Working Class Formation in Taiwan: Fractured Solidarity in State-Owned Enterprises, 1945-2012

by Ming-sho Ho

Overview

This book offers a fresh look at Taiwan's state workers in from the postwar period to the present day and examines the rise and fall of labor insurgency in the past two decades. Challenging the conventional image of docile working class, it unearths a series of workers resistance, hidden and public, in a high authoritarian era.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781349487462
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan US
Publication date:	06/05/2014
Edition description:	1st ed. 2014
Pages:	247
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Ming-sho Ho is Professor of Sociology at National Taiwan University, Taiwan.

Table of Contents

1. A Historical Institutionalist Approach to Working-Class Formation 2. Researching Taiwan's Industrial Workers 3. Politics of Ethnicity: Neo-colonialism and Revolutionary Insurgency 4. Politics of Partisanship: Party-State Mobilization and Ritualism 5. Politics of Position: The Perverse Effect of Internal Labor Market Reform 6. Moonlighting and Petty Bargaining 7. From Social Movement Unionism to Economic Unionism 8. Rethinking Institution, Solidarity, and Resistance

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Theoretically informed and rich in empirical findings, this book provides a vivid portrait of the inter-class and intra-class dynamics of Taiwanese workers and their movements. The book compellingly tells a story of workers' resistance under the authoritarian rule and the upsurge of their movements with democratization of Taiwan. Ming-sho Ho's work also makes an important contribution to comparative studies of labor movements, especially to the under-researched area of comparative studies among non-Western countries." - Akira Suzuki, Professor and Deputy Director, The Ohara Institute for Social Research, Hosei University, Japan

"This book truly illuminates some of the peculiarities of Taiwan and how it has been buffeted by a succession of intersecting external and internal oppressions. The beauty of this history of working class 'resistance' lies in the specification of the formation, fracturing, and periodization of the Taiwanese working class through a constant comparison with a wide range of other national working classes while at the same time recognizing its internal heterogeneity through a detailed comparison, based on careful research, of working class organization in sugar and oil refining." Michael Burawoy, Honorary Distinguished Professor, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan

"This book brings readers on a sociological journey of the formation, transformation, and reformation of workers consciousness in state-owned enterprises of Taiwan since World War II. In what is described as 'fractured solidarity', these workers in the more or less privileged working class sub-segment have exercised guanxi, ritualism, petty bargaining, and resistance so as to form their 'class awareness'." - Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao, Distinguished Research Fellow and Director, Academia Sinica, Taiwan

Editorial Reviews

Ming-sho Ho’s new book Working Class Formation in Taiwan is an impressive work. … There is much to commend the book Working Class Formation in Taiwan and Ho should be congratulated for producing such a scholarly effort. … I regard Working Class Formation in Taiwan as an important and fascinating work of scholarship. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.” (Robert Tierney, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Vol. 46 (2), 2016)

From the Publisher