This book sheds light on the real experiences of women in different societies, exploring the impact of globalization through the changing nature of the labour of women. A comprehensive survey of women and work is provided by using case studies and empirical data collected from throughout Asia and also includes an analysis of Asian immigrants working in the US. This book is an invaluable resource, accessible to both undergraduate and postgraduate students of women's studies, labour relations, international political economy and Asian studies.

Women increasingly make up a significant percentage of the labor force throughout the world. This transformation is impacting everyone's lives. This book examines the resulting gender role, work, and family issues from a comparative worldwide perspective. Working allows women to earn an income, acquire new skills, and forge social connections. It also brings challenges such as simultaneously managing domestic responsibilities and family relationships. The social, political, and economic implications of this global transformation are explored from an interdisciplinary perspective in this book. The commonalities and the differences of women’s experiences depending on their social class, education, and location in industrialized and developing countries are highlighted throughout. Practical implications are examined including the consequences of these changes for men. Engaging vignettes and case studies from around the world bring the topics to life. The book argues that despite policy reforms and a rhetoric of equality, women still have unique experiences from men both at work and at home. Women, Work, and Globalization explores: Key issues surrounding work and families from a global cross-cultural perspective. The positive and negative experiences of more women in the global workforce. The spread of women’s empowerment on changes in ideologies and behaviors throughout the world. Key literature from family studies, IO, sociology, anthropology, and economics. The changing role of men in the global work-family arena. The impact of sexual trafficking and exploitation, care labor, and transnational migration on women. Best practices and policies that have benefited women, men, and their families. Part 1 reviews the research on gender in the industrialized and developing world, global changes that pertain to women’s gender roles, women’s labor market participation, globalization, and the spread of the women’s movement. Issues that pertain to women in a globalized world including gender socialization, sexual trafficking and exploitation, labor migration and transnational motherhood, and the complexities entailed in care labor are explored in Part 2. Programs and policies that have effectively assisted women are explored in Part 3 including initiatives instituted by NGOs and governments in developing countries and (programs) policies that help women balance work and family in industrialized countries. The book concludes with suggestions for global initiatives that assist women in balancing work and family responsibilities while decreasing their vulnerabilities. Intended as a supplemental text for advanced undergraduate and/or graduate courses in Women/Gender Issues, Work and Family, Gender and Families, Global/International Families, Family Diversity, Multicultural Families, and Urban Sociology taught in psychology, human development and family studies, gender and/or women’s studies, business, sociology, social work, political science, and anthropology. Researchers, policy makers, and practitioners in these fields will also appreciate this thought provoking book.

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.

Women's voices and experiences from around the world are brought to bear upon issues of globalization and democratization in this volume of strikingly original and diverse essays. From the Comfort Women of Japan to the Mexican maquiladoras, from the debt burdened nations of Africa to the 'new settler societies' of Oceania, the impact of globalizing forces and uneven democratization yields gender dislocations everywhere. This volume charts these trends with original research, first-hand interviews and surveys, and fresh theoretical perspectives. Gender regime change may be built on the understandings begun here.

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.

With thirty-two original chapters reflecting cutting edge content throughout developed and developing Asia, Women of Asia: Globalization, Development, and Gender Equity is a comprehensive anthology that contributes significantly to understanding globalization’s transformative process and the resulting detrimental and beneficial consequences for women in the four major geographic regions of Asia—East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Eurasia/Central Asia—as it gives "voice" to women and provides innovative ways through which salient understudied issues pertaining to Asian women’s situation are brought to the forefront.

Broken Promises of Globalization: The Case of the Bangladesh Garment Industry analyzes the consequences of the latest wave of globalization within the context of the Bangladesh garment industry's integration into world markets and production chains. Shahidur Rahman has found that although globalization has created opportunities, the process of globalization has also triggered a deformed development leaving Bangladesh increasingly vulnerable to shifts and tensions within the world trading regime. Bangladesh’s vulnerability, experienced as a constraining framework by all the major actors in dependent industrialization, is of particular importance to the progress both of workers and of Bangladesh’s industrializing modernizers in the garment industry. This book intends to respond to three questions. First, has the garment industry been able to counteract the vulnerability that women garment workers had experienced in their villages? Second, is the formation of a welfare committee a substitute model for unions when it comes to protecting women’s rights? Finally, how is a Least Developing Country dealing with both domestic and external pressures in its response to globalization? Rahman argues that in spite of the opportunities created by the growth of the garment industry, the key actors such as workers, entrepreneurs, unions, and even the government have become vulnerable in the process of the global integration of this industry. This is an ethnographic study that tells the story of the rise, growth, and demise of a Bangladeshi garment company. From a broader approach, an internal force such as the government of Bangladesh is not alone in being responsible for pushing the workers into a vulnerable position; external pressure on the state is also responsible for intensifying the vulnerability of Bangladeshi institutions and actors. Broken Promises of Globalization exposes the crisis Bangladeshi garment companies face as a result of the momentous pressures emanating from the regime of neo-liberal globalization. This ethnographic study, exploring a wide range of contemporary and recent development issues, holds particular relevance for students and scholars of sociology, political science, political economics, labor, and development studies.

This book explores the unstudied nature of diaspora among young Korean, Japanese and Chinese women living and studying in the West. Why do women move? What are the actual conditions of their transnational lives? How do they make sense of their transnational lives through the experience of the media? Are they becoming cosmopolitan subjects? Exploring the key questions within their particular socio-economic and cultural contexts, this book analyzes the contradictions of cosmopolitan identity formation and challenges the general assumptions of cosmopolitanism. It considers the highly visible, fastest growing, yet little studied phenomenon of women’s transnational migration and the role of the media in everyday life, offering detailed empirical data on the nature of the women’s diaspora. Drawing on a wide range of perspectives from media and communications, sociology, cultural studies and anthropology, the book provides an empirically grounded and theoretically insightful investigation into this evolving phenomenon.

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.