Anthropology and the Global Factory


Book Description

The world is fast becoming a global factory in which workers, entrepreneurs, and multinational corporations find themselves producing for the world capitalist market. This collection of original essays explores in concrete anthropological detail the ways that people throughout the world have been drawn into this new international labor web. Broad in scope and far-reaching in their analyses, the chapters in this book offer numerous examples of this new world order. The case studies focus on industrialization in small-scale workshops and informal work-at-home situations as well as multinational corporations. Undertaken in every continent, in core as well as peripheral regions, the studies cover the perspectives of the workers, the entrepreneurs, and the corporations. In this systematic view of the capitalization of the world economy, the contributors demonstrate how new economic linkages are being formed between world markets and small-scale entrepreneurs and home-based local producers and how late-developing regions attempt to gain economic sovereignty through the marketing of local product specialties. At the same time, the contributors' investigations provide concrete evidence of local efforts to create culturally distinct and socially equitable lives--showing how the spread of the world capitalist economy changes the everyday lives of people. They point to ways in which people use their local traditions of kinship, culture, and community to resist and shape economic change to more satisfying local ends.




Anthropology and the Global Factory


Book Description

The world is fast becoming a global factory in which workers, entrepreneurs, and multinational corporations find themselves producing for the world capitalist market. This collection of original essays explores in concrete anthropological detail the ways that people throughout the world have been drawn into this new international labor web. Broad in scope and far-reaching in their analyses, the chapters in this book offer numerous examples of this new world order. The case studies focus on industrialization in small-scale workshops and informal work-at-home situations as well as multinational corporations. Undertaken in every continent, in core as well as peripheral regions, the studies cover the perspectives of the workers, the entrepreneurs, and the corporations. In this systematic view of the capitalization of the world economy, the contributors demonstrate how new economic linkages are being formed between world markets and small-scale entrepreneurs and home-based local producers and how late-developing regions attempt to gain economic sovereignty through the marketing of local product specialties. At the same time, the contributors' investigations provide concrete evidence of local efforts to create culturally distinct and socially equitable lives--showing how the spread of the world capitalist economy changes the everyday lives of people. They point to ways in which people use their local traditions of kinship, culture, and community to resist and shape economic change to more satisfying local ends.




Anthropology and the Global Factory


Book Description

In this systematic view of the "capitalization" of the world economy the authors show how new economic linkages are being formed between world markets and small-scale entrepreneurs and home-based local producers. At the same time, they point to ways in which people use their local traditions of kinship, culture, and community to resist and shape economic change to more satisfying local ends. This collection of original essays explores in concrete anthropological detail the ways that people throughout the world have been drawn into this new international division of labor.




The Global Factory


Book Description

This key new book synthesises Peter Buckley's work on ‘the global factory’ – the modern networked multinational enterprise. The role of interfirm networks, entrepreneurship and cooperation in the creation and management of global factories leads to a discussion of their governance, internal knowledge transfer strategies and performance, including their role in potentially combating societal failures. Emerging country multinationals are examined as a special case of global factories with a focus on Indian and Chinese multinationals, their involvement in tax havens and offshore financial centres, the performance and processes of their acquisition strategies – all seen as key aspects of globalisation.




Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline, Second Edition


Book Description

New edition of the classic ethnographic study of Malay women factory workers. In the two decades since its original publication, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline has become a classic in the fields of anthropology, labor, gender and globalization studies. Based on intensive fieldwork, the book captures a moment of profound transformation for rural Muslim women even as their labor helped launch Malaysia’s rise as a tiger economy. Aihwa Ong’s analysis of the disruptions, conflicts, and ambivalences that roiled the lives of working women has inspired later generations of feminist ethnographers in their study of power, resistance, religious upheavals, and subject formation in the industrial periphery. With a critical introduction by anthropologist Carla Freeman, this new edition upholds an exemplary model of anthropological inquiry into cultural modes of resistance to the ideology, discipline, and workings of global capitalism. “This work remains powerful for its refusal to over-simplify the complexities of export industrialization as a model for economic development, and for its demonstration of the intimate dialectics of culture, economy, gender, religion, and class, and the meaningfulness of place amid the swirling forces of global capitalism [It] opened up many of the questions that should continue to inspire our analyses of globalization today. Indeed, these questions are equally compelling for the reader returning to this work after twenty years and for the reader new to this text and to the intriguing and complex puzzles of globalization.” — from the Introduction by Carla Freeman




Anthro-Vision


Book Description

While today’s business world is dominated by technology and data analysis, award-winning financial journalist and anthropology PhD Gillian Tett advocates thinking like an anthropologist to better understand consumer behavior, markets, and organizations to address some of society’s most urgent challenges. Amid severe digital disruption, economic upheaval, and political flux, how can we make sense of the world? Leaders today typically look for answers in economic models, Big Data, or artificial intelligence platforms. Gillian Tett points to anthropology—the study of human culture. Anthropologists learn to get inside the minds of other people, helping them not only to understand other cultures but also to appraise their own environment with fresh perspective as an insider-outsider, gaining lateral vision. Today, anthropologists are more likely to study Amazon warehouses than remote Amazon tribes; they have done research into institutions and companies such as General Motors, Nestlé, Intel, and more, shedding light on practical questions such as how internet users really define themselves; why corporate projects fail; why bank traders miscalculate losses; how companies sell products like pet food and pensions; why pandemic policies succeed (or not). Anthropology makes the familiar seem unfamiliar and vice versa, giving us badly needed three-dimensional perspective in a world where many executives are plagued by tunnel vision, especially in fields like finance and technology. “Fascinating and surprising” (Fareed Zararia, CNN), Anthro-Vision offers a revolutionary new way for understanding the behavior of organizations, individuals, and markets in today’s ever-evolving world.




Made in China


Book Description

As China has evolved into an industrial powerhouse over the past two decades, a new class of workers has developed: the dagongmei, or working girls. The dagongmei are women in their late teens and early twenties who move from rural areas to urban centers to work in factories. Because of state laws dictating that those born in the countryside cannot permanently leave their villages, and familial pressure for young women to marry by their late twenties, the dagongmei are transient labor. They undertake physically exhausting work in urban factories for an average of four or five years before returning home. The young women are not coerced to work in the factories; they know about the twelve-hour shifts and the hardships of industrial labor. Yet they are still eager to leave home. Made in China is a compelling look at the lives of these women, workers caught between the competing demands of global capitalism, the socialist state, and the patriarchal family. Pun Ngai conducted ethnographic work at an electronics factory in southern China’s Guangdong province, in the Shenzhen special economic zone where foreign-owned factories are proliferating. For eight months she slept in the employee dormitories and worked on the shop floor alongside the women whose lives she chronicles. Pun illuminates the workers’ perspectives and experiences, describing the lure of consumer desire and especially the minutiae of factory life. She looks at acts of resistance and transgression in the workplace, positing that the chronic pains—such as backaches and headaches—that many of the women experience are as indicative of resistance to oppressive working conditions as they are of defeat. Pun suggests that a silent social revolution is underway in China and that these young migrant workers are its agents.




Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology


Book Description

Providing a guide to the ideas, arguments and history of the discipline, this volume discusses human social and cultural life in all its diversity and difference. Theory, ethnography and history are combined in over 230 entries on topics




Invisible Factories


Book Description

Invisible Factories analyzes the role of the informal economy in national development and weighs alternative claims about its impact on industrial development. Detailed case studies of the electronics and shoe industries in Spain demonstrate the restructuring process. Benton examines the transformation of ideas about work and gender, the shifting lines of conflict between workers and employers, and growing tensions between national and regional interests. She shows that these elements of the workplace and national politics, rather than the logic of economic development, command the new industrial order. Benton asks how decentralization of production has affected workers, industrial growth, and the recasting of industrial policy. Explored in depth are the plight of women outworkers, the history of regional labor conflicts, and the evolution of national-level bargaining among unions, employers, and the state.




More Than Class


Book Description

Examines the changing texture of power relations in non-traditional U.S. worksites.