Putting Class in Its Place

Worker Identities in East Asia

Elizabeth J Perry, Elizabeth J. Perry

• Publisher: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley
• Year: 1996
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781557292117
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Social Sciences

The studies in this volume dismiss the myth of the quiescent East Asian worker. Worker activism is not fully explained by familiar models of class consciousness; educational aspirations, family pressures, gender roles, state directives, native-place origins, and clientelist networks have proven as decisive as class consciousness in shaping the behavior of East Asian workers. These workers appear to have been more consumed with the politics of "place" than with a "class" struggle to further their interests.

Table of contents

• Front cover
• Notes to this edition
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Introduction. Putting Class in Its Place
• 1. Conditions for the Disappearance of the Japanese Working-Class Movement
• 2. Work, Culture, and Consciousness of the Korean Working Class
• 3. Class Identity without Class Consciousness? Working-Class Orientations in Taiwan
• 4. Changing Literary Images of Taiwan's Working Class
• 5. Owner, Worker, Mother, Wife: Taibei and Chengdu Family Businesswomen
• 6. The Chinese Cultural Revolution in the Factories: Party-State Structures and Patterns of Conflict
• 7. Chinese Sex Workers in the Reform Period
• 8. Regional Identity, Labor, and Ethnicity in Contemporary China
• Index
• Back cover