Arne L. Kalleberg, Kevin Hewison and Kwang-Yeong Shin. 2021. Precarious Asia: Global Capitalism and Work in Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ISBN: 978-1-5036-1025-5 (hardcover).
Precarious Asia assesses the role of global and domestic factors in shaping precarious work and its outcomes in Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia as they represent a range of Asian political democracies and capitalist economies: Japan and South Korea are now developed and mature economies, while Indonesia remains a lower-middle income country.
With their established backgrounds in Asian studies, comparative political economy, social stratification and inequality, and the sociology of work, the authors yield compelling insights into the extent and consequences of precarious work, examining the dynamics underlying its rise. By linking macrostructural policies to both the mesostructure of labor relations and the microstructure of outcomes experienced by individual workers, they reveal the interplay of forces that generate precarious work, and in doing so, synthesize historical and institutional analyses with the political economy of capitalism and class relations. This book reveals how precarious work ultimately contributes to increasingly high levels of inequality and condemns segments of the population to chronic poverty and many more to livelihood and income vulnerability.
“Precarious Asia fills a much-needed gap, challenging mainstream economics by combining historical institutional and critical political economy approaches to understand how national institutions structure precarious employment and its outcomes.”
– Leah F. Vosko, Professor and Canada Research Chair in the Political Economy of Gender & Work, York University
“An insightful and fascinating exploration of the drivers of precarious work in Asia, and of the variable, politically contested ways in which governments have sought to balance the competing agendas of firms requiring employment flexibility and of workers demanding basic social and livelihood protections.”
– Frederic C. Deyo, Bartle Professor of Sociology, SUNY Binghamton
“Precarious Asia stakes out a commanding perspective situating country cases on a broad canvas that stretches across both the region and the globe. The authors open the field of vision to expose the scarred landscapes of labor relations and deep social fault-lines of precarity.”
– Heidi Gottfried, Associate Professor of Sociology, Wayne State University
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Precarious Work in Comparative Perspective
2. Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia
3. Global Capitalism, Domestic Policies, and Precarious Work
4. Dualisms of Precarious Work: Nonstandard Work, the Informal Economy, and Self-Employment
5. Precarious Work, Wages, and Social Protections
6. Precarious Work: Politics and Policies
Conclusion
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