Everyday Life of Ready-made Garment Kormi in Bangladesh


Book Description

This book portrays the scene where corporate international trade agreements, a new neoliberal state regime, and a growing textile market have contributed to the becoming of a new class of Muslim female workers—who labor in Bangladesh’s apparel export factories under conditions of neoliberal capitalism. The garment kormi—often abstracted by the homogenizing category of the “garment worker”—remain lost in the statistics of development and empowerment or contrarily exploitation. Thereby, focusing on the everyday lives of garment kormi, i.e., workers’ stories than on the collective of garment workers as a category, this book at one front highlights the neoliberal structures of difference and inequality, and on the other reflects on the potential of egalitarianism and change in terms of novel ways of comprising and expressing life-worlds. It shows that the values in life and the structures that govern life, such as contemporary Bangladesh’s neoliberal order, kinship relationality, and religiosity, are co-constitutive, multi-layered, and always on the move, never fixed.




Everyday Life of Ready-made Garment Kormi in Bangladesh


Book Description

"Mohammad Tareq Hasan's powerful and sensitive understanding of the situations of female garment workers in Bangladesh's clothing factories critically contextualizes commanding theoretical discourse grounding their insights but simultaneously demonstrating the limits to their understanding. Hasan in his masterly analysis shows how ethnography is not merely illustrative of theory but central to its construction." -Bruce Kapferer, Emeritus Professor, University of Bergen and Honorary Professorial Fellow, University College, London "Everyday Life of Ready-made Garment Kormi in Bangladesh is a rich ethnography of the lives of garment workers in Bangladesh. Hasan argues against the orthodox view of garment workers as the pawns of capitalism; instead, he shows how workers renegotiate capitalist agendas to create emancipatory opportunities. The book adds a new dimension to the growing literature on the garment industry by focusing on the female garment kormi as the agent of social change." -Lamia Karim, Professor of Anthropology, University of Oregon This book portrays the scene where corporate international trade agreements, a new neoliberal state regime, and a growing textile market have contributed to the becoming of a new class of Muslim female workers-who labor in Bangladesh's apparel export factories under conditions of neoliberal capitalism. The garment kormi-often abstracted by the homogenizing category of the "garment worker"-remain lost in the statistics of development and empowerment or contrarily exploitation. Thereby, focusing on the everyday lives of garment kormi, i.e., workers' stories than on the collective of garment workers as a category, this book at one front highlights the neoliberal structures of difference and inequality, and on the other reflects on the potential of egalitarianism and change in terms of novel ways of comprising and expressing life-worlds. It shows that the values in life and the structures that govern life, such as contemporary Bangladesh's neoliberal order, kinship relationality, and religiosity, are co-constitutive, multi-layered, and always on the move, never fixed. Mohammad Tareq Hasan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. .




Coercion and Wage Labour


Book Description

Coercion and Wage Labour presents novel histories of people who experienced physical, social, political or cultural compulsion in the course of paid work. Broad in scope, the chapters examine diverse areas of work including textile production, war industries, civil service and domestic labour, in contexts from the Middle Ages to the present day. They demonstrate that wages have consistently shaped working people’s experiences, and failed to protect workers from coercion. Instead, wages emerge as versatile tools to bind, control, and exploit workers. Remuneration mirrors the distribution of power in labour relations, often separating employers physically and emotionally from their employees, and disguising coercion. The book makes historical narratives accessible for interdisciplinary audiences. Most chapters are preceded by illustrations by artists invited to visually conceptualise the book’s key messages and to emphasise the presence of the body and landscape in the realm of work. In turn, the chapter texts reflect back on the artworks, creating an intense intermedial dialogue that offers mutually relational ‘translations’ and narrations of labour coercion. Other contributions written by art scholars discuss how coercion in remunerated labour is constructed and reflected in artistic practice. The collection serves as an innovative and creative tool for teaching, and raises awareness that narrating history is always contingent on the medium chosen and its inherent constraints and possibilities. Praise for Coercion and Wage Labour Coercion and Wage Labour is a pioneering volume. It makes a well-founded break with the widespread misconception that wage labour is by definition free from coercion. The fourteen historical case studies ... lead to the conclusion that wage labourers too were subject to many forms of coercion and that usually their “freedom” was and is only relative. But something else makes this book special: throughout the text there are artistic illustrations that enter into a dialogue with the individual chapters, which in turn reflect on the images. This creates an inspiring interaction that complements the volume’s interdisciplinary nature. Marcel van der Linden, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam




Handbook of Research on Achieving Sustainable Development Goals With Sustainable Marketing


Book Description

The prominent idea of sustainable development has influenced almost all disciplines, changing our understanding and behavior toward sustainability. In this respect, marketing has also been transforming from the sustainability point of view as emerging social and ecological problems caused by the exponential growth require sustainable solutions and joint efforts. Sustainable marketing intends to integrate ecological, social, and ethical concerns while creating value. Consumers, along with other stakeholders, expect that brands will contribute to work toward the sustainable development goals; therefore, companies need to redesign their marketing initiatives to create, promote, and deliver values that are in line with sustainability. The Handbook of Research on Achieving Sustainable Development Goals With Sustainable Marketing illuminates current developments in sustainable marketing and the new trends and tendencies concerning the concept in theory and practice. The book also explores the concept of sustainable marketing in today’s context of the digital age, explains its boundaries and benefits, and describes the challenges and opportunities as well as the advantages and potential disadvantages of sustainable marketing and branding efforts. Covering key topics such as branding, marketing ethics, and corporate social responsibility, this premier reference source is ideal for marketers, business owners, managers, industry professionals, researchers, academicians, scholars, practitioners, instructors, and students.




Morality as Organizational Practice


Book Description

Organizations are increasingly the subject of moral debates. The positioning of enterprises of various sizes, non-governmental organizations, or public institutions is discussed and taken as a basis for consumer, client, and political decisions in a broad scope of topics. While the perspectives of customers, organizations, and further stakeholders on such developments have been highlighted under the label of 'ethical consumption' or vis-à-vis the fragility of organizations, the impact and effects on actors working in or for such organizations or subcontractors have so far only been dealt with tangentially or left as a blank spot. This volume turns its attention to the actors and organizational practices in order to trace the effects of these discourses on everyday lives. Similarly, the ethnographic case studies collected in this volume explore the extent to which everyday work life itself shapes discourses on the negotiation of morality in the present.




Genders in Production


Book Description

In this engrossing and original book, Leslie Salzinger takes us with her into the gendered world of Mexico's global factories. Her careful ethnographic work, personal voice, and sophisticated analysis capture the feel of life inside the maquiladoras and make a compelling case that transnational production is a gendered process. The research grounds contemporary feminist theory in an examination of daily practices and provides an important new perspective on globalization.




Governmentality and Counter-Hegemony in Bangladesh


Book Description

Using Michel Foucault's idea of governmentality, this book reinterprets various cases of revolt and popular uprisings in Bangladesh. It attempts to synthesize the theories of Foucault's governmentality and Antonio Gramsci's notions of hegemony and counter-hegemony.




Egalitarianism in Scandinavia


Book Description

This book discusses egalitarianism in Scandinavian countries through historically oriented and empirically based studies on social and political change. The chapters engage with issues related to social class, political conflict, the emergence of the welfare state, public policy, and conceptualizations of equality. Throughout, the contributors discuss and sometimes challenge existing notions of the social and cultural complexity of Scandinavia. For example, how does egalitarianism in these nations differ from other contemporary manifestations of egalitarianism? Is it meaningful to continue to nurture the idea of Scandinavian exceptionalism in an age of economic crises and globalization? The book also proposes that egalitarianism is not merely a relationship between specific, influential enlightenment ideas and patterns of policy, but an aspect of social organization characterized by specific forms of political tension, mobilization, and conflict resolution-as well as emerging cultural values such as individual autonomy.




Critical Anthropological Engagements in Human Alterity and Difference


Book Description

This book explores how one measures and analyzes human alterity and difference in an interconnected and ever-globalizing world. This book critically assesses the impact of what has often been dubbed ‘the ontological turn’ within anthropology in order to provide some answers to these questions. In doing so, the book explores the turn’s empirical and theoretical limits, accomplishments, and potential. The book distinguishes between three central strands of the ontological turn, namely worldviews, materialities, and politics. It presents empirically rich case studies, which help to elaborate on the potentiality and challenges which the ontological turn’s perspectives and approaches may have to offer.




Indigenous Life Projects and Extractivism


Book Description

Exploring indigenous life projects in encounters with extractivism, the present open access volume discusses how current turbulences actualise questions of indigeneity, difference and ontological dynamics in the Andes and Amazonia. While studies of extractivism in South America often focus on wider national and international politics, this contribution instead provides ethnographic explorations of indigenous politics, perspectives and worlds, revealing loss and suffering as well as creative strategies to mediate the extralocal. Seeking to avoid conceptual imperialism or the imposition of exogenous categories, the chapters are grounded in the respective authors’ long-standing field research. The authors examine the reactions (from resistance to accommodation), consequences (from anticipation to rubble) and materials (from fossil fuel to water) diversely related to extractivism in rural and urban settings. How can Amerindian strategies to preserve localised communities in extractivist contexts contribute to ways of thinking otherwise?