Class and Gender in the Industrial Borderland: Lee's Feminist Theory of Production Politics

Lee's Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women is a study of gender and labor control in one of the most dynamic new industrial regions of East Asia, formulated in dialogue with the work of Michael Burawoy and his emphasis on workers' subjectivities and the politics of production. ¹ Three important extensions of Burawoy's work are accomplished by Lee's ethnography of working women in South China. First is her extension of Burawoy's focus on class politics to gender politics in the construction of workers' identities (see Gottfried, 2001). Lee makes a second important intervention into Burawoy's conceptual framework by reframing capitalist historical development to a post-national focus on regional settings, local/global linkages, and spatial difference. ² The regional setting that forms the context of the study is the borderland of South China, now unified in macro-political terms but, at the time of the study, delineated geo-politically into the British commonwealth state of Hong Kong and the southern province of the People's Republic of China, Guangdong.

The research is based on an ethnographic study of women workers in two electronics factories of Liton Corporation (a pseudonym)—one in Hong Kong, the other in Shenzhen. The study employs the extended case method, which in the work of Burawoy begins with the social situation of a work setting and extends to the broader social structure in order to explain the work situation. In comparative research designs, the extended case method seeks to connect differences in otherwise similar work situations to differences in the broader social structure. In Burawoy's research, the state and industrial relations are the most important external structures affecting the micro-politics of the workplace. Lee makes a third important intervention into Burawoy's theory by focusing instead on the labor market, more precisely, the social organization of the labor market and how it contextualizes the single-cases of factory regimes she identifies in Hong Kong and Shenzhen.

In its design, Lee's study is rare in its careful matching of employer, product, managers (the Shenzhen executives were dispatched from the Hong Kong site), and the technical division of labor. The study explains differences in labor control, which Lee argues co-vary with differences in gender ideologies (especially of male managers), gendered organization of production (the construction of managerial hierarchies), and the gendered identity of the women workers. Lee draws on Burawoy's terminology in specifying the contrast in labor control between the Hong Kong and Shenzhen factories in terms of hegemonic and despotic factory regimes, respectively. Labor control in the Hong Kong factory is based on a system of familial hegemony, within which women workers depend on their families (income and child care support) for the reproduction of their labor. By contrast, labor control in the Shenzhen factory is constructed out of women worker's dependence on localistic regional/ethnic networks for the reproduction of their labor in what Lee terms "localistic despotism." Factory workers in Shenzhen are primarily migrant laborers, and the data available to Lee shows that most migrants are women.

In Manufacturing Consent, the shift from competitive to monopoly capitalism Burawoy observed in the U.S. was explained in terms of class struggle and changes in industrial relations policies, which incorporated labor as industrial citizens. Lee finds no plausible explanation for the differences in factory regimes in Hong Kong and Shenzhen in state policies generally, or industrial relations policies specifically. Both the colonial Hong Kong state and the clientalist Chinese local state take a non-interventionist stance vis-à-vis managerial prerogative and control.

Lee's alternative analysis can be broken down into two successive steps. First, she asks the question, which Herbert Gutman (1987) has taught labor scholars concerned with worker's identities to pose: what kind of workers are being industrialized? Lee's seemingly obvious answer is that these...