived among women workers in factory dormitories, worked with them on factory floors, and joined in their activities during their days off, Pun investigates the reasons the women choose to migrate from rural areas to the special economic zone (SEZ) to look for work, the discrimination they face in the factory and the surrounding area, the limited overt resistance to the exploitative actions of the factory system, and the ways in which, through physical pain, their bodies resist. She examines the creation of a new female migrant laborer identity, that of the dagongmei, how it is shaped by multiple actors (the state, global capitalism, the patriarchal family system, and the women themselves), and how, although devalued for their class, rural origins, and gender, the dagongmei personifies multi-layered tensions and fusions of globalization and persisting cultural difference. Pun argues that the factories are a site of social violence committed against the dagongmei who are thrice exploited: first by global capitalism; second, through the hukou system of residence restrictions, by the state; finally, by the familial patriarchy. Pun situates her study in a wide range of theoretical discourses. To examine the control the state and factory have over the laborers and their means of exploitation, she draws on Marx and Foucault. To identify a wide variety of possible sites of resistance, she draws again on Foucault, and also on the work of Kleinman, and finds most useful Deleuze and Guattari's idea of a "minor literature of resistance," which she retools as a "minor genre of resistance." Two of Pun's stories highlight one of the key apparent contradictions she seeks to understand in the lives of the dagongmei. At the beginning of the Introduction, she tells of going to a hospital to visit Xiaoming. Badly burned, Xiaoming was one of the survivors of a factory fire that killed more than eighty workers and burned or injured another fifty. Industrial accidents were not rare, and most women migrating to look for factory work were aware of this kind of risk, as well as the more mundane tolls factory work could exact through headaches, backaches, and eyestrain among other physical pains. They also knew that as migrants from rural villages they would face discrimination in the more cosmopolitan cities. Nevertheless, the story that opens chapter two, of hundreds of women lining up to compete for a handful of these jobs, illustrates that they are not daunted by the downside of the work. Indeed, Pun goes to great lengths to show that dagongmei are not naive or tricked into working in the factories; nor are they coerced or forced by their families. She carefully avoids falling into the trap she identifies in previous scholarship on Chinese women which results in a portrait of a homogenous, difficult life that is inevitable for all of them. She emphasizes that these women freely choose to work in factories, although it seems the reality of factory life and its exploitations, discriminations, and dangers would stifle their desire to do so. She explains that their unflagging willingness to endure stems from a desire to separate from the less modern rural villages from which they come in order to become new modern selves, and that in part that modernity comes from the consumption of goods they can afford with the wages they receive as industrial producers. They also see this time away from their fami lies and earning their own wages as a brief window during which they can be active agents in their own lives, exploring their individual desires and, as one of her field subjects says, living for themselves. …

In contrast to the existing argument that the logic of capital has monetised almost every aspect of human relationships to the realm of exchange value, this article explores the social values that are practised by Chinese working-class youth as an alternative form of agency and everyday practice. Instead of understanding social values as a realm of value operating entirely outside the logic of exchange value, this article takes social values as the constitutive other of exchange value embodied in the neoliberalised form of capitalism. It attempts to develop a micro-foundation of social values or a social mechanism of values for understanding social protection and class solidarity. Employing in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations in vocational schools in China, at sites for the education and nurture of working-class youth, we ask what social values are, how they are perceived and exercised, and by whom. From students’ practices of care in schools, cooperation in the workpl...

Background and aims Previous research shows that empathy can be one of the potential protective factors for Internet gaming disorder (IGD), yet the complex relationships between multidimensional factors of empathy and IGD remain understudied. Thus, a major question moving forward is to resolve the mixed empirical data by examining the specific contributions of empathy components. In this study, we disentangle the effects of cognitive component (i.e., perspective taking) and affective component (i.e., empathic concern and personal distress) on IGD symptoms and propose affect-oriented mediation pathways between them. Methods We surveyed a large sample (N = 3,348) of Chinese vocational school students, one of the most vulnerable groups to online gaming addiction. Results Our structural equation modeling results revealed that only personal distress, but not empathic concern or perspective taking, positively predicted IGD symptoms. However, empathic concern and personal distress were neg...

The paper uses research into industrial dormitories in Southern China to examine the role performed by employer-controlled accommodation in the management of human resources. The current rapid industrialization in China has been fuelled by the over 100 million internal migrants who move around the country on an annual basis and are housed in industrial dormitories within or close to production

... Ngai, Department of Applied Social Sciences, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong ... Xin's story echoes the stories of most migrant workers regarding their first move from ... Ming, a female worker in an electronics factory in Shenzhen, said, “The first thing I ...

... Peter Evans and Sarah Staveteig part ii Postsocialist Power and Property Relations chapter six Institutional Basis of Social Stratification in Transitional China 85 Liu Xin chapter seven Rethinking Corporatist Bases of Stratification in Rural China 97 Xueguang Zhou chapter eight ...