The Making of Chinese Industrial Workers
The Making of Chinese Industrial Workers
Chapter Four looks into the transformation of rural Chinese women into industrial workers and the process through which management’s particular mode of labor discipline gradually penetrates their minds and bodies. Nawon’s foreign management departed from its initial methods based on the “universal” concepts of labor supervision and rational principles of reward and punishment, since it had to change disciplinary methods according to the workers’ reactions to them. Han-Chinese workers reacted to them with their own critical consciousness of a proper level of body discipline and work diligence. As management’s methods of labor discipline and punishment infringed on their ideas about proper discipline and work ethics, the workers developed their own tactics to evade management’s control. The chapter therefore shows that the actual process of labor discipline is a dialectical one that ultimately leads to the mutual transformation of workers and management.
Keywords: body discipline, coevalness, collective misrecognition, collective punishment, collective inaction, communism, Confucianism, resistance, surveillance, village officials
Stanford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.