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As the first ethnographic account of Foxconn in Zhengzhou—the world's largest iPhone manufacturing base—this paper argues that a new labor regime features 'hegemonic precarity' has arisen since capital's move to inland China. Despite being offered formal contracts with long-term benefits, inland Foxconn workers choose a more precarious employment status. I argue that this surprising pattern is a result of the interaction between dynamics at the point of production and that of social reproduction. Through the mechanism of 'hoarding of time', Foxconn's management pays relatively high wages to a minority of workers while keeping the majority's wages minimal. Meanwhile, changing dynamics in the realm of social reproduction makes Foxconn workers, especially women with children, constantly struggle between work and the family. Working together, these factors have led to extremely high turnover rates, bleak prospects for labor solidarity, and the rise of 'gig manufacturing' in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines, from a Southeast Asian perspective, the issues of globalization, regulation and gender and labor regimes in relation to the recent papers by Sylvia Walby (2001, 2002). The comments are linked to the conceptual debates and empirical evidence from the UK experience, which I argue, is too narrow a focus if one wants to discuss a process as broad as globalization. The paper then looks at the processes of the modernization of the gender regime and its connections to changing capital/labor relations by re-visiting the nation state, the impact of European Union regionalism and the relative power of the gender regime. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The special issue contributes to the exploration of transversal solidarities counterpoised to an exhausted neoliberalism on the one hand and a xenophobic populism on the other. It tracks contours of a multifarious countermovement, traversing 'race', class and gender, driven by reimaginings of the common and the renewal of democracy. The emphasis is on the understanding of contending urban justice movements, welcoming communities and their liaisons in a multiscale (local, national, transnational) perspective. A collection of theoretically informed papers discusses cases from urban contexts of Europe and the United States, all riveted by schisms of class, 'race'/ethnicity and gender, occupied by the 'migration' issue and challenged by contending movements for social cum environmental sustainability. Exploring examples of social movements and forms of mobilisation in different contexts, the overarching aim is to retrieve options for transversal solidarities transcending identities while focusing on commonalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on qualitative interviews and fieldwork, this paper examines the risk factors that lead families into mortgage default and foreclosure risk. While neoliberal ideology and policy recognize lower-income families as at greater risk, in this paper we argue that immigrants and women experience particular risks – separation and divorce, the expense of remittances, poorer treatment in rental markets, and conflicting experience of ownership between the United States and country of origin. When these differences are ignored, social policies cannot respond adequately to the disproportionate risk that women and immigrants face to homeownership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much recent academic work on making sense of the changing public profile of the Muslim community in Britain operates within an explanatory framework that assumes a shift from ethnicity to religion and an accompanying shift from racialization to Islamophobia. A key limitation of this work, often grounded in media representations, is that it tends to be disconnected from contemporary lived social relations. In response, this paper critically engages with these debates, drawing upon qualitative research that explores a changing cultural condition that is inhabited by British born, working-class Pakistani and Bangladeshi young men. It is argued that this emergent cultural condition cannot conceptually be contained within a singular category of religion as the contours of the young men’s cultural condition are embedded within a range of intensified and ambivalent rapidly shifting local, national and international geo-political processes. Therefore in contrast to recent theorizing and research on Muslim communities and identities, the young men in this study critically engage with the contextually-based local meanings of Muslim, Islamophobia and racialization to secure complex masculine subjectivities. Alongside this, the article highlights that young men recognize that Islamophobia, displacing a notion of racialization, is a danger for their community because of the attendant invisibility of the current impact of social class within conditions of socio-economic austerity, which for them is a central element of their social and cultural exclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper addresses potential changes in the patterns of work and private life among freelancers in Germany's media industry (journalists, designers, software developers). In the first step, we analyze how freelance workers have been integrated into Germany's regulations for the labor market. Our analysis points to important differences between the professional groups. In a second step, we ask whether freelancers in the German media industry fit the picture of workaholics. Our interviews with freelancers show that only a minority has thoroughly blurred the boundaries between work and life, while most others still draw a clear line between the two. Findings on partnerships reveal that structurally equal dual-earner arrangements are widespread, but are not the only type of gender arrangement. An important group opts for structurally specialized arrangements based on traditional as well as reversed gender roles. In the final discussion we assess to what extent German trends in the changing patterns of work and life converge with those in the US and in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Advances in information technology (IT) have been critical to the USA for maintaining its competitive edge in the global economy, and the role of workers on the H-1B visa has been central in this process since the 1990s. The H-1B visa program, which allows US employers to hire skilled foreign workers on a temporary basis, enabled the recruitment of thousands of IT professionals, the majority of whom has been from India. Based on 40 in-depth interviews with Indian IT workers in the USA, this paper illustrates how the interplay between visa policies and flexible hiring in IT marginalizes this workforce. As a result of their fragile immigration status under H-1B visa terms, these workers are disproportionately employed as contract labor in an exploitative system of subcontracting. As an employment-based visa, the H-1B makes these workers dependent on their visa-sponsoring employers for immigration status and livelihood. The compulsion to remain employed and legal drives H-1B employees to accept severely exploitative work conditions, including wage cuts, deduction of commissions from hourly wages, lack of benefits, and frequent relocations. Theoretical insights from Asian-American studies, which foreground the historical nexus between US immigration policies and the gendered racialization of immigration, anchor the analyses of how current visa policies sustain the exigencies of late-capital. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Global restructuring is a gendered process. In transnational production, the creation and allocation of labor power is organized around and in terms of tropes of gendered personhood, and this has consequences for the way production works in general, above and beyond its implications for workers themselves. The paper explores this process through narrating the evolution of a local labor market in Mexico's export-processing (maquila) industry. In so doing, the account reveals globalization to be less linear, obdurate and inevitable than many theories suggest. In this context, managers gendered commitments, desires and understandings prove to be literally counterproductive, undermining industry-wide shop-floor control. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses work of an American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois. Topics discussed entry of Marxism and feminism bringing sociology from crisis to renewal; the canon as irredeemable it don't often sees race, gender and imperial order in which it born due to being Eurocentric; and idea of sociology as a contested ‘discipline' of competing and interdependent research programs.

Employing a racialized gendered lens, we explore the perceptions of status threat and victimhood among a sample of White Americans following the 2016 presidential election. Specifically, we draw upon such theoretical and empirical work to frame our analyses of the associations between perceptions of a white "victim" ideology and anti-Black Lives Matter (BLM) sentiments and how such associations may be conditioned by support for Trump and holding patriarchal gender normative beliefs. We propose that the BLM movement may be perceived as a "threat" to many White Americans. Furthermore, we believe Whites' anti-BLM sentiments will be enhanced by support for Trump, given his racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, and oppressive tendencies. Moreover, we believe that these associations will differ based on gender and beliefs in patriarchal gender norms, as White men and women are likely to feel status threat in varied ways. Mix support for our propositions and complex gendered differences are revealed. Implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on original survey and interview data on platform-based food delivery workers, we deploy an intersectional lens to analyze the ways in which the white working-class women who predominate in this sector of the gig economy interpret their work experience. With a focus on the gender–class nexus, we explore the reasons why these workers, especially mothers and other caregivers, self-select into this sector. These include: scheduling flexibility, which facilitates balancing paid work and family care; the opportunity to use previously unpaid food shopping skills to generate income, a neoliberal form of "wages for housework"; and the emotional rewards of serving elderly and disabled customers who cannot easily shop for themselves. Although these workers embrace the traditional gender division of labor and normative femininity, at the same time they express strong class resentment of both the companies they work for and the class and gender entitlements of their most privileged customers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we understand the trajectory of Japanese capitalism? This Afterword situates Japan on a broad canvas stretching across both the region and the globe. East Asia's regional dynamics figure prominently, shaping the trajectory of Japanese capitalism not only in the formative Age of Empire and postwar reconstruction, but also in the emergent Asian Century. An historical examination of geo-politics highlights imperial entanglements and both the routes and the roots of capitalist development in Japan. This discussion begins by setting the stage of post-World War II Japan, elaborating on the reproductive bargain that characterizes Japan's political economy, investigating the importance of national identity as it informs who can participate in Japan's economy, revealing the underbelly of contemporary Japan, discussing forces for change, and revisiting the methodological approach used to understand Japanese capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Migrant and refugee communities are at the forefront of highly feminised and precarious community sector work. Facing insecure labour contracts and contingent, competitive funding for activities, these communities routinely move between paid and unpaid work. Drawing on multi-sited and participatory ethnographic research and 30 semi-structured interviews with women of different African backgrounds living and working in western Sydney, this article explores the relationship between collective sharing practices and life as precarious workers. The sharing of material resources, information and support takes place beyond designated 'workplaces' and on a continuum of activity that moves between the formal and informal, public and private, productive and socially reproductive. This article uses a practice-based approach to foreground the social world of working migrant women. In doing so, it sheds light on the hidden, precarious work of an increasingly marketised community sector and the everyday and emergent ways that marginalised communities respond to precarious work under neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Working-class, Latin American men are increasingly removed from their families and exploited by the global market-driven for-profit detention system and then deported from the United States. Using gendered and racialized deportation regimes and neoliberal paternalism this research qualitatively analyzes the financial and emotional consequences of deportation for 17 U.S. citizen mothers who are part of a mixed-status marriage (primarily white non-Latina citizens, married to undocumented Latin American men). The state uses strict deportation policies as a mechanism to "protect" citizens from so-called dangerous criminals, most who have not committed a crime. This supposed safeguard suggests that citizens need to be protected from their own husbands and fathers. Citizens are suddenly cast into the role of single parent and sole provider and often rely on public assistance to replace their husband's income, in what I call the deportation to welfare pathway. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Precarization, in its form and consequences, varies across workers, sectors and geographies. The five articles in this special issue examine ways that workers have struggled with and against precarious labor in different contexts, from low-wage retail and service workers in Canada and the USA, to manufacturing and construction workers in India and China. In particular, they show that the role of the state has been crucial in shaping the terrain of struggle at the workplace and in the wider community. They argue that against all odds protesting workers have repeatedly exercised some power to influence employer and government policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although worker centers have reenergized immigrant labor movements in the U.S., recent research points to their potential deradicalization as they expand and institutionalize. This article builds on emerging critiques of the nonprofit worker center model by interrogating this organizational form through the analytic lens of governmentality, particularly efforts to shape immigrant workers' subjectivities, proclivities, and comportment to capacitate them for the exigencies of responsible citizenship. How do worker centers set out to make ethical subjects out of "illegal" immigrant workers? What technologies do centers rely on to redeem populations marked as criminal, deviant, and deficient? I explore these questions through a case study of a worker center in San Francisco, California, which serves immigrant day laborers and domestic workers. I focus on its "feminist wing" to highlight the technologies of empowerment and self-esteem aimed at reforming Latina immigrant women, a group historically deemed "neither ideal laborers nor ideal women." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2012–2015, baristas engaged in union drives at five cafes in Halifax, Nova Scotia. In a series of semi-structured interviews with participants in and supporters of these drives, it became clear that issues of gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity were critical in understanding why and how these union drives evolved: women and queer baristas experienced gender-based discrimination and marginalization at work; they were noted leaders in some of the drives and drew on activist networks to rally community support for the unionization effort. Finally, issues of gender and sexuality informed some of the baristas' broader economic analysis. We argue that the barista union drive in Halifax illustrates a framework for understanding how gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation inform unjust experiences in precarious workplaces and strategies for confronting them. A gendered analysis of the barista union drives underscores the importance of organized labor's outreach to young workers and, further, that engaging with workers with attention to intersectionality is an important organizational strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last two decades many studies have focused on female migrants’ transnational care practices, while those of stay-behind fathers have hardly been investigated. This chapter deals with masculinity, childcare and fatherhood of stay-behind male partners of female migrants from former socialist countries in Europe. A discussion of the particularities of gender regimes in socialist and postsocialist Europe will be followed by a presentation of three case studies on fatherhood and lone parenting. The article concludes with a discussion of “mothering fathers’” predicaments in a postsocialist situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An analysis of the international division of reproductive labor is incomplete without acknowledging the proliferation of state regulations in migrant-receiving countries, which result in restricting workers’ ability to maintain their own families and to exercise their full range of labor rights. An overview of trends in nations fueling the need for domestic workers and caregivers includes the social conditions for migrants increasingly fill this niche. The transnational circuits of care migration are constructed by the commercial and legal processes used to recruit and transport domestic workers. These are highlighted by analyzing the policies in the USA and United Arab Emirates to demonstrate the restrictions countries place on migrants seeking employment and the limited labor protections offered migrant domestic workers. Two otherwise different countries have adopted similar entry requirements tying migrant domestic workers to employer sponsored jobs in their homes. However, the USA offers fewer visa options to domestic workers and recruitment systems differ. Vulnerabilities faced by migrant domestics receiving visas are linked to these immigration policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the intersectional dynamics of gender, migration, and labor shape the trajectories of immigrant women into home-based elder care and how unions and community organizations mediate its conditions. Our analysis, which uses interviews with In-Home Supportive Services workers in California’s Oakland Chinatown, shows that the growth of publicly-subsidized homecare jobs has created an occupational opportunity for workers who face restrictive labor markets due to declining factory jobs and discriminatory hiring. Workers acknowledge the daily stress of working in low-paid, precarious jobs characterized by high levels of informality and coercive gender and racial-ethnic dynamics but the quasi-public nature of these jobs complicates a facile depiction of it as domestic servitude. Ethnic community organizations and labor unions open up institutional pathways to empowering forms of collective voice. Our findings contribute to the growing effort to understand how the social organization of care work both draws upon and exacerbates existing inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Looking through the lens of gender, this article engages with the opportunities, dilemmas and challenges posed by Sen’s framework to sociological research. Sen’s capability approach offers sociological research a dynamic framework through its concept of agency and its multidimensional approach. It also poses dilemmas, revealed in the tensions within agency and choice and the challenges in operationalizing Sen’s framework: adapting it to sociological models and applying it to empirically grounded research. Through conversion factors and processes, a central component in the capabilities approach, I reveal the potential of Sen’s approach for developing more dynamic frameworks in sociological research, with respect to (1) changes in gendered norms (how new norms are seeded); (2) how entitlements are converted into a sense of entitlement to make claims; and (3) how the capabilities approach can lead toward a more dynamic institutional analysis of welfare states. My contribution to Sen’s framework involves elaborating two mechanisms in the conversion of capabilities to agency freedoms and achievements: the sense of entitlement to make claims and the perceived scope of alternatives in exercising rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoliberal cut-backs in health-care spending have had numerous negative impacts on nurses, but we know less about how they fare when governments move from neoliberal austerity to reinvestment in their health-care systems. El Salvador is an apt case to examine for how a post-neoliberal health-care reform, launched in 2010 by the newly elected FMLN government, addresses the deterioration in nurses' work conditions caused by austerity policies. Based mainly on focus groups, interviews and participant observation conducted in the first three years of the reform's implementation, the analysis finds important strides for nurses, especially in increased hiring in the expanded components of public health-care, and the reduction of labor precarity in formal employment. But several problems continue to imperil nurses' well-being, reflecting, in part, a persistent devaluation of the care work that is performed mainly by women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to evaluate the relationship between the two assessments of subjective placement in the social structure – class identification and subjective social placement – in a top-to-bottom social hierarchy. In this article, the focus is on the association between working-class identity and subjective social placement. The source material is derived from the International Social Survey Programme from 2009 and 2012. The analysis reveals that women who identified with the working class to a higher extent located themselves towards the lower strata compared to their male counterparts, a result indicating that the female class structure may be more polarized than that of males. The results imply a need for more research concerning how women and men relate their objective class position to social status, as well as the relationship to different outcomes, such as subjective well-being and social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The racialization of Muslim Americans is examined in this article. Qualitative in-depth interviews with 48 Muslim Americans reveal they experience more intense forms of questioning and contestation about their status as an American once they are identified as a Muslim. Because Islam has become synonymous with terrorism, patriarchy, misogyny, and anti-American sentiments, when participants were identified as Muslims they were treated as if they were a threat to American cultural values and national security. Their racialization occurred when they experienced de-Americanization, having privileges associated with citizenship such as being viewed as a valued member of society denied to them. This article highlights the importance of gender in the process of racialization. It also demonstrates the need for race scholarship to move beyond a black and white paradigm in order to include the racialized experiences of second and third generations of newer immigrants living in the USA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Now reaching over 100 million families, the burgeoning microcredit movement has come to play a dominant role in the international development agenda. This is especially true in Nicaragua, where microcredit has supplanted the Sandinistas’ more radical approaches to poverty alleviation and women’s empowerment. Survey and focus group data from borrowers with seven prominent Nicaraguan microfinance institutions show that women benefit less than men from microcredit because they get smaller loans and they invest those loans in less lucrative businesses. Also, these women are constrained by household responsibilities. These findings call into question neoliberal notions that market forces can solve societal problems such as gender inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gendering the discourse of globalization will help to develop a better understanding of globalization processes and their consequences for women and men. I argue that gender processes and ideologies are embedded in globalizing capitalism in the separation of capitalist production and human reproduction and the corporate claims to non-responsibility for reproduction; in the important role of hegemonic masculinities in globalizing processes, and in the ways that gender serves as a resource for capital. I also discuss some of the consequences for women and men of these processes of globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]