Suchergebnisse

"This ethnography examines questions of value, labor, and morality underlining the translocal waste networks in Spring District, Vietnam. Engaging with waste as an economic category of global significance, this book provides an account of migrant laborers' complex negotiations with political economic forces to build their economic, social, and moral life from their marginalized position. It thereby makes visible how women and men seek to construct viable identities and meaningful lives in the face of stigmatization, insecurity, and precarity. It makes an important contribution to global studies of informalized economies and post-socialist transformations, adding to knowledge about how the forces of globalization blend with local historical-cultural dynamics to shape economic and moral lives."

Three decades after the economic reform that abandoned socialist central planning for a market economy, the Vietnamese state has been accelerating its modernising efforts. In 2009, a so-called New Countryside Programme was initiated to mobilise resources for developing a modern and 'civilised' countryside. While it brought together various existing development schemes, the programme's logics and practices indicate a new direction in rural development ideology. Although the state continues to practice political control and moral guidance, there is a shift away from direct intervention to enabling local people and communities to be responsible for their development. This paper uses narratives constructed from long-term ethnographic fieldwork with a migrant, waste-trading community in northern Vietnam to examine how the scheme works out in practice. They suggest that the state actively capitalises on people's mobility and entrepreneurial capacity through long-standing tools of socialist mobilisation. Local people are sceptical of the state's agenda, but find in it a social space in which to locate their social aspirations and the meanings of their actions. There are, however, limits to their strategies and aspirations, and thus to the goals of the New Countryside Programme itself, limits that are rooted in the uncertainties and anxieties of Vietnam's political economy today.

AbstractChina and Vietnam have experienced waves of labour and welfare reform since both countries shifted to market socialism, pursuing a development model that depends on the labour of millions of rural–urban migrants in global factories. Their similar development trajectories are productive for theorizing the relationship between labour and welfare. This article conceptualises the two countries' distinctive regime of migrant labour welfare as integral to a cycle of commodification that encompasses the overlapping processes of commodification, de-commodification and re-commodification of labour. After decades of collectivized labour under state socialism, the cycle begins with the commodification of labour through market reforms that led to mass rural–urban migration and the rise of the global factory alongside the dismantling of the former socialist welfare system. It was then followed by de-commodification attempts aimed at providing forms of social protection that offset the labour precarity caused by decades of labour market liberalisation. Despite the emergence of new universal welfare programs, the market has increasingly intruded into social protection, especially through financialized products targeted at the labouring masses who must compensate for the failings of public welfare programs. As such, these welfare regimes are undergoing a process of re-commodification in which the protection of labour is re-embedded into the market as a commodity to be consumed by the migrant workers with their meagre wages. The "cycle of commodification" offers an analytical framework to understand welfare regimes as a social and political field that keeps evolving in response to the changing global valuation of labour.

China and Vietnam have experienced waves of labour and welfare reform since both countries shifted to market socialism, pursuing a development model that depends on the labour of millions of rural–urban migrants in global factories. Their similar development trajectories are productive for theorizing the relationship between labour and welfare. This article conceptualises the two countries' distinctive regime of migrant labour welfare as integral to a cycle of commodifcation that encompasses the overlapping processes of commodifcation, de-commodifcation and recommodifcation of labour. After decades of collectivized labour under state socialism, the cycle begins with the commodifcation of labour through market reforms that led to mass rural–urban migration and the rise of the global factory alongside the dismantling of the former socialist welfare system. It was then followed by decommodifcation attempts aimed at providing forms of social protection that ofset the labour precarity caused by decades of labour market liberalisation. Despite the emergence of new universal welfare programs, the market has increasingly intruded into social protection, especially through fnancialized products targeted at the labouring masses who must compensate for the failings of public welfare programs. As such, these welfare regimes are undergoing a process of re-commodifcation in which the protection of labour is re-embedded into the market as a commodity to be consumed by the migrant workers with their meagre wages. The "cycle of commodifcation" ofers an analytical framework to understand welfare regimes as a social and political feld that keeps evolving in response to the changing global valuation of labour.

China and Vietnam have experienced waves of labour and welfare reform since both countries shifted to market socialism, pursuing a development model that depends on the labour of millions of rural–urban migrants in global factories. Their similar development trajectories are productive for theorizing the relationship between labour and welfare. This article conceptualises the two countries' distinctive regime of migrant labour welfare as integral to a cycle of commodification that encompasses the overlapping processes of commodification, de-commodification and re-commodification of labour. After decades of collectivized labour under state socialism, the cycle begins with the commodification of labour through market reforms that led to mass rural–urban migration and the rise of the global factory alongside the dismantling of the former socialist welfare system. It was then followed by de-commodification attempts aimed at providing forms of social protection that offset the labour precarity caused by decades of labour market liberalisation. Despite the emergence of new universal welfare programs, the market has increasingly intruded into social protection, especially through financialized products targeted at the labouring masses who must compensate for the failings of public welfare programs. As such, these welfare regimes are undergoing a process of re-commodification in which the protection of labour is re-embedded into the market as a commodity to be consumed by the migrant workers with their meagre wages. The "cycle of commodification" offers an analytical framework to understand welfare regimes as a social and political field that keeps evolving in response to the changing global valuation of labour.

"China, Laos and Vietnam are three of a handful of late socialist countries where capitalist economics rubs up against party-state politics. In these countries, sweeping processes of change open up new vistas of opportunity and imaginaries of the future alongside much uncertainty and anxiety, especially for their large rural populations. Contributors to this edited volume demonstrate the diverse ways in which rural people build futures in this unique policy landscape and how their aspirations and desires are articulated as projects involving both citizens and the state. This produces a politics of development that happens through and around the state as people navigate discourses of betterment to imagine and make new futures at individual and collective levels"--