Abstract
In this chapter, I turn to the modes of domination inside a Chinese garment factory, focusing on factory management’s changing workplace strategies. An increasingly heterogeneous garment workforce containing more and more young male workers drove changes in management strategies. I show that management uses an array of new mechanisms to control various aspects of workers’ labor power. It becomes clear by the end of my inquiry of workplace domination that Chinese management is resorting to softer, personalized, and non-coercive workplace strategies.
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Notes
- 1.
The following quote succinctly captures what Marx highlights as the problem of instability of a heterogeneous workforce under the capitalist mode of production: “[L]arge-scale industry, by its very nature, necessitates variation of labor, fluidity of functions, and mobility of the workers in all directions. But on the other hand, in its capitalist form it reproduces the old division of labor with its ossified particularities. We have seen how this absolute contradiction does away with all repose, all fixity and all security as far as the worker’s life situation is concerned. … But if, at present, variation of labor imposes itself after the manner of an overpowering natural law, and with the blindly destructive action of a natural law that meets with obstacles everywhere, large scale industry, through its very catastrophes, makes the recognition of variation of labor and hence of the fitness of the worker for the maximum number of different kinds of labor into a question of life and death” (Marx, 1976, pp. 617–618). See also, Harvey (2000, pp. 103–105).
- 2.
This paradox has been long addressed in the literature of organization theory and “the conflict” perspective in sociological theory continues to be controversial. For example, William Baldamus (1961) asked the same question in his Efficiency and Effort when he criticized the underlying harmonious assumptions in “consensus theory.” Baldamus asked, “Once the assumption of a harmonious and self-regulating system is removed, we are faced with the vastly complicated jungle of industrial administration that would seem to be without any system at all. If conflict is basic and unavoidable, how do we account for the apparent stability of employer-employee relations when there are no strikes, no grievances, no dissatisfactions?” [my emphasis] (p. 1).
- 3.
“The form of co-operation which is based on division of labor assumes its classical shape in manufacture. As a characteristic form of the capitalist process of production it prevails throughout the manufacturing period” (Marx, 1976, p. 455).
- 4.
It should be noted that earlier studies such as Lee (1998, pp. 116–117) and Pun (2005, pp. 145–150) were launched in middle-sized factories. Different sizes of factories as I discussed in Chapter 4 have different workforce composition in terms of age and gender. Large-sized factories have a more elaborate and complicated organizational structure with more ranks, grades, and departments than the middle- and small-sized factories. However, if we only focus on the commanding structure along a production line, usually different sizes of factories resemble each other.
- 5.
- 6.
“Manufacture therefore develops a hierarchy of labor powers, to which there corresponds a scale of wages,” “Alongside the gradations of the hierarchy, there appears the simple separation of the workers into skilled and unskilled” (Marx, 1976, pp. 469–470).
- 7.
As Chris and Charles Tilly rightly point out, employers are constrained by bounded rationality and multiple objectives when they run their business and try their best to optimize. More importantly, these multiple objectives are sometimes conflictual in nature. The aspects that management seek to control presented in this section also represent the conflictual nature of these multiple objectives (e.g., quality vs. efficiency; productivity vs. organizational maintenance; cost minimization vs. flexibility). See Tilly and Tilly (1998, pp. 107–111).
- 8.
For power, I adopt Max Weber’s (1997) definition: power is “the probability that one actor in a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his will despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which this probability rests.” On the other hand, authority may be defined as the “probability that a command with a given specific content will be obeyed by a given group of persons… The important difference between power and authority consists in the fact that whereas power is essentially tied to the personality of individuals, authority is always associated with social positions or roles … authority is a legitimate relation of domination and subjection. In this sense, authority can be described as legitimate power” (Dahrendorf, 1959, p. 166). However, I avoid using the term “authority.” As Andrew Walder (1986) said, “All forms of authority, according to Weber, involve specific normative and ideological claims made by superiors, ‘ideal’ and material interests in obedience, and a characteristic form of conflict shaped by the pattern of authority” (pp. 23–24). As I demonstrate in this chapter, workers’ subjection to workplace control is not just an imposition of “specific normative and ideological claims” made unilaterally by superiors. Maybe it is true in the Maoist period Chinese factory institutions in which structural and ideological power were persuasive. But it is not the case I found in the post-socialist Chinese workplaces. For ideology, I adopt Antonio Gramsci’s (1971) definition. Ideology, as cement for social relations, which binds individuals to one another, and connects one’s immediate experiences to each other, to the past, and to the future, is a “creation of concrete phantasy which acts on the dispersed and shattered people arouse and organize its collective will” (p. 126).
- 9.
These affective personal ties are not ideology. Recall that Gramsci’s definition of ideology is that ideology is the “creation of concrete phantasy which acts on the dispersed and shattered people arouse and organize its collective will.” First of all, these personal ties are concrete social relations, not “phantasy.” Second, there is no “collective will” articulated. Instead, exactly the opposite, exchanges between management and workers through these interpersonal relations aim to individualize and de-collectivize class relations.
- 10.
This form of hidden collective bargaining and “slowing down” resembles the “hidden transcripts” (e.g., foot-dragging) portrayed by James C. Scott (1990) vis-à-vis the significance of everyday life resistance and infrapolitics, albeit Scott’s study focuses on how peasants in Malaysia discredited the powerful in a village setting, while the context of my study is inside a factory (pp. 183–201). Certainly, this hidden form of collective bargaining at Pearl is a form of what Scott (1985) elsewhere refers to as “weapons of the weak.”
- 11.
- 12.
The new context indicates that workers’ marketplace bargaining power and workplace bargaining power have increased since 2010. On the broader topic in comparative perspective, see Silver (2003, p. 13).
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Siu, K. (2020). Power and Domination in the Chinese Garment Workplace. In: Chinese Migrant Workers and Employer Domination. Series in Asian Labor and Welfare Policies. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9123-2_5
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