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Chapter Five analyzes the changing factory regime at Nawon, caused primarily by the incessant demand of the global garment industry to cut production costs. The interethnic circumstances of China and the management’s non-Western origins influenced the management’s responses to the pressure of cutting labor costs and the formation of factory regimes. Management’s unique ideas of the Korean nation and its national superiority over Han-Chinese contributed to the management’s collaborative relationship with Korean-Chinese employees. The chapter then examines the transformation of factory regime from one that relied on the collaborative relationship between management and Korean-Chinese to the other that increasingly depended on the growing number of Han-Chinese managerial staff. The new factory regime was charismatic-paternalist since its operation was guaranteed both by the charismatic leadership of a plant manager and by the subtle paternalistic relationships between the plant manager and Han-Chinese workers.

Discusses how the non-western origin of Nawon, a multinational garment corporation located in Qingdao, China, contributed to creating a specific form of locally embedded globalization. The Nawon management’s argument for the superiority of global or universal managerial principles and practices hid its local characteristics that originated from the historical memories, politics, and culture of South Korea and China. From the main thread, this chapter introduces concepts of culture, ethnicity, nationality, and post-socialism to discuss the construction of a managerial hierarchy and workforce divisions at the workplace. The incessant pressure from the global chain of garment production to reduce production costs shaped and changed the factory regime of the company, which was caught in a web of collusion between global capital and local government and struggled to maintain its business in China. This chapter also discusses the conditions of (im)possibility of workers’ resistance against the factory regime.

This chapter discusses the state of the current research on workplace consent in authoritarian states. It reviews the existing empirical studies of factory regimes in Russia and China and existing theories of workplace consent. The core of the chapter focuses on developing the theoretical approach used in the study. This approach centers on three consent-generation mechanisms: socialization, incentives, and participation. Taken together, these mechanisms are referred to as the factory regime. Based on the assumption that participation mechanisms are absent or underdeveloped in authoritarian societies, the chapter develops the thesis that, to generate consent and compensate for the lack of participation, authoritarian societies need to rely on very intensive organizational socialization processes (including social engineering) and material incentives.

This chapter summarizes the findings of the study. It takes the empirical results of Chapter 3 as its point of departure; although the institutional environment in Russia formally provides better possibilities for the workforce to articulate its demands than is the case in China, at the same time, the Russian automobile plants have significantly greater problems with the generation of consent. This chapter reveals a somewhat surprising face of factory regimes in the Chinese plants, one that combines controlled employee voice, extensive socialization activities, and at the same time, a strong competitive orientation. By contrast, the findings on the Russian plants show the consequences of a system that, while formally accepting employee voice, also creates a culture shaped by corruption, mistrust, and punishment-oriented leadership styles. The chapter concludes with a look ahead and discusses what the consent-generating micromechanisms analyzed here reveal about the functioning of the two societies and economies.

How is workplace consent created in authoritarian countries that limit participation rights, not only in the political sphere, but also in the workplace? Although authoritarian countries make up a large proportion of the states in existence today, there are few comparative studies of work in authoritarian societies. This introduction presents the study’s main questions and research design as well as the theories, methods, and data used in the analysis. It introduces the concept of consent and discusses the particularities of consent generation in authoritarian societies and workplaces. It compares Russia and China as the world’s two biggest authoritarian countries and reviews their similarities—mainly their shared post-communist past—and differences regarding labor regulation and socioeconomic development.

This chapter enquires into the working lives of women, apparel park workers, in two firms in an export promotion industrial park in southern Kerala, and examines how these workers organized around a very local set of concerns and formed their own association. Supported by the labour geography framework, this chapter analyses how spatial practices of labour shape the economic geography of capitalism, by looking into a model not at a global but at a very local scale of organization and showing its effectiveness while confronting social actors organized at global or extra-local scales. Questioning global stereotypes on economic responses to globalization, I argue that labour becomes actively involved in the very process of globalization and the expansion of capital.