The gendered political economy of control and resistance on the shop floor of the multinational firm: A case-study from Malaysia

New Political Economy

Volumn 10, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 203-222

  Elias, Juanita ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

MULTINATIONAL ENTERPRISE; WOMENS EMPLOYMENT;

ASIA; EASTERN HEMISPHERE; EURASIA; MALAYSIA; SOUTHEAST ASIA; WORLD;

EID: 22644435132     PISSN: 13563467     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13563460500144751     Document Type: Article

References (118)

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2. V. Spike Peterson & Anne Sisson Runyan, Global Gender Issues, second edn (Westview, 1999), pp. 142-7;
3. Shirin M. Rai, Gender and the Political Economy of Development (Polity, 2002), pp. 147-50;
4. and Jan Jindy Pettman, Worlding Women: A Feminist International Politics (Allen & Unwin, 1996), ch. 8.
5. Diane Elson & Ruth Pearson, 'The subordination of women and the internationalization of factory production', in: K. Young, C. Wolkowitz & R. McCullagh (eds), Of Marriage and the Market (CSE Books, 1981), pp. 18-40.
6. Elson and Pearson base these arguments on Noeleen Heyzer's 1978 study of women workers in textile firms in Singapore. See Heyzer, 'Young women and migrant workers in Singapore's labour-intensive industries', unpublished paper presented at Conference on Continuing Subordination of Women in the Development Process, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, 1978.
7. Aiwah Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia (SUNY Press, 1987);
8. Anna Pollert, Girls, Wives, Factory Lives (Macmillan, 1981);
9. and Ruth Cavendish, Women on the Line (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982).
10. Richard Falk, 'Resisting "globalization-from-above" through "globalization-from-below"', in: Barry Gills (ed.), Globalization and the Politics of Resistance (Palgrave, 2000), pp. 46-56.
11. Dong-Sook S. Gills, 'Globalization and counter-globalization', in: Dong-Sook S. Gills & Nicola Piper (eds), Women and Work in Globalizing Asia (Routledge, 2002), pp. 13-31;
12. and Marianne Marchand, 'Challenging Globalization: Towards a Feminist Understanding of Resistance', Review of International Studies, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2003), pp. 145-60.
13. The research presented in this article was carried out over five full days of research visits to the case-study firm's Malaysian operations in March and August 1999. The principal research method used was the semi-structured interview. Interviews were conducted with four senior level managers, ten middle and junior 'executive' level managers or 'officers' and five supervisory level staff (those employees who supervise production lines); I was also able to interview the company's (male) trade union representative. Although some of these interviews were conducted in a formal setting, many involved being shown around different sections of the factory floor; hence the interviews often served to provide me with observational data. In addition, some of the research data highlighted in the article came from company documents that I was provided with by the firm.
14. Juanita Elias, Fashioning Inequality: The Multinational Company and Gendered Employment in a Globalizing World (Ashgate, 2004).
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16. Susan P. Joekes, Women in the World Economy: An INSTRAW Study (Oxford University Press, 1987);
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18. Guy Standing, 'Global Feminization through Flexible Labor: A Theme Revisited', World Development, Vol. 23, No. 3 (1999), pp. 583-602;
19. and Adrian Wood, 'North-South Trade and Female Labour in Manufacturing: An Asymmetry', The Journal of Development Studies, Vol. 27, No. 2 (1991), pp. 168-89.
20. Peterson & Runyan, Global Gender Issues, p. 1.
21. This association of masculinity with rationality is rooted in the Cartesian method which privileges rationality, dispassion and detachment over what feminist scholars point out are essentially 'feminine' qualities (emotion, irrationality etc.). Thus it can be argued that discussions of globalisation are predicated upon the construction of these gendered theoretical dualisms whereby dominant groups are described in masculine terms while subordinate groups are feminised. Such a strategy not only sets up masculine hierarchies but is based upon, and reinforces, a discourse associating men and masculinity with power.
22. Leslie Salzinger, Genders in Production: Making Workers in Mexico's Global Factories (University of California Press, 2003), p. 2.
23. Robert W. Connell, Masculinities (Polity, 1995);
24. and Robert W. Connell, The Men and the Boys (University of California Press, 2000), pp. 51-2.
25. For a discussion of how Connell's writings have been developed within IPE, see Charlotte Hooper, Manly States: Masculinities, International Relations and Gender Politics (Columbia University Press, 2001).
26. Angus Cameron & Ronen Palan, The Imagined Economies of Globalization (Sage, 2004), pp. 89-91.
27. A critique of this position is developed by Louise Amoore, 'International Political Economy and the "Contested Firm"', New Political Economy, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2000), pp. 183-204.
28. John H. Dunning, Multinational Enterprises and the Global Economy (Addison Wesley, 1993), p. 80.
29. R.W. Connell, 'Masculinities and Globalization', Men and Masculinities, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1998), pp. 3-23;
30. and Connell, The Men and the Boys, p. 51.
31. On superior employment conditions in MNCs, see Dunning, Multinational Enterprises and the Global Economy, pp. 372-3;
32. and UNCTAD, World Investment Report 1994: Transnational Corporations, Employment and the Workplace (United Nations, 1994).
33. On the role of the firm in undermining gender inequality, see UNCTAD, World Investment Report 1994, pp. 202-3.
34. Susan Halford & Pauline Leonard, Gender, Power and Organisations (Palgrave, 2001);
35. and Anne Ross-Smith & Martin Kornberger, 'Gendered Rationality? A Genealogical Exploration of the Philosophical and Sociological Conceptions of Rationality, Masculinity and Organization', Gender, Work and Organisation, Vol. 11, No. 3 (2004), p. 281.
36. Diane Elson, 'Nimble fingers and other fables', in: Wendy Chapkis & Cynthia Enloe (eds), Of Common Cloth: Women in the Global Textile Industry (Transnational Institute, 1983);
37. and Ellen Israel Rosen, Making Sweatshops: The Globalization of the US Apparel Industry (University of California Press, 2002), pp. 240-7.
38. Carla Freeman, High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy (Duke University Press, 2000), p. 102.
39. Maria Angelina Soldatenko, 'Made in the USA: Latinas/os? Garment Work and Ethnic Conflict in the Los Angeles Sweatshops', Cultural Studies, Vol. 13, No. 2 (1999), pp. 319-34.
40. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Beacon Press, 1944).
41. See, for example, Fred Block, Post-industrial Possibilities: A Critique of Economic Discourse (University of California Press, 1990), pp. 21-45;
42. Richard Swedberg & Mark Granovetter, 'Introduction', in: M. Granovetter and R. Swedberg (eds), The Sociology of Economic Life (Westview, 1992), pp. 1-28;
43. and John Lie, 'Embedding Polanyi's Market Society', Sociological Perspectives, Vol. 34, No. 2 (1991), pp. 219-35.
44. Thanh-Dam Truong, 'The Underbelly of the Tiger: Gender and the Demystification of the Asian Miracle', Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 6, No. 3 (1999), pp. 133-65.
45. Jongwoo Han & L.M.H. Ling, 'Authoritarianism in the Hypermasculinized State: Hybridity, Patriarchy and Capitalism in Korea', International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 1 (1998), pp. 53-78.
46. Aidan Foster-Carter, 'The Modes of Production Controversy', New Left Review, No. 107 (1978), pp. 44-77.
47. Aiwah Ong, 'The Gender and Labour Politics of Postmodernity', Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 20 (1991), pp. 284-6.
48. Stephanie Seguino, 'Gender Inequality and Economic Growth: A Cross Country Analysis', World Development, Vol. 28, No. 7 (2000), pp. 1211-30.
49. For more detailed accounts of the role of ethnicity in the political economy of Malaysia, see J.V. Jesudason, Ethnicity and the Economy: The State, Chinese Business and Multinationals in Malaysia (Oxford University Press, 1990);
50. and Rasiah Rajah, 'Class, ethnicity and economic development in Malaysia', in: Gary Rodan, Kevin Hewison & Richard Robison (eds), The Political Economy of South-East Asia: An Introduction, first edn (Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 121-47.
51. Malaysian society is made up of three main ethnic groups: the (mainly Islamic) Malays who comprise 65.1% of the population, Chinese (26% of the population) and Indians (7.7%). Figures are for 2000.
52. Christine B.N. Chin, In Service and Servitude: Foreign Female Domestic Workers and the Malaysian 'Modernity' Project (Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 171;
53. and Linda Lim, 'Women Workers in Multinational Corporations: The Case of the Electronics Industry in Malaysia and Singapore', Michigan Occasional Papers in Women's Studies, No. IX (1980).
54. Hua Wu Yin, Class and Communalism in Malaysia: Politics in a Dependent Capitalist State (Zed, 1983).
55. Harold Crouch, 'Malaysia: neither authoritarian nor democratic', in: Kevin Hewison, Richard Robison & Garry Rodan (eds), Southeast Asia in the 1990s: Authoritarianism, Democracy and Capitalism (Allen & Unwin, 1993), pp. 133-58.
56. Frederic C. Deyo, Beneath the Miracle: Labour Subordination in the New Asian Industrialism (University of California Press, 1989).
57. Elizabeth Grace, Shortcircuiting Labour: Unionising Electronic Workers in Malaysia (INSAN, 1990);
58. K.S. Jomo & Patricia Todd, Trade Unions in Peninsular Malaysia (Oxford University Press, 1994);
59. and Vicki Crinis, 'The stratification of the garment and textile industries and labour movements in Malaysia', in: Gills & Piper, Women and Work in Globalizing Asia, pp. 154-68.
60. Noeleen Heyzer, 'Asian Women Wage Earners: Their Situation and Possibilities for Donor Intervention', World Development, Vol. 17, No. 7 (1989), p. 1117.
61. Malaysia, Sixth Malaysia Plan 1991-1996 (Government Printers, 1991), p. 422.
62. Jamilah Ariffin, From Kampung to Urban Factories: Findings from the HAWA Study (University of Malaya Press, 1994);
63. and Richard Leete, Malaysia's Demographic Transition: Rapid Development, Culture, and Politics (Oxford University Press, 1996).
64. Truong, 'The Underbelly of the Tiger', p. 147.
65. I use the term 'offshore' in this context because of its prevalence in the literature on foreign direct investment and the use of the term amongst the firm's UK-based senior management who were interviewed as part of this research. However, in discussing the notion of 'offshore' some care needs to be taken. Palan and Cameron have identified 'offshore' as one of their 'imagined' economies of globalisation (locating offshore financial centres and EPZs within this definition). Their notion of the 'offshore' is, however, presented as a powerful ideational consensus around globalisation as an essentially business-led process - which obscures the extent to which the 'offshore' is politically constructed in its origins. Importantly, in this article it is argued that the management practices of firms can only be understood in relation to the societies in which they invest. In this sense I do not wish to infer that the 'offshore' economy of the EPZ is in any way de-linked from an 'onshore' economy. See Cameron & Palan, The Imagined Economies of Globalization. The concept of the 'offshore' is developed in Palan's earlier work.
66. See Ronen Palan, The Offshore World: Sovereign Markets, Virtual Places, and Nomad Millionaires (Cornell University Press, 2003).
67. Angela Hale, 'Technologies of Control and Resistance: New Technology and Women Workers in the Globalized Garment Industry', International Feminist Journal of Politics, Vol. 2, No. 3 (2000), pp. 406-8. Indeed such threats are indicative of the way in which the ideational consensus around the idea of the 'offshore' economy serves to legitimate business interests.
68. See note 42 above.
69. Ong, 'The Gender and Labour Politics of Postmodernity', p. 285.
70. Elson & Pearson, 'The subordination of women and the internationalization of factory production';
71. and Juanita Elias, 'Stitching-up the Labour Market: Recruitment, Gender and Ethnicity in the Multinational Firm', International Feminist Journal of Politics, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2005), pp. 90-111.
72. I have generally chosen to refer to ethnicity rather than race. However, the use of the term 'race' in this table is because this is what appears in the company personnel statistics the table was adapted from.
73. Salzinger, Genders in Production, p. 37.
74. Susan Ackerman, Cultural Processes in Malaysian Industrialization: A Study of Women Workers, unpublished PhD thesis, University of California, 1980.
75. Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline.
76. A study of spirit possession in Malaysian factories (and in a range of other locations) is also found in Mary Keller's recent book, The Hammer and the Flute: Women, Power, and Spirit Possession (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).
77. It is rather problematic to view absenteeism as a form of worker resistance, given that absenteeism generally reflected women's position within the household as the primary child carer. However, absenteeism was constructed by managers as a 'discipline problem' and was thereby seen as a form of worker resistance.
78. Maznah Mohamad & Celia Ng, New Technologies and Women's Labour: Case Studies of Two Electronics Firms in Malaysia, Institut Kajian Malaysia dan Antarabangsa (IKMAS) Working Paper No. 5, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi, 1996.
79. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (Yale University Press, 1985).
80. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press, 1984).
81. Roland Blieker, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 200-7.
82. Scott, Weapons of the Weak.
83. For a wider discussion of the role of gender in Scott's work, see Gillian Hart, 'Engendering Everyday Resistance: Gender, Patronage and Production Politics in Rural Malaysia', Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1 (1991), pp. 93-121.
84. Blieker's focus on gendered patterns of everyday dissent focuses largely on women's political agency in the former East Germany. See Blieker, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics, pp. 160-70.
85. Marchand, 'Challenging Globalization', p. 154.
86. Nina Shapiro-Perl, 'Resistance struggles: the routine struggle for bread and roses', in: Karen Sacks & Dorothy Remy (eds), My Troubles are Going to Have Trouble With Me (Rutgers University Press, 1984), p. 194.
87. Dipak K. Gupta, 'Everyday Resistance or Routine Repression? Exaggeration as Stratagem in Agrarian Conflict', Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2002), pp. 89-108.
88. Ackerman, Cultural Processes in Malaysian Industrialization.
89. Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline, pp. 184-5, 220.
90. See also Ackerman, Cultural Processes in Malaysian Industrialization, pp. 160, 188 for examples of company managers expressing similar views.
91. Ariffin, From Kampung to Urban Factories;
92. Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline;
93. Amriah Buang, 'Development and factory women: negative perceptions from a Malaysian source area', in: Janet Henshall Momsen & Vivian Kinnaird (eds), Different Places Different Voices: Gender and Development in Africa, Asia and Latin America (Routledge, 1993), pp. 197-210;
94. and Fatimah Daud, 'Minah Karan': The Truth about Malaysian Factory Girls (Berita Publishing, 1985).
95. Ariffin, From Kampung to Urban Factories, pp. 1-2.
96. This point is raised by Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline,
97. and Ariffin, From Kampung to Urban Factories, pp. 1-2, and was also raised in interviews with a women's NGO activist from the organisation Sahabat Wanita (19 March 1999). It is apparent that concerns about the moral susceptibility of young women workers have been articulated by nationalist groups within a number of states in which there has been growth in female export-sector factory employment.
98. See, for example, Caitrin Lynch, 'The Politics of White Women's Underwear in Sri Lanka's Open Economy', Social Politics, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2002), pp. 87-125.
99. Maznah & Ng, New Technologies and Women's Labour, p. 46.
100. This point was also raised in a number of interviews and conversations that I undertook whilst in Malaysia - for example, interview with members of the MTUC Women's Committee, Petailing Jaya (12 February 1999) and interview with member of Sahabat Wanita (19 March 1999).
101. Lucy Healey, 'Gender, Power and the Ambiguities of Resistance in a Malay Community of Peninsular Malaysia', Women's Studies International Forum, Vol. 22, No. 1 (1999), p. 49.
102. Jonathan Kent, 'Malaysian city rules on women', BBC News Online (World Edition), 5 January 2004;
103. and 'PAS chief makes about-turn on dress code', New Straits Times, 21 March 2004.
104. Mazhah Mohamad, 'Men foil as women toil', Aliran Monthly (on-line edition), April 1999, available at http://www.aliran.com/high9904.html
105. The United Malays National Organisation constitutes the largest party within the ruling coalition the Barisan Nasional (National Front).
106. Cynthia Cockburn, Brothers: Male Dominance and Technological Change (Pluto, 1983).
107. Rasiah notes that this ethnic networking is common amongst the Chinese business community, reflecting a sense of solidarity among Chinese businessmen who saw recruitment of other Chinese into their firms as some form of counter-measure towards what they perceived to be the discriminatory practices of the NEP.
108. See Rasiah, 'Class, ethnicity and economic development in Malaysia', pp. 10-11.
109. Dunning, Multinational Enterprises, p. 129.
110. R.W. Connell, 'Globalization, imperialism, and masculinities', in: Michael S. Kimmel, J. Hearn & R.W. Connell (eds), Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities (Sage, 2005), pp. 71-89.
111. D.S. Gills, 'Neoliberal Economic Globalization and Women in Asia: Introduction', in Gills and Piper, Women and Work in Globalizing Asia, pp. 1-12.
112. Healey, 'Gender, Power and the Ambiguities of Resistance'.
113. L.M.H. Ling, 'Sex Machine: Global Hypermasculinity and Images of Asian Woman in Modernity', Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1999), pp. 277-306.
114. Sally Theobold, 'Working for Global Factories: Thai Women in Electronics Export Companies in the Northern Regional Industrial Estate', in Gills and Piper, Women and Work in Globalizing Asia, pp. 146-50.
115. Hale, 'Technologies of Control and Resistance'.
116. Gills, 'Globalization and Counter-globalization', pp. 13-31.
117. Amy Luinstra, Toil and Sweat: What Can be Done to Improve Working Conditions in Developing Countries? (World Bank, 2001).
118. Ong, 'The Gender and Labour Politics of Postmodernity', p. 289.