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By bridging culture and institutions, this book aims to bring a more integrated and nuanced understanding of unequal work, with a view to casting fresh light on social change in China, Japan, and beyond.
List of contents
- Introduction: The culture of unequal work: Temps and giggers in China and Japan
- 1: Huiyan Fu: Old and new inequalities: Citizenly discounting and precarious work in a changing China
- 2: Saori Shibata: Gender, precarious labour and neoliberalism in Japan
- 3: Machiko Osawa and Jeff Kingston: Teleworking in pandemic Japan
- 4: Jude Howell: Organising around precarity in China
- 5: Arjan Keizer: Precarious work and challenges facing Japanese unionism
- 6: Akira Suzuki: Organising temporary agency workers in Japan: Two types of inclusive union responses
- 7: Nana Zhang: Negotiating gender, citizenship and precarity: Migrant women in contemporary China
- 8: Elaine Jing Zhao: Hierarchies, shadows and precarity: Cultural production on online literature platforms in China
- 9: Shinji Kojima: Making sense of inequalities at work: The micropolitics of everyday negotiation among non-regular workers in Japan
- 10: Emma E. Cook: 'I'm not a real freeter': Aspiration and non-regular labour in Japan
About the author
Huiyan Fu (PhD, Social Anthropology, University of Oxford) is Senior Lecturer at University of Essex. Her main research interests lie in precarious work, social inequalities, and critical management studies. She is the author of An Emerging Non-Regular Labour Force in Japan: The Dignity of Dispatched Workers (Routledge 2011, 2015) and the editor of Temporary Agency Work and Globalisation (Routledge 2015). Her work also appears in highly ranked journals such as Human Relations, Gender & Society, and British Journal of Industrial Relations.
Summary
By bridging culture and institutions, this book aims to bring a more integrated and nuanced understanding of unequal work, with a view to casting fresh light on social change in China, Japan, and beyond.
Additional text
This is an important comparative book. It explores the origins and persistence of insecure work and brings a focus on culture in a search for underlying values within different conditions. Crucially these values are not transhistorical, but remade in different situations and therefore historically conditioned. Both China and Japan have moved away from secure employment in different ways, but with overlaps as well. The book has important chapters on tele-working, gig work, gender, migration, union organising, and forces both producing and challenging insecure work. It is a key reading for comparative understanding of precarious work.
