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Elias The Gendered Political Economy of Control and Resistance On The Shop Floor of The Multinational Firm A Case Study From Malaysia
Elias The Gendered Political Economy of Control and Resistance On The Shop Floor of The Multinational Firm A Case Study From Malaysia
Juanita Elias
To cite this article: Juanita Elias (2005) The gendered political economy of control and resistance
on the shop floor of the multinational firm: A case-study from Malaysia, New Political Economy,
10:2, 203-222, DOI: 10.1080/13563460500144751
Juanita Elias, Government, International Politics and Philosophy, University of Manchester, Oxford
Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK.
ISSN 1356-3467 print; ISSN 1469-9923 online=05=020203-20 # 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd
DOI: 10.1080=13563460500144751
Juanita Elias
structures that reveal something of the masculinised nature of power within the
multinational factory setting (and, more widely, in identifying how ‘hegemonic’
notions of masculinity operate at the global and the local levels).
chapter from this Sixth Plan conveys the message that women are, first and fore-
most, reproducers and homemakers:
measurement and direct forms of disciplinary action. In this firm, for example,
work is organised along classic Taylorist assembly lines; monitored and measured
through the setting of targets (determined by industrial engineers); and subject to
intense surveillance by supervisory, training and quality control staff. It should be
noted that the exercise of power by managers within the firm is often subtle, indir-
ect and reflective of a wider set of ideological practices at work within both the
workings of the capitalist firm and the everyday practices of local communities.44
Power is exercised not only through the (gendered and ethnic) division of labour
and direct (Taylorist) forms of control (measurement, supervision etc.), but
also through a localised culture of paternalism which acts to tie localised norms
regarding appropriate female behaviour into the wider structures of corporate
control.
We can view recruitment practices as a primary mechanism through which
Taylorist management processes are neither ideologically nor gender neutral,
embodying both the needs of the business to secure low cost ‘nimble fingered’
labour and also the requirement for ‘docile and diligent’ workers to work as
sewing machinists. These skills are tested for during the recruitment process via
a number of different ‘dexterity tests’. In the case-study firm, one such test
involved the timing of workers placing marbles on a grid. Such tests are clearly
gendered, as recruitment staff commented that men rarely display the level of
manual dexterity necessary for sewing machine work. The effective impact of
these recruitment strategies is the crowding of women workers into the lowest
paying, lowest status jobs within the factory, not least because of the way in
which recruiters construct the manual dexterity skills displayed by female
workers as innate/natural and thus not deserving of higher rates of pay.45 The
firm also actively seeks to recruit women who might conform to the ‘diligent and
docile’ stereotype of the female assembly line worker. One manager, for example,
commented on the kinds of questions that they ask female interviewees:
We will ask a girl in interview something like ‘how would you feel
if your supervisor used a loud voice and makes you feel uncomfor-
table?’ The right kind of response would be that she would discuss
the matter with the supervisor later, but the wrong response would
be that she shouts back. We don’t want people like that. So you
would also ask questions like ‘at work, how would you feel if you
were told to keep un-picking the seam that you are working on?’
Conversations with recruiters and managers at the firm revealed that the job of
sewing machinist is constructed not only as essentially feminine, but also as a form
of employment that is well suited to Malay women’s supposedly natural skills and
abilities. For example, one (Malay) personnel executive involved in the interview-
ing and selection process suggested that Malay women in particular made good
sewers. During a tour of one of the factory sites, she put forward the suggestion
that, as women raised in ‘traditional’ (meaning rural, Muslim) households,
Malay women inevitably acquired a level of skill in sewing work that non-
traditional (meaning urban, Chinese) women did not generally possess. She told
me that in the interview process she always asked the women whether they
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Juanita Elias
enjoy sewing and what sort of experience they have had of sewing – with Malay
women most likely to answer positively to these questions. Such managerial per-
ceptions act to marginalise the majority of Malay women within the workforce.
They are viewed as unskilled rural women and will remain within sewing work
during their (often lengthy) tenure of employment. Managers at the firm
claimed that they do not target a particular group of people in their recruitment
practices, but it was obvious from observing the job applicants each morning
and talking with personnel staff that these applicants tended to be mainly
female, young, Malay (and sometimes Indian but rarely Chinese) and to come
from the surrounding rural areas. In fact, the firm does undertake recruitment
drives that are clearly targeted on the rural, demographically Malay, areas. For
example, it pays local bus contractors to bring in potential new recruits and
makes announcements over the company tannoy calling for workers (the majority
of whom are Malay) to bring in friends and family for interview. Table 1 presents
data on the ethnic and gender breakdown of the sewing machinists at the firm. We
can see that Malay women constituted 79.3 per cent of the firm’s sewing machi-
nists. Far from being a scientific/objective process, recruitment represents a highly
gendered and racialised everyday international business practice and constitutes
the key mechanism through which localised social inequalities and hierarchies
are reproduced within the workforce of the firm.
TABLE 1. Breakdown of sewing machinists at the case-study firm by gender and race,46 June 1999
These are incidents when lots of the girls are falling over and are
hysterical. Over the last seven to eight years this phenomenon
has developed – it’s always the young girls who are involved in
it and it’s not just a few of them either. Last year we had a spate
of hysterical cases, and even this morning a girl was hysterical
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Juanita Elias
and went to the clinic saying that she had seen an old lady in the
toilet. I think that it’s all in the mind, but just to be on the safe
side the spirit man, the bomoh, the ‘ghostbusters’ come in and
throw water around.
by the HR director of the case-study firm when he suggested that it is not just that
women (being the ‘weaker sex’) are more prone to spirit possession, but rather that
the ‘girls’ who suffer from these attacks are likely to be young women who do not
fit into the norms of traditional Malay family life.62 He suggested that they may
come from broken homes, be malnourished, be experiencing problems with a boy-
friend, or have had an abortion. More importance, however, was attached to women
who ‘are making no headway in their social life’. He suggested that in Malaysian
society getting married is ‘a critical issue’, such that ‘girls aged 23 plus in relation-
ships with guys and not getting married can cause problems’. During this conver-
sation, he went on to use the Malay word bohsia, meaning loose woman, to
describe some of the women whom he felt were particularly susceptible to these
attacks. He commented: ‘I see this hysteria as a state of anxiety for people who
have not fulfilled what they want in life and it reaching a level of them not
being able to control their mind. We use the word bohsia for these sorts of girls.’
Concerns regarding the sexuality of young female workers have been an issue
in Malaysian public debate since women were first recruited into the export fac-
tories in the 1970s.63 Such concerns led to the government launching a research
project looking into the welfare of new Malay women workers64 and also saw
both government and Islamic groups taking action to highlight the supposed
‘moral threats’ that women faced in the new factory environment.65 Although it
has been suggested that ‘the issue of cultural and social stigmatization of
women workers is no longer relevant’,66 it was clear even from my interviews
with managers that there were still concerns about the way in which entry into
full-time waged employment could have some form of corrupting effect on the
younger women employed in the factory.67 This suspicion of factory women’s
sexual and moral vulnerability plays a part in underlining the notion that
Malay women are not ‘by nature’ factory workers. It is yet another discursive tech-
nique that identifies Malay women as struggling to conform to the rigours of
factory production (and thus being unsuited to higher waged, less intensive
employment).
The way in which the (Malay female) body becomes a site for the preoccupa-
tion of concerns about the impact of capitalist development in the Malaysian
context features in the work of both Ong and Healey, with Healey suggesting
that Malay women are viewed not only as bearers of culture, but as ‘icons of cul-
tural anxiety’.68 Most recently, the Islamic opposition party PAS (Parti Islam se
Malaysia) attempted to pass legislation in the states that it controlled concerning
the kinds of dress that women were allowed to wear in the workplaces.69 This con-
troversy followed events of 1999 in which the state leader of the PAS-controlled
state of Kelantan, Nik Aziz, apparently made statements condemning working
mothers. Although commentators argued that Aziz’s comments were taken out
of context and reflected more the government’s desire to discredit the main politi-
cal opposition at a time of economic and political crisis,70 these incidents are
highly relevant because they indicate the extent to which debates concerning
the appropriate role and position of women in traditional Malay society are part
of Malaysian political discourse (in particular in debates between the ruling
party (United Malays National Organisation71) and its main Islamic opposition
as to who best represents the interests of the ethnic Malays). Worker resistances,
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Gendered Control and Resistance on the Shop Floor
then, feed into a politics of control within the factory and, also, outside of the
factory as the post-NEP shift of Malay women out of the rural household
context potentially upsets notions of a Malay Muslim identity.
supervisory employment that were both highly informal and based upon a level of
ethnic networking and acted to consolidate the position of Chinese men within the
upper echelons of the employment hierarchy.73 Chinese men in particular appeared
to be the main beneficiaries of this ‘ethnic networking’, for interviews with this
group of managers revealed that they had fairly average educational backgrounds
(especially compared to some of the highly educated senior Chinese women in
the firm) and had little in the way of previous work experience, being employed
largely on the basis of personal ties to a former (Chinese) managing director. Clearly,
the promotion of these kinds of recruitment practices has acted to prevent certain
groups from entering into managerial employment.
Whereas the firm targets relatively uneducated Malay females for sewing
machinist work, the recruitment for higher-ranking positions within the factory
has tended to favour Chinese employment. The ad hoc approach to recruitment
of this group is a real contrast to the highly regulated recruitment process for
sewers (aimed at securing the most efficient workforce possible). These practices
are infused with notions of gender and ethnicity, yet it is in the managerial and
supervisory jobs that recruitment practices come to reflect much more strongly
a localised culture of ethnicity. Recruitment for sewing machinists was tied in
with established global practice across the labour intensive (‘efficiency-
seeking’74) garment sector in which firms aim to keep labour costs at the minimum
whilst ensuring an efficient productive workforce. These efficiency-seeking
concerns (and the standardised recruitment practices that accompanied them)
have been markedly absent from recruitment practices for the more senior level
staff at the firm.
What these examples suggest is that a gendered global management culture
based upon ideas of efficiency and rationality actually breaks down when con-
fronted with localised masculinities. Hence women workers are subjected to
Taylorist patterns of measurement and control in corporate recruitment and
employment practices which are backed up by a local paternalism (including a
concern with the moral susceptibility of the young female worker). But, for
male workers, localised masculinities (often infused with a politics of ethnicity)
have proved more resilient in resisting factory control and/or in protecting the
interests of certain groups of male employees.
Conclusion
Connell argues that the ‘globalisation of gender’ can be understood in terms of ‘the
structure of relationships that interconnect the gender regimes of institutions, and
the gender orders of local societies’.75 Thus the MNC, as a globally significant
actor operating within local states and societies, can be viewed as a site of both
globalised and localised ‘gender cultures’. Recognition of this interplay
between the global and the local is central, then, to an understanding of how
both regimes of workplace control and the articulation of employee agencies
can be understood. MNCs play a key role in the construction of women as a
low wage, diligent and, more importantly, ‘docile’ workforce; yet this is not to
suggest that women workers in the factory simply accept the structural hierarchies
within which their labour force participation takes place. Hence this article has
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Gendered Control and Resistance on the Shop Floor
Notes
Earlier drafts of this article were presented at the International Studies Association Convention, Montreal, March
2004 and at the University of Manchester Centre for International Politics Research Colloquium. My thanks to the
participants at both for their insightful comments, in particular Sophie Hague, Philip Cerny, Lucy Ferguson,
Stuart Shields, Richard Jackson and Andrea Bertone. My thanks also go to Rorden Wilkinson and to the two
anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on earlier drafts.
1. Cynthia Enloe, Beaches, Bananas and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Pandora,
1989), ch. 7; V. Spike Peterson & Anne Sisson Runyan, Global Gender Issues, second edn (Westview,
1999), pp. 142–7; Shirin M. Rai, Gender and the Political Economy of Development (Polity, 2002), pp.
147–50; and Jan Jindy Pettman, Worlding Women: A Feminist International Politics (Allen & Unwin,
1996), ch. 8.
2. Diane Elson & Ruth Pearson, ‘The subordination of women and the internationalization of factory pro-
duction’, in: K. Young, C. Wolkowitz & R. McCullagh (eds), Of Marriage and the Market (CSE Books,
1981), pp. 18–40.
3. Elson and Pearson base these arguments on Noeleen Heyzer’s 1978 study of women workers in textile firms
in Singapore. See Heyzer, ‘Young women and migrant workers in Singapore’s labour-intensive industries’,
unpublished paper presented at Conference on Continuing Subordination of Women in the Development
Process, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, 1978.
4. Aiwah Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia (SUNY Press,
1987); Anna Pollert, Girls, Wives, Factory Lives (Macmillan, 1981); and Ruth Cavendish, Women on the
Line (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982).
5. Richard Falk, ‘Resisting “globalization-from-above” through “globalization-from-below” ’, in: Barry Gills
(ed.), Globalization and the Politics of Resistance (Palgrave, 2000), pp. 46– 56.
6. Dong-Sook S. Gills, ‘Globalization and counter-globalization’, in: Dong-Sook S. Gills & Nicola Piper (eds),
Women and Work in Globalizing Asia (Routledge, 2002), pp. 13 –31; and Marianne Marchand, ‘Challenging
Globalization: Towards a Feminist Understanding of Resistance’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 29,
No. 1 (2003), pp. 145–60.
7. The research presented in this article was carried out over five full days of research visits to the case-study
firm’s Malaysian operations in March and August l999. The principal research method used was the semi-
structured interview. Interviews were conducted with four senior level managers, ten middle and junior
‘executive’ level managers or ‘officers’ and five supervisory level staff (those employees who supervise pro-
duction lines); I was also able to interview the company’s (male) trade union representative. Although some
of these interviews were conducted in a formal setting, many involved being shown around different sections
of the factory floor; hence the interviews often served to provide me with observational data. In addition,
some of the research data highlighted in the article came from company documents that I was provided
with by the firm.
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Gendered Control and Resistance on the Shop Floor
8. Juanita Elias, Fashioning Inequality: The Multinational Company and Gendered Employment in a Globaliz-
ing World (Ashgate, 2004).
9. Georgina Waylen, ‘Gender, Feminism and Political Economy’, New Political Economy, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1997),
pp. 205–20.
10. Susan P. Joekes, Women in the World Economy: An INSTRAW Study (Oxford University Press, 1987);
Guy Standing, ‘Global Feminization through Flexible Labor’, World Development, Vol. 17, No. 7 (1989),
pp. 1077–95; Guy Standing, ‘Global Feminization through Flexible Labor: A Theme Revisited’, World
Development, Vol. 23, No. 3 (1999), pp. 583–602; and Adrian Wood, ‘North-South Trade and Female
Labour in Manufacturing: An Asymmetry’, The Journal of Development Studies, Vol. 27, No. 2 (1991),
pp. 168–89.
11. Peterson & Runyan, Global Gender Issues, p. 1.
12. This association of masculinity with rationality is rooted in the Cartesian method which privileges rationality,
dispassion and detachment over what feminist scholars point out are essentially ‘feminine’ qualities
(emotion, irrationality etc.). Thus it can be argued that discussions of globalisation are predicated upon
the construction of these gendered theoretical dualisms whereby dominant groups are described in masculine
terms while subordinate groups are feminised. Such a strategy not only sets up masculine hierarchies but is
based upon, and reinforces, a discourse associating men and masculinity with power.
13. Leslie Salzinger, Genders in Production: Making Workers in Mexico’s Global Factories (University of
California Press, 2003), p. 2.
14. Robert W. Connell, Masculinities (Polity, 1995); and Robert W. Connell, The Men and the Boys (University
of California Press, 2000), pp. 51 –2. For a discussion of how Connell’s writings have been developed within
IPE, see Charlotte Hooper, Manly States: Masculinities, International Relations and Gender Politics
(Columbia University Press, 2001).
15. Angus Cameron & Ronen Palan, The Imagined Economies of Globalization (Sage, 2004), pp. 89 –91.
16. A critique of this position is developed by Louise Amoore, ‘International Political Economy and the
“Contested Firm” ’, New Political Economy, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2000), pp. 183–204.
17. John H. Dunning, Multinational Enterprises and the Global Economy (Addison Wesley, 1993), p. 80.
18. R.W. Connell, ‘Masculinities and Globalization’, Men and Masculinities, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1998), pp. 3–23; and
Connell, The Men and the Boys, p. 51.
19. On superior employment conditions in MNCs, see Dunning, Multinational Enterprises and the Global
Economy, pp. 372–3; and UNCTAD, World Investment Report 1994: Transnational Corporations, Employ-
ment and the Workplace (United Nations, 1994). On the role of the firm in undermining gender inequality, see
UNCTAD, World Investment Report 1994, pp. 202–3.
20. Susan Halford & Pauline Leonard, Gender, Power and Organisations (Palgrave, 2001); and Anne Ross-
Smith & Martin Kornberger, ‘Gendered Rationality? A Genealogical Exploration of the Philosophical and
Sociological Conceptions of Rationality, Masculinity and Organization’, Gender, Work and Organisation,
Vol. 11, No. 3 (2004), p. 281.
21. Diane Elson, ‘Nimble fingers and other fables’, in: Wendy Chapkis & Cynthia Enloe (eds), Of Common Cloth:
Women in the Global Textile Industry (Transnational Institute, 1983); and Ellen Israel Rosen, Making Sweat-
shops: The Globalization of the US Apparel Industry (University of California Press, 2002), pp. 240–7.
22. Carla Freeman, High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy (Duke University Press, 2000), p. 102.
23. Maria Angelina Soldatenko, ‘Made in the USA: Latinas/os? Garment Work and Ethnic Conflict in the Los
Angeles Sweatshops’, Cultural Studies, Vol. 13, No. 2 (1999), pp. 319–34.
24. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Beacon Press,
1944).
25. See, for example, Fred Block, Post-industrial Possibilities: A Critique of Economic Discourse (University of
California Press, 1990), pp. 21–45; Richard Swedberg & Mark Granovetter, ‘Introduction’, in: M. Granovetter
and R. Swedberg (eds), The Sociology of Economic Life (Westview, 1992), pp. 1–28; and John Lie, ‘Embedding
Polanyi’s Market Society’, Sociological Perspectives, Vol. 34, No. 2 (1991), pp. 219–35.
26. Thanh-Dam Truong, ‘The Underbelly of the Tiger: Gender and the Demystification of the Asian Miracle’,
Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 6, No. 3 (1999), pp. 133–65.
27. Jongwoo Han & L.M.H. Ling, ‘Authoritarianism in the Hypermasculinized State: Hybridity, Patriarchy and
Capitalism in Korea’, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 1 (1998), pp. 53– 78.
28. Aidan Foster-Carter, ‘The Modes of Production Controversy’, New Left Review, No. 107 (1978), pp. 44–77.
29. Aiwah Ong, ‘The Gender and Labour Politics of Postmodernity’, Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 20
(1991), pp. 284–6.
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30. Stephanie Seguino, ‘Gender Inequality and Economic Growth: A Cross Country Analysis’, World Develop-
ment, Vol. 28, No. 7 (2000), pp. 1211–30.
31. For more detailed accounts of the role of ethnicity in the political economy of Malaysia, see J.V. Jesudason,
Ethnicity and the Economy: The State, Chinese Business and Multinationals in Malaysia (Oxford University
Press, 1990); and Rasiah Rajah, ‘Class, ethnicity and economic development in Malaysia’, in: Gary Rodan,
Kevin Hewison & Richard Robison (eds), The Political Economy of South-East Asia: An Introduction, first
edn (Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 121 –47.
32. Malaysian society is made up of three main ethnic groups: the (mainly Islamic) Malays who comprise 65.1%
of the population, Chinese (26% of the population) and Indians (7.7%). Figures are for 2000.
33. Christine B.N. Chin, In Service and Servitude: Foreign Female Domestic Workers and the Malaysian
‘Modernity’ Project (Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 171; and Linda Lim, ‘Women Workers in Multi-
national Corporations: The Case of the Electronics Industry in Malaysia and Singapore’, Michigan
Occasional Papers in Women’s Studies, No. IX (1980).
34. Hua Wu Yin, Class and Communalism in Malaysia: Politics in a Dependent Capitalist State (Zed, 1983).
35. Harold Crouch, ‘Malaysia: neither authoritarian nor democratic’, in: Kevin Hewison, Richard Robison &
Garry Rodan (eds), Southeast Asia in the 1990s: Authoritarianism, Democracy and Capitalism (Allen &
Unwin, 1993), pp. 133–58.
36. Frederic C. Deyo, Beneath the Miracle: Labour Subordination in the New Asian Industrialism (University of
California Press, 1989).
37. Elizabeth Grace, Shortcircuiting Labour: Unionising Electronic Workers in Malaysia (INSAN, 1990);
K.S. Jomo & Patricia Todd, Trade Unions in Peninsular Malaysia (Oxford University Press, 1994); and
Vicki Crinis, ‘The stratification of the garment and textile industries and labour movements in Malaysia’,
in: Gills & Piper, Women and Work in Globalizing Asia, pp. 154–68.
38. Noeleen Heyzer, ‘Asian Women Wage Earners: Their Situation and Possibilities for Donor Intervention’,
World Development, Vol. 17, No. 7 (1989), p. 1117.
39. Malaysia, Sixth Malaysia Plan 1991–1996 (Government Printers, 1991), p. 422.
40. Jamilah Ariffin, From Kampung to Urban Factories: Findings from the HAWA Study (University of Malaya
Press, 1994); and Richard Leete, Malaysia’s Demographic Transition: Rapid Development, Culture, and
Politics (Oxford University Press, 1996).
41. Truong, ‘The Underbelly of the Tiger’, p. 147.
42. I use the term ‘offshore’ in this context because of its prevalence in the literature on foreign direct investment
and the use of the term amongst the firm’s UK-based senior management who were interviewed as part of this
research. However, in discussing the notion of ‘offshore’ some care needs to be taken. Palan and Cameron
have identified ‘offshore’ as one of their ‘imagined’ economies of globalisation (locating offshore financial
centres and EPZs within this definition). Their notion of the ‘offshore’ is, however, presented as a powerful
ideational consensus around globalisation as an essentially business-led process—which obscures the extent
to which the ‘offshore’ is politically constructed in its origins. Importantly, in this article it is argued that the
management practices of firms can only be understood in relation to the societies in which they invest. In this
sense I do not wish to infer that the ‘offshore’ economy of the EPZ is in any way de-linked from an ‘onshore’
economy. See Cameron & Palan, The Imagined Economies of Globalization. The concept of the ‘offshore’ is
developed in Palan’s earlier work. See Ronen Palan, The Offshore World: Sovereign Markets, Virtual Places,
and Nomad Millionaires (Cornell University Press, 2003).
43. Angela Hale, ‘Technologies of Control and Resistance: New Technology and Women Workers in the
Globalized Garment Industry’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Vol. 2, No. 3 (2000), pp. 406–
8. Indeed such threats are indicative of the way in which the ideational consensus around the idea of the ‘off-
shore’ economy serves to legitimate business interests. See note 42 above.
44. Ong, ‘The Gender and Labour Politics of Postmodernity’, p. 285.
45. Elson & Pearson, ‘The subordination of women and the internationalization of factory production’; and
Juanita Elias, ‘Stitching-up the Labour Market: Recruitment, Gender and Ethnicity in the Multinational
Firm’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2005), pp. 90– 111.
46. I have generally chosen to refer to ethnicity rather than race. However, the use of the term ‘race’ in this table
is because this is what appears in the company personnel statistics the table was adapted from.
47. Salzinger, Genders in Production, p. 37.
48. Susan Ackerman, Cultural Processes in Malaysian Industrialization: A Study of Women Workers, unpub-
lished PhD thesis, University of California, 1980.
49. Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline.
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50. A study of spirit possession in Malaysian factories (and in a range of other locations) is also found in Mary
Keller’s recent book, The Hammer and the Flute: Women, Power, and Spirit Possession (Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2002).
51. It is rather problematic to view absenteeism as a form of worker resistance, given that absenteeism generally
reflected women’s position within the household as the primary child carer. However, absenteeism was con-
structed by managers as a ‘discipline problem’ and was thereby seen as a form of worker resistance.
52. Maznah Mohamad & Celia Ng, New Technologies and Women’s Labour: Case Studies of Two Electronics
Firms in Malaysia, Institut Kajian Malaysia dan Antarabangsa (IKMAS) Working Paper No. 5, Universiti
Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi, 1996.
53. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (Yale University Press, 1985).
54. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press, 1984).
55. Roland Blieker, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2000),
pp. 200–7.
56. Scott, Weapons of the Weak. For a wider discussion of the role of gender in Scott’s work, see Gillian Hart,
‘Engendering Everyday Resistance: Gender, Patronage and Production Politics in Rural Malaysia’, Journal
of Peasant Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1 (1991), pp. 93– 121. Blieker’s focus on gendered patterns of everyday
dissent focuses largely on women’s political agency in the former East Germany. See Blieker, Popular
Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics, pp. 160–70.
57. Marchand, ‘Challenging Globalization’, p. 154.
58. Nina Shapiro-Perl, ‘Resistance struggles: the routine struggle for bread and roses’, in: Karen Sacks &
Dorothy Remy (eds), My Troubles are Going to Have Trouble With Me (Rutgers University Press, 1984),
p. 194.
59. Dipak K. Gupta, ‘Everyday Resistance or Routine Repression? Exaggeration as Stratagem in Agrarian
Conflict’, Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2002), pp. 89– 108.
60. Ackerman, Cultural Processes in Malaysian Industrialization.
61. Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline, pp. 184– 5, 220.
62. See also Ackerman, Cultural Processes in Malaysian Industrialization, pp. 160, 188 for examples of
company managers expressing similar views.
63. Ariffin, From Kampung to Urban Factories; Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline; Amriah
Buang, ‘Development and factory women: negative perceptions from a Malaysian source area’, in: Janet
Henshall Momsen & Vivian Kinnaird (eds), Different Places Different Voices: Gender and Development
in Africa, Asia and Latin America (Routledge, 1993), pp. 197– 210; and Fatimah Daud, ‘Minah Karan’:
The Truth about Malaysian Factory Girls (Berita Publishing, 1985).
64. Ariffin, From Kampung to Urban Factories, pp. l –2.
65. This point is raised by Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline, and Ariffin, From Kampung to
Urban Factories, pp. 1 –2, and was also raised in interviews with a women’s NGO activist from the organ-
isation Sahabat Wanita (19 March 1999). It is apparent that concerns about the moral susceptibility of young
women workers have been articulated by nationalist groups within a number of states in which there has
been growth in female export-sector factory employment. See, for example, Caitrin Lynch, ‘The Politics
of White Women’s Underwear in Sri Lanka’s Open Economy’, Social Politics, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2002),
pp. 87–125.
66. Maznah & Ng, New Technologies and Women’s Labour, p. 46.
67. This point was also raised in a number of interviews and conversations that I undertook whilst in Malaysia—
for example, interview with members of the MTUC Women’s Committee, Petailing Jaya (12 February 1999)
and interview with member of Sahabat Wanita (19 March 1999).
68. Lucy Healey, ‘Gender, Power and the Ambiguities of Resistance in a Malay Community of Peninsular
Malaysia’, Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 22, No. 1 (1999), p. 49.
69. Jonathan Kent, ‘Malaysian city rules on women’, BBC News Online (World Edition), 5 January 2004; and
‘PAS chief makes about-turn on dress code’, New Straits Times, 21 March 2004.
70. Mazhah Mohamad, ‘Men foil as women toil’, Aliran Monthly (on-line edition), April 1999, available at
http://www.aliran.com/high9904.html
71. The United Malays National Organisation constitutes the largest party within the ruling coalition the Barisan
Nasional (National Front).
72. Cynthia Cockburn, Brothers: Male Dominance and Technological Change (Pluto, 1983).
73. Rasiah notes that this ethnic networking is common amongst the Chinese business community, reflecting a
sense of solidarity among Chinese businessmen who saw recruitment of other Chinese into their firms as
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Juanita Elias
some form of counter-measure towards what they perceived to be the discriminatory practices of the NEP.
See Rasiah, ‘Class, ethnicity and economic development in Malaysia’, pp. 10–11.
74. Dunning, Multinational Enterprises, p. 129.
75. R.W. Connell, ‘Globalization, imperialism, and masculinities’, in: Michael S. Kimmel, J. Hearn &
R.W. Connell (eds), Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities (Sage, 2005), pp. 71– 89.
76. D.S. Gills, ‘Neoliberal Economic Globalization and Women in Asia: Introduction’, in Gills and Piper,
Women and Work in Globalizing Asia, pp. 1–12.
77. Healey, ‘Gender, Power and the Ambiguities of Resistance’.
78. L.M.H. Ling, ‘Sex Machine: Global Hypermasculinity and Images of Asian Woman in Modernity’,
Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1999), pp. 277 –306.
79. Sally Theobold, ‘Working for Global Factories: Thai Women in Electronics Export Companies in the
Northern Regional Industrial Estate’, in Gills and Piper, Women and Work in Globalizing Asia, pp. 146 –50.
80. Hale, ‘Technologies of Control and Resistance’.
81. Gills, ‘Globalization and Counter-globalization’, pp. 13–31.
82. Amy Luinstra, Toil and Sweat: What Can be Done to Improve Working Conditions in Developing Countries?
(World Bank, 2001).
83. Ong, ‘The Gender and Labour Politics of Postmodernity’, p. 289.
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