The Global Political Economy of the Household in Asia

by Elias, Juanita; Gunawardana, Samanthi J.

• ISBN13: 9781137338891
• ISBN10: 113733889X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-10-04
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

The household has traditionally been neglected in studies of Asian political economy. While there is an emergent literature that looks at this relationship, to date, it is fragmented. The contributors consider how the household economy has increasingly been incorporated into development planning and policy making within both states and multilateral development agencies. They examine the social consequences of the tendency to view households as marketizable spaces, and explore how the household economy relates to broader structures of industrial production in the region. With case studies on Singapore, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, India, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and China, they provide a comprehensive picture of the centrality of the household economy to ongoing processes and struggles associated with the continuous economic transformation of the region.

Author Biography

Juanita Elias is Assistant Professor at Warwick University, UK. Previously she was an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute, Griffith University, Australia working on the project 'The Gender Politics of Economic Competitiveness in Southeast Asia'. Her research interests focus on gender issues in the global political economy and the political economy of Malaysia. She is the author of Fashioning Inequality: The Multinational Corporation and Gendered Employment in a Globalising World (2004).
 
Samanthi J Gunawardana is a Lecturer in Employment Relations at Griffith University, Australia. Previously, she was the McGill International Assistant Professor of International Studies at Trinity College in Connecticut, an Instructor in Labour Studies at the Pennsylvania State University and an International Research Fellow at Cornell University, all in the US. She has published on the working lives and organizing activities of women workers in Sri Lanka's export processing zones.

Table of Contents

Introduction; Juanita Elias and Samanthi J. Gunawardana
PART 1 THE STATE AND THE HOUSEHOLD ECONOMY: COMPETITIVENESS, DEVELOPMENT AND SECURITY
1. Women Hold up the Anti-Welfare Regime: How Social Policies Produce Social Differentiation in Singapore; Teo You Yenn
2. The State and the Foreign Relations of Households: The Malaysia-Indonesia Domestic Worker Dispute; Juanita Elias
3. Armed Resistance, Economic (In)security and the Household: A Case Study of the Maoist Insurgency in India;
Swati Parashar
4. Rural Sinhalese women, Nationalism and Narratives of Development in Sri Lanka's Postwar Political Economy; Samanthi J. Gunawardana
PART 2 THE HOUSEHOLD AS A SITE OF SOCIO-ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATION
5. Flexible, Exotic, Unorganized: 'Frontier' Women in Indian cities; Duncan McDuie Ra
6. Global Householding for Social Reproduction: Vietnamese Marriage Migration to South Korea; Lee Hyunok
7. Single Women and their Households in Contemporary Japan; Laura Dales
8. "Because We Have Husbands With Full-time Jobs . . .": The State, the Household and Home Care Work in Japan; Kaye Broadbent
PART 3 THE HOUSEHOLD AND THE GENDERED WORKPLACE
9. It's the (Household) Economy, Stupid! Pension Reform, Collective Resistance and the Reproductive Sphere in Sri Lanka; Kanchana N. Ruwanpura
10. Vietnamese Migrant Clothing Workers in Malaysia: Global production, Transnational Labour Migration and Social Reproduction; Vicki Crinis
11. Work, Employment and Welfare of Chinese Rural Women: The Impact of Household Structure and Implications for Social Policy; Fang Lee Cooke
12. Extreme Jobs and the Household: Work and Care in the New India; Elizabeth Hill
13. Waste-Recycling and the Household Economy: The Case of the Pune Waste-Pickers Response to the Changing "Rules of the Game"; Patrick Kilby
Conclusions: The Significance of the Household to Asia's Transformation and to Studies of the Global Political Economy; Samanthi J. Gunawardana and Juanita Elias