What is globalization? How is it gendered? How does it work in Asia and the Pacific? The authors of the sixteen original and innovative essays presented here take fresh stock of globalization’s complexities. They pursue critical feminist inquiry about women, gender, and sexualities and produce original insights into changing life patterns in Asian and Pacific Island societies. Each essay puts the lives and struggles of women at the center of its examination while weaving examples of global circuits in Asian and Pacific societies into a world frame of analysis. The work is generated from within Asian and Pacific spaces, bringing to the fore local voices and claims to knowledge. The geographic emphasis on Asia/Pacific highlights the complexity of globalizing practices among specific people whose dilemmas come alive on these pages. Although the book focuses on global, gendered flows, it expands its investigation to include the media and the arts, intellectual resources, activist agendas, and individual life stories. First-rate ethnographies and interviews reach beyond generalizations and bring Pacific and Asian women and men alive in their struggles against globalization. Globalization cannot be summed up in a neat political agenda but must be actively contested and creatively negotiated. Taking feminist political thinking beyond simple oppositions, the authors ask specific questions about how global practices work, how they come to be, who benefits, and what is at stake. Contributors: Nancie Caraway, Steve Derné, Cynthia Enloe, Kathy Ferguson, Maria Ibarra, Gwyn Kirk, Sally Merry, Virginia Metaxas, Min Dongchao, Monique Mironesco, Rhacel Parrenas, Lucinda Peach, Vivian Price, Jyoti Puri, Judith Raiskin, Nancy Riley, Saskia Sassen, Teresia Teaiwa, Chris Yano, Yau Ching.

Toward Gender Equality in East Asia and the Pacific examines the relationship between gender equality and development and outlines an agenda for public action to promote more effective and inclusive development in East Asian and Pacific countries.

This book demonstrates the integral nature of gendered issues and feminist frameworks for a comprehensive understanding of contemporary IR bringing together the work of feminist scholars, teachers and activists into a coherent and accessible collection.

Working women everywhere face discrimination. Inequality and lack of inclusion is reinforced through regulation, policy, behaviors and attitudes. Although there has been progress in some countries, gender equality at work has yet to be achieved by any nation.This in-depth study examines the challenges faced by working women, their families and communities in ten countries throughout Asia and the Pacific: New Zealand, Australia, Japan, China, Cambodia, India, Sri Lanka, Fiji, Pakistan and the Philippines. Informed by the work of senior academics, policy-makers and community grouprepresentatives, and with a foreword by Elizabeth Broderick, independent expert for the Working Group on Discrimination Against Women and Girls, United Nations Human Rights Council, working women' s experiences are described and analyzed within a framework of four themes: demography, globalization, technological development and sustainability.Drawing on this wide range of qualitative and quantitative evidence, the authors set out recommendations for coordinated and context-sensitive responses specific to each country to improve the working lives of women and girls.

The concept of emotional labour has largely emerged from the analysis of organizations in the West. However, little has been written about the issue of what defines emotional labour and how it is configured in different cultural contexts. This book addresses this gap in the literature and considers how, and in what ways, emotional labour characterises formal and informal work environments in Southeast Asia.

Textiles in the Pacific, 1500-1900 brings together 13 articles which include both classics and lesser-known but important works related to the trade and production of textiles in the Pacific region, extending from the tip of Northeast Asia to the other end of South America and Australia. Collectively these articles bring out two central themes, as highlighted in the introduction. First, there is the leading role of textiles in linking up the economies across the Pacific in the era before the 19th-century rise of steam-engine-powered global integration. Second is the crucial role of textile manufacturing and trade in the early stage of industrialization for most of the developing Pacific economies after the 19th century. The volume also reflects both revolutionary shifts in paradigms and revisions of traditional consensus, and seeks to present a more balanced account of global trade and market integration in the early modern period.

Aid for trade has an important role to play in supporting Asia and the Pacific’s recovery from the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, especially for the region’s lower-middle-income and least developed countries. Aid for trade can help by supporting forward-looking trade and digital policies that reduce vulnerability, strengthen resilience, and foster economic growth. This report looks at how aid for trade should be modernized so it reflects new economic and trade realities including the risk of global value chains disruptions, preference erosion, the emergence of new digital technologies, and the rising need for regional cooperation.

This book explores the impact of neoliberal globalization on labour markets and the state in the developed and developing world. It focuses especially on the United States and the economies of Asia – in particular, India. Liberalized trade and investment are thought by neoliberals to be the best levers for raising labour standards, provided labour market flexibility and capital market restructuring accompany them. Labour market flexibility and capital market restructuring, at a first glance, appear to be complementary and symmetric policies. In practice, however, they might have very asymmetric consequences. This book addresses these issues, and it presents a comprehensive analysis of the key questions such as: How far is globalization a ‘real’ threat to the conventional systems of wage fixation, employment pattern, and basic rights at work in both developed, as well as underdeveloped countries? Are casualization and informalization of the workforce direct outcomes of deregulation? How do labour organizations cope with the volatility of the labour market? Are the existing labour market conditions and forms of labour organizations misfits in the globalized business world? Is it at all feasible to choose a high road that combines some degree of labour market flexibility with better labour standards? This book will be of interest to academics working on International Development, Development Economics, Political Economy, Comparative Labour Studies and Asian Studies.

Asia’s rapid economic growth has led to a significant reduction in extreme poverty, but accompanied by rising inequality. This book deals with three questions: What have been the trends of inequality in Asia and the Pacific? What are the key drivers of rising inequality in the region? How should Asian countries respond to the rising inequality? Technological change, globalization, and market-oriented reform have been the key drivers of Asia’s remarkable growth and poverty reduction, but they have also had significant distribution consequences. These three drivers of growth cannot be hindered because they are the sources of productivity improvement and betterment of quality of life. This book will be useful to those interested in policy options that could be deployed by Asian countries in confronting rising inequality.