Engendering the worlds of labor: women workers, labor markets, and production politics in the south China economic miracle

This study conducted a comparative ethnographic study of two gendered regimes of production in two factories in the south China manufacturing region. Owned by the same enterprise, managed by the same team of managers, producing the same products, and using the same technical labor proceses, the two factories developed distinctive patterns of shop-floor politics, termed "localistic despotism' and "familial hegemony'. To explain these patterns, it is argued that the social organization of local labor markets produces diverse conditions of workers' dependence. The different dependencies determine management's strategies of control, workers' collective practices, and their mutual constructions of workers' gender. This case study leads to critiques and reconstruction of the theory of production politics and the feminist literature on women workers in global factories. -Author