Date: Thu, 5 Sep 2024
Time: 5:00 PM – 6:10 PM AEST
Location: Online
CSC International Research Webinars
The presentation will introduce a collective research program carried over the last 5 years by a group of historians and sociologists examining workers’ experiences in Japan, France and Belgium during the 30-year post-war boom and in China from the 1980s to the present day. The originality of the program is that it uses the conditions of Chinese workers as a starting point to revise the standard narrative on the homogenisation of incomes and lifestyles, embodied in the idea of a growing middle class, followed by the de-standardization of labour (Ulrich Beck 1992, Robert Castel 1995).
The presentation will introduce how the comparison was carried in the two main outputs of the program:
- An online exhibition untitled Workers of the World: Lives, Bodies, Struggles that gives visitors close insights into the reality of the working-class experiences. Visitors can access various written, audio, video, and image resources by exploring the three main sections (lives, bodies, struggles).
https://experiencesouvrieres.phl-lab.uliege.be/?lang=en
https://experiencesouvrieres.phl-lab.uliege.be/?lang=fr - A book to be published in 2024, Thomann B. & Guiheux G. (dir.), Comparing Labor in Contemporary China and in Postwar Japan and France. Precariousness in High-Growth Economies (Amsterdam University Press). The five chapters are thematic analyses blending in-depth micro perspectives based on extensive fieldwork in China, France and Japan with broader perspectives mobilising historical and political economic thought. The five chapters focus on payslips, workers’ domestic economics, workers’ demand recognition, arenas of negotiations, religion and ethics in the world of business.
About the speaker
Gilles Guiheux is Professor at the Université Paris Cité, France. He specializes in economic sociology of China. Over the last few years, he was involved in a research program on garment workers. He has recently co-edited a special issue of Le Mouvement Social (in English) on labour issues (https://www.cairn-int.info/journal-le-mouvement-social-2023-4.htm). Among his recent publications: “The CCP and the Chinese bourgeoisie (from 1949 to the present): from a first alliance to repression and contemporary mutual dependence ” (2024, https://doi.org/10.22459/CCP.2024.12), Contemporary China: 1949 to the Present (Polity Press, 2023). Check: https://www.cessma.org/GUIHEUX-Gilles
Fiona Gill (Moderator) is a Senior Lecturer and Discipline Chair in sociology and Criminology, The University of Sydney. Her research interests are women and feminism, political repression and memorialisation, as well as research methods and ethics.
