Download or read book China s Changing Workplace written by Peter Sheldon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-04-15 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the diversity and dynamism of China’s workplaces and of the wider labour market experiences of its workforce. Drawing on the authors’ extensive recent research, it considers a diverse range of issues and types of workplaces. These changes include: the continuing spread of market-oriented human resource management across public and private sector organisations; greater employment rights for workers; local diversity in regulatory control alongside the governmental priority of a ‘harmonious society’; persistent shortages of skilled labour co-existing with vast underemployment amongst the unskilled; uneven access to education and training across regions; and changes in union behaviour and influence. Unlike other studies - which tend to assume changes to management, work and employment are relatively uniform across modernising parts of the economy - this book conveys the rich variety among contemporary China’s local labour markets by looking at them, and the institutions that influence them, from the bottom-up. It focuses on other under-explored but emerging phenomena such as family-owned firms, the role of private services businesses, and the emergence of employer associations.

Download or read book Changing Workplace Relations in the Chinese Economy written by M. Warner and published by Springer. This book was released on 2000-05-31 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Changing Workplace Relations in the Chinese Economy attempts to deal with how China's economic reforms have undermined the 'iron rice-bowl' system which since the 1950s has provided both 'lifetime-employment' and 'cradle-to-the-grave' welfare for many workers, particularly those in state-owned enterprises. It starts by examining the background of these reforms and how they have changed workplace relations in the Chinese economy; it will also look at key themes relating to the role of trade unions and the management of human resources in both state-owned and joint-venture firms; finally, a number of illustrative case-studies involving industrial relations and human resource management are set out. A set of contributors, drawn from a wide range of disciplines and nationalities who are expert in these fields, have contributed chapters to the volume.

Download or read book The Danwei written by Xiaobo Lü and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The danwei, or work unit, occupies a central place in Chinese society. To understand Chinese politics demands a better understanding of this system. This volume provides a systematic study of the danwei system and addresses a variety of questions from historical and comparative perspectives.

Download or read book China s Changing Workplace written by Peter Sheldon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-04-15 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the diversity and dynamism of China’s workplaces and of the wider labour market experiences of its workforce. Drawing on the authors’ extensive recent research, it considers a diverse range of issues and types of workplaces. These changes include: the continuing spread of market-oriented human resource management across public and private sector organisations; greater employment rights for workers; local diversity in regulatory control alongside the governmental priority of a ‘harmonious society’; persistent shortages of skilled labour co-existing with vast underemployment amongst the unskilled; uneven access to education and training across regions; and changes in union behaviour and influence. Unlike other studies - which tend to assume changes to management, work and employment are relatively uniform across modernising parts of the economy - this book conveys the rich variety among contemporary China’s local labour markets by looking at them, and the institutions that influence them, from the bottom-up. It focuses on other under-explored but emerging phenomena such as family-owned firms, the role of private services businesses, and the emergence of employer associations.

Download or read book Working in China written by Ching Kwan Lee and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-10-03 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After a quarter of a century of market reform, China has become the workshop of the world and the leading growth engine of the global economy. Its immense labour force accounts for some twenty-nine per cent of the world's total labour pool but all too little is known about Chinese labour beyond the image of workers toiling under appalling sweatshop conditions for extremely low wages. Working in China introduces the lived experiences of labour in a wide range of occupations and work settings. The chapters of this book cover professional employees such as engineers and lawyers, service workers such as bar hostesses, domestic maids and hotel workers, and industrial workers in a variety of factories. The mosaic of human faces, organizational dynamics and workers' voices presented in the book reflect the complexity of changes and challenges taking place in the Chinese workplace today. Based on extraordinary and thorough field research, this book will have a wide readership at undergraduate level and beyond, appealing to students and scholars from a myriad of disciplines including Chinese studies, labour studies, sociology and political economy.

Download or read book Made in China written by Pun Ngai and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2005-04-05 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As China has evolved into an industrial powerhouse over the past two decades, a new class of workers has developed: the dagongmei, or working girls. The dagongmei are women in their late teens and early twenties who move from rural areas to urban centers to work in factories. Because of state laws dictating that those born in the countryside cannot permanently leave their villages, and familial pressure for young women to marry by their late twenties, the dagongmei are transient labor. They undertake physically exhausting work in urban factories for an average of four or five years before returning home. The young women are not coerced to work in the factories; they know about the twelve-hour shifts and the hardships of industrial labor. Yet they are still eager to leave home. Made in China is a compelling look at the lives of these women, workers caught between the competing demands of global capitalism, the socialist state, and the patriarchal family. Pun Ngai conducted ethnographic work at an electronics factory in southern China’s Guangdong province, in the Shenzhen special economic zone where foreign-owned factories are proliferating. For eight months she slept in the employee dormitories and worked on the shop floor alongside the women whose lives she chronicles. Pun illuminates the workers’ perspectives and experiences, describing the lure of consumer desire and especially the minutiae of factory life. She looks at acts of resistance and transgression in the workplace, positing that the chronic pains—such as backaches and headaches—that many of the women experience are as indicative of resistance to oppressive working conditions as they are of defeat. Pun suggests that a silent social revolution is underway in China and that these young migrant workers are its agents.

Download or read book Work and Family in Urban China written by Jiping Zuo and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-08-27 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines a three-way interaction among market, state, and family in China’s recent market reform. It depicts transformations in urban women’s experiences with both paid and non-paid domestic work. The book challenges China’s free-market approach and demonstrates its negative impacts on women’s work and family experiences by revealing labor commodification processes and work-to-family conflicts as the state abandons its commitment to public welfare. Using interview data collected from 165 women of three different cohorts in urban China during the 2000-2008 period, this study uncovers the revival of traditional gendered family roles among urban women and men as one of their strategies to resist market brutality and their struggles to balance work and family demands. The book also explores urban women’s non-market definitions of marital equality, and highlights theoretical and policy implications concerning market efficiency, marital equality, and the state’s role in protecting public good.

Download or read book The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace written by Mark W. Frazier and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-01-24 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: State workers in China have until recently enjoyed the 'iron rice bowl' of comprehensive cradle-to-grave benefits and lifetime employment. This central institution in Chinese politics emerged over the course of various crises that swept through China's industrial sector prior to and after revolution in 1949. Frazier explores critical phases in the expansion of the Chinese state during the middle third of the twentieth century to reveal how different labour institutions reflected state power. While the 'iron rice bowl' is usually seen as an outgrowth of Communist labour policy, Frazier's account shows that is has longer historical roots. As a product of the Chinese state, the iron rice bowl's dismantling in the 1990s has raised sensitive issues about the way in which the contemporary Chinese state exerts control over urban industrial society. This book sheds light on state and society relations in China under the Nationalist and Communist regimes.

Download or read book Factory Girls written by Leslie T. Chang and published by Random House. This book was released on 2009-08-04 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An eye-opening and previously untold story, Factory Girls is the first look into the everyday lives of the migrant factory population in China. China has 130 million migrant workers—the largest migration in human history. In Factory Girls, Leslie T. Chang, a former correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Beijing, tells the story of these workers primarily through the lives of two young women, whom she follows over the course of three years as they attempt to rise from the assembly lines of Dongguan, an industrial city in China’s Pearl River Delta. As she tracks their lives, Chang paints a never-before-seen picture of migrant life—a world where nearly everyone is under thirty; where you can lose your boyfriend and your friends with the loss of a mobile phone; where a few computer or English lessons can catapult you into a completely different social class. Chang takes us inside a sneaker factory so large that it has its own hospital, movie theater, and fire department; to posh karaoke bars that are fronts for prostitution; to makeshift English classes where students shave their heads in monklike devotion and sit day after day in front of machines watching English words flash by; and back to a farming village for the Chinese New Year, revealing the poverty and idleness of rural life that drive young girls to leave home in the first place. Throughout this riveting portrait, Chang also interweaves the story of her own family’s migrations, within China and to the West, providing historical and personal frames of reference for her investigation. A book of global significance that provides new insight into China, Factory Girls demonstrates how the mass movement from rural villages to cities is remaking individual lives and transforming Chinese society, much as immigration to America’s shores remade our own country a century ago.

Download or read book The Changing Face of Management in China written by Chris Rowley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-03-18 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Changing Face of Management in China explores the challenges facing managers in China, both across management functions, as well as across a range of sectors and organization types. This book adds to existing knowledge by examining Chinese management in the context of local political, economic and social traditions, and the global economy.

Download or read book Invisible China written by Scott Rozelle and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of how China’s changing economy may leave its rural communities in the dust and launch a political and economic disaster. As the glittering skyline in Shanghai seemingly attests, China has quickly transformed itself from a place of stark poverty into a modern, urban, technologically savvy economic powerhouse. But as Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell show in Invisible China, the truth is much more complicated and might be a serious cause for concern. China’s growth has relied heavily on unskilled labor. Most of the workers who have fueled the country’s rise come from rural villages and have never been to high school. While this national growth strategy has been effective for three decades, the unskilled wage rate is finally rising, inducing companies inside China to automate at an unprecedented rate and triggering an exodus of companies seeking cheaper labor in other countries. Ten years ago, almost every product for sale in an American Walmart was made in China. Today, that is no longer the case. With the changing demand for labor, China seems to have no good back-up plan. For all of its investment in physical infrastructure, for decades China failed to invest enough in its people. Recent progress may come too late. Drawing on extensive surveys on the ground in China, Rozelle and Hell reveal that while China may be the second-largest economy in the world, its labor force has one of the lowest levels of education of any comparable country. Over half of China’s population—as well as a vast majority of its children—are from rural areas. Their low levels of basic education may leave many unable to find work in the formal workplace as China’s economy changes and manufacturing jobs move elsewhere. In Invisible China, Rozelle and Hell speak not only to an urgent humanitarian concern but also a potential economic crisis that could upend economies and foreign relations around the globe. If too many are left structurally unemployable, the implications both inside and outside of China could be serious. Understanding the situation in China today is essential if we are to avoid a potential crisis of international proportions. This book is an urgent and timely call to action that should be read by economists, policymakers, the business community, and general readers alike. Praise for Invisible China “Stunningly researched.” —TheEconomist, Best Books of the Year (UK) “Invisible China sounds a wake-up call.” —The Strategist “Not to be missed.” —Times Literary Supplement (UK) “[Invisible China] provides an extensive coverage of problems for China in the sphere of human capital development . . . the book is rich in content and is not constrained only to China, but provides important parallels with past and present developments in other countries.” —Journal of Chinese Political Science

Download or read book Building China written by Sarah Swider and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-19 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roughly 260 million workers in China have participated in a mass migration of peasants moving into the cities, and construction workers account for almost half of them. In Building China, Sarah Swider draws on her research in Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shanghai between 2004 and 2012, including living in an enclave, working on construction jobsites, and interviews with eighty-three migrants, managers, and labor contractors. This ethnography focuses on the lives, work, family, and social relations of construction workers. It adds to our understanding of China's new working class, the deepening rural-urban divide, and the growing number of undocumented migrants working outside the protection of labor laws and regulation. Swider shows how these migrants—members of the global "precariat," an emergent social force based on vulnerability, insecurity, and uncertainty—are changing China's class structure and what this means for the prospects for an independent labor movement.The workers who build and serve Chinese cities, along with those who produce goods for the world to consume, are mostly migrant workers. They, or their parents, grew up in the countryside; they are farmers who left the fields and migrated to the cities to find work. Informal workers—who represent a large segment of the emerging workforce—do not fit the traditional model of industrial wage workers. Although they have not been incorporated into the new legal framework that helps define and legitimize China's decentralized legal authoritarian regime, they have emerged as a central component of China's economic success and an important source of labor resistance.

Download or read book Law and Fair Work in China written by Sean Cooney and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China's economic reforms have brought the country both major international clout and widespread domestic prosperity. At the same time, the reforms have led to significant social upheaval, particularly manifest in labour relations. Each year, several thousand disputes break out over working conditions, many of them violent, and the Chinese state has responded with both legal and political strategies. This book investigates how Chinese governments have used law, and other forms of regulation, to govern working conditions and combat labour disputes. Starting from the early years of the Republican period, the book traces the evolution of the law of work in modern China right up to the reforms of the present day. It considers the structure of Chinese work law, drawing on both Chinese and Western scholarship to provide new insights into its unique features and assess where the law is innovative and where it is stagnant and unresponsive. The authors explore the various legal and extra-legal techniques successive Chinese governments have adopted to enforce work law and the responses of firms, workers and organizations to these practices.

Download or read book Work Safety Regulation in China written by Jie Gao and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-31 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fatality quotas implemented in China’s industrial section and local governments are being used to promote work safety and therefore, reducing the number of work-related deaths. Given the controversial nature of this policy, Gao analyzes how the fatality quotas are functioning to aid the country in balancing economic growth and social stability. The book also examines significant implications caused of this policy’s implementation in the local regions, and reveals how local officials attempt to handle these problems. This is the first book to systematically examine the role of death indicators in work safety improvement in contemporary China, revealing insight into Beijing’s quota-oriented approach to policy-making.

Download or read book How China Works written by Jacob Eyferth and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-09-27 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spanning the whole of the twentieth century, How China Works examines the labour issues surrounding the workplace in China in both the Republican and People's Republic epochs. The international team of contributors treat China's twentieth-century revolution as an industrial revolution, stressing that China's recent emergence as the new workshop of the world was a gradual change, and not a recent phenomena led by external forces. Providing the reader with extensive ethnographic research on topics such as culture and community in the workplace, the rural-urban divide, industrialization, subcontracting and employment practices, How China Works really does ground the study of Chinese work in the daily interactions in the workplace, the labour process and the micropolitics of work.

Download or read book China s Peasants and Workers written by Beatriz Carrillo and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2012 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique and fascinating book explores three decades of economic change in China and the consequent transformation of class relations and class-consciousness in villages and in the urban workplace. The expert contributors illustrate how the development of the urban economic environment has led to changes in the urban working class, through an exploration of the workplace experiences of rural migrant workers, and of the plight of the old working class in the state owned sector. They address questions on the extent to which migrant workers have become a new working class, are absorbed into the old working class, or simply remain as migrant workers. Changes in class relations in villages in the urban periphery _ where the urbanization drive and in-migration has lead to a new local politics of class differentiation _ are also raised. Presenting new, original field research detailing social and socio-economic change in China, this book will prove invaluable to scholars, researchers and postgraduate students with an interest Asian studies, public policy, regional and urban studies, political science or sociology.

Download or read book Looking for Work in Post Socialist China written by Feng Xu and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unemployment is one of the most politically explosive issues in China and has gained further prominence as a result of the present global financial crisis. The novelty, urgency, and complexity of Chinese unemployment have compelled the government to experiment with policy initiatives that originate in the West. This book argues that although China is not a liberal democracy, it has turned to neo-liberal forms of governance to deal with unemployment, which now function alongside pre-existing Chinese modes of governance. This book examines the initiatives which represent China’s attempt to institutionalize and humanize its approach to governance: these initiatives include training programmes; counselling; a web-based national labour-market information network; insurance; and using community (shequ) organizations as the base for new mechanisms of governance and informal job generation. Based on extensive original research including semi-structured interviews, the book discusses the ways in which the government combines the new techniques with old campaign-style policy techniques. The author argues that these multiple modes of governance make the state's power visible in the new Chinese labour market, and at the same time run the risk of policy incoherence or even failure.