Jokes in a garment workshop in Hanoi: How does humour foster the perception of community in social movements?

International Review of Social History

Volumn 52, Issue SUPPL. 15, 2007, Pages 209-223

  Huong, Nghiem Lien ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 36549023008     PISSN: 00208590     EISSN: 1469512X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0020859007003203     Document Type: Article

References (41)

1. Yiannis Gabriel, "The Unmanaged Organization: Stories, Fantasies and Subjectivity", Organization Studies, 16 (1995), pp. 477-501.
2. R. Samuel and P. Thompson (eds), The Myths We Live By (London [etc.], 1990).
3. D.S. Simmons, "The Nature of the Organizational Grapevine", Supervisory Management, 30 (1985), pp. 35-46.
4. See also J. Mishra, "Managing the Grapevine", Public Personnel Management, 19 (1990). pp. 213-228.
5. In Vietnam, garment workers' wages are often based on the numbers of pieces they produce rather than the numbers of hours or days they work.
6. In the past, most of the wholly foreign-owned companies and joint ventures in the garment industries employed foreigners (mostly South Koreans and Taiwanese) as managers. However, because of the public outcry following several cases of labour conflicts between South Korean and Taiwanese managers and Vietnamese workers, the cause of which was often assumed to be cultural misunderstanding, some foreign companies now use Vietnamese managers instead.
7. F. Peter Meiksins, "Scientific Management and Class Relations: A. Dissenting View", Theory and Society, 13 (1984), pp. 177-209, 185.
8. SA 8000 is a standard and verification system, for assuring humane workplaces, ISO 9000 is a generic name given to a family of quality management standards, and ISO 14001 specifies the requirements for an environmental management system.
9. 50,000 Vietnamese dong is approximately US$ 3.
10. This will be elaborated in the next part, where workers made jokes about the interviews.
11. Gabriel, "Unmanaged Organization".
12. Ibid., p. 479.
13. Samuel and Thompson, Myths We Live By.
14. The issue of subjectivity and resistance has been discussed in detail by several authors, including D. Knights, "Subjectivity, Power and the Labour Process", and H. Willmott, "Subjectivity and the Dialectics of Praxis: Opening up the Core of Labour Process Analysis", in D. Knights and H. Willmott (eds), Labour Process Theory (London, 1990), pp. 297-335 and 336-378 respectively.
15. See also D.L. Collinson, Managing the Shopfloor: Subjectivity, Masculinity and Workplace Culture (Berlin, 1992).
16. The idea was also reflected in D.L. Collinson, "Managing Humour", Journal of Management Studies, 39 (2002), pp. 269-288.
17. Marcel van der Linden, "Keeping Distance: Alf Lüdtke's 'Decentreï Labour History", International Review of Social History, 40 (1995), pp. 285-294. According to Van der Linden, Eigensinn was first introduced by Alf Lüdtke, a German historian, to denote having one's own sense, self-willed behaviour, obstinacy, intractability, and pigheadedness. Resistance meant "strategically optimizing the effectiveness of behaviour", whereas Eigensinn signified joyful expenditure of time on the spot "without any calculation of effects or outcomes". Gabriel, "Unmanaged Organization", also argued, that fantasy including humour provided, a third possibility to organization members, which amounted to neither conformity nor rebellion but to a grudging material acceptance accompanied by a symbolic refashioning of events and official stories,
18. P. Thompson and S. Ackroyd, "All Quiet on the Workplace Front? A Critique of Recent Trends in British Industrial Sociology", Sociology, 29 (1995), pp. 615-633. In their article, Thompson and Ackroyd use the term "misbehaviour" to capture the full range of employee practices in the control-resistance model. Thus, jokes, which are considered as acts of neither obedience nor resistance, also belong to this range and hence can be called misbehaviour.
19. In the literature on human resource and management, collectivism is identified with formal institutions such as teams, workshops, or companies. See for instance J. Storey and N. Bacon, "Individualism and Collectivism.: Into the 1990s", International Journal of Human Resource Management, 4 (1993), pp. 665-684.
20. However, L.M. Martinez and P. Stewart, "The Paradox of Contemporary Labour Process Theory: The Rediscovery of Labour and the Disappearance of Collectivism", Capital and Class, 62 (1997), pp. 49-79, refer to collectivism, in the traditional definition of trade unions.
21. Martinez and. Stewart, "Paradox of Contemporary Labour Process Theory".
22. Samuel and Thompson, Myths We Live By, pp. 5 and 96.
23. See, for example, A. Bennett, Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music, Identity, and Place (Basingstoke, 2000),
24. and. S. Banerji and G. Baumann, "Bhangra 1984-8: Fusion and Professionalization in a Genre of South Asian Dance Music", in P. Oliver (ed.), Black Music in Britain: Essays on the Afro-Asian Contribution to Popular Music (Milton Keynes, 1990), pp. 137-153.
25. S. Frith, "Music and Identity", in Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay (eds), Questions of Cultural Identity (London [etc.], 1996), pp. 108-127.
26. Interview with one female worker in MH's Team. 8, Hanoi, 16 November 2003.
27. Workers put their output (especially at the end of the production line, when products are almost completed and become bigger than those at the beginning of the line) in the big basket so that the products will not fall, on the floor and be dirtied and so that workers on the next task can receive their work pieces easily.
28. Interview with one female worker in MH's Team 8, Hanoi, 10 December 2003.
29. A. Pravda and Blair A. Ruble, Trade Unions in Communist States (Boston, MA, 1986), pp. 1-21.
30. Irene Norlund, "Labor Laws and the New Labor Regimes: A Comparison of Vietnam and China", in Björn Beckman, Eva Hansson, and. Lisa Román (eds), Vietnam, Reform and Transformation (Stockholm, 1997), pp. 159-178;
31. A. Chan and I. Narlund, "Vietnamese and Chinese Labour Regimes: On the Road to Divergence", The China Journal, 40 (1998), pp. 173-1.97, also accessible at http://rspas.anu.edu.au/papers/ccc/AC_IN_labour_regimes.pdf (last accessed 31 May 2007). For example, the role of the VGCL and its relationship to the partystate are set out in the Constitution, the Labour Code, and the Trade Union Law. The VGCL as a component of the party-state structure is referred to in Article 1 o of the Constitution. The dual role and its participation in state management are also outlined in Article 2 of the 1990 Trade Union Law.
32. E. Hansson, "Authoritarian Governance and Labour: The VGCL and the Party-State in Economic Renovation", in Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet, Russell H.K. Heng, and David. W.H. Koh (eds), Getting Organized in Vietnam' Moving In and Around the Socialist State (Singapore, 2003), pp. 153-184, 157.
33. E. Hansson, "The Vietnam Railway Trade Union", in Beckman, Hansson, and Román Vietnam, Reform and Transformation, pp. 179-185, 181.
34. Chan and Nrlund, "Vietnamese and Chinese Labour Regimes", p, 205; Hansson, "The Vietnam Railway Trade Union", pp. 160-161.
35. During the first seven months of 1999, 473 companies operating in Ho Chi Minh City were inspected (of which 35 were SOEs, while the rest were local private and foreign-backed companies). One of the committee's reports concludes that violations related to the signing of labour contracts, working hours, rest time, overtime payments, and the payment of social insurance are common problems in many private companies (local, and foreign). However, only one of the 473 companies inspected, did not have a trade union; Hansson, "The Vietnam. Railway Trade Union", p. 166.
36. In the new economic zones such as Tan Thuan near Ho Chi Minh City, the zone's deputy manager is simultaneously the head of the zone's trade union. Under such a personnel set-up, it was likely that of the thirty-four enterprises in the zone the fourteen unionized foreign ones were likely to be management-dominated; Chan and Narlund, "Vietnamese and Chinese Labour Regimes".
37. Narlund, "Labor Laws and the New Labor Regimes", p. 171.
38. Hansson, "The Vietnam Railway Trade Union", p. 161.
39. Tran Thanh Ha, Nhin lai cae cuoc tranh chap lao dong tap the - dinh cong trong cac doanh nghiep co von dau tu nuoc ngoai: Nhung kien nghi va giaiphap (Hanoi, 1999).
40. Interview with Tran Thanh Ha, Legal Expert at the Legal Department of the VGCL, 15 September 1999, cited in Hansson, "The Vietnam Railway Trade Union". 35. Narlund, "Labor Laws and the New Labor Regimes".
41. Alex Callinicos, Making History: Agency, Structure and Change in Social Theory (Cambridge, 1987).