This paper examines “the work” of philanthropy, volunteerism, and corporate social responsibility (CSR) in contemporary China. While these domains of social action are often understood through the idioms of “service” and “giving,” in this paper I suggest we should theorize these “practices of responsibility” through labor studies.  What kinds of labor subjectivities emerge with these practices of unpaid labor and private giving in the city?  The discussion is based on preliminary research with Dalian City’s Charity Federation, a local office of the national China Charity Federation that was opened in 2004. The national office is based in Beijing and was established in 1994.   Contemporary charity organizations and “charity volunteers” (cishan yigong) – what is called “modern charity work” – began to form after extensive flooding in southern China in the mid-1990s. The more spontaneous acts of donation and volunteering have been formalized in municipal agencies (e.g., Dalian’s federation office), which became more visible following the destructive earthquake in Sichuan Province in May 2008. In Dalian, the agency not only solicits charitable giving from private citizens, particularly companies (CSR), but also organizes networks of volunteers that fan across the city to help others. Federation officials and citizens describe these acts as ways to build a “civilized city” (wenming chengshi) and to help solve social problems that the government can no longer control. I have called the donations and volunteering managed through this federation “practices of responsibility” – practices that take shape in multiple domains, and often with a diversity of ends in mind. The paper thus considers how the complex intersection of regimes of responsibility (Maoist traditions of serving the people, post-Mao reworking of the state’s place in managing social relations, and contemporary practices of donating private assets and time through philanthropic acts) may be examined as the constitution of “working” subjects and bodies. 

Extending the scholarship on immaterial labor as a dominant mode of production, my paper uses the term “affective work” to characterize a distinctive mode of work deployed by cultural industries (i.e., the third sector or/and the creative industries). Affect designates a broad field of feelings, whether affirmative (such as success, happiness, love, tolerance, diversity, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism) or negative (such as shame, loss, trauma, melancholy, hate, fear). In the affective mode of work, while work itself occupies a central place in the entire process of production/consumption, affect becomes a subjective power or force that potentially defines and significantly transforms work’s meaning and value. My ethnographic discussion focuses on China and includes such examples as uses of the Internet and mobile media in daily lives, and volunteering or similar work that aims at serving others (including the poor and the disenfranchised). My analysis does not focus on one particular category of social groups (whether age, gender, sexuality, or ethnicity); instead, it examines the ways in which affective work both continues the historical process of proletarianization and becomes an important dimension of life in neoliberal practices that expand economic rationalism into everyday lives.

The year of 2008 witnessed the outbreak of the financial crisis, the downsizing job market, and the highest unemployment rate among college graduates in China. The “post-80” and “post-90”s generations have actively engaged in flexible employment to counter the challenge. This paper examines such an attempt by Chen Xiao, a 26-year-old unemployed fashion college graduate in Beijing, who started to sell her “remaining life time” online in 2008. For a small fee, Chen would do whatever netizens request (with a few exceptions) and blog what she did almost everyday. Her services, especially her charitable activities such as serving meals to homeless, aroused much attention among the public. Her online store had been enthusiastically sought after by young fans and spawned imitators. Through examining the “Chen Xiao phenomena” in relation to China’s booming immaterial labor market and emerging youth culture on the Internet, I argue that selling “remaining life time” is not just a stunt created by Chen to claim the curiosity of the public and to promote her business, but a new way of conceptualizing time and life where the materialization of life/time possesses the potential for extending the life/time of the privileged social strata but only at the cost of the “less valuable” life/time of the youth. Blurring the borderline between work and life, selling “remaining life time” highly appeals to young Chinese who are eager to stay away from both a socialist morality of working for the country and a market economy rationality of working for profit. With its emphasis on social responsibility and change, this new form of labor becomes a common ground for Chinese youth to claim a sense of solidarity, albeit mostly in cyberspace. While selling "remaining life time" enables Chinese youth, such as Chen, a certain degree of freedom to take control of their lives, this benefit comes at the cost of any job security and ironically reinforces the capitalization of the meaning of life that neoliberalism favors. 

It is a truism that the economic recession and financial crisis of 1997 have dramatically transformed South Korean society. One of the effects of the transformation was that youth has become adventurous, creative, and self-reliant. The popular media call them the ‘New Generation,’ the ‘I –Generation’ or “N-Generation.’ In this presentation, I trace how this young generation has been transformed into neo-liberal subjects. I will analyze three socioeconomic institutions that played key roles in this process: the market (professional education consultants), family (‘manager mothers’ and their highly motivated children who are incorporated in the labor force as consumers of private education) and the state (state controlled public schools who ‘care’ only about the best students who are willing to themselves to preparing for college entrance examinations). I will focus on the practices that transform college students into “hard laboring willing slaves.” I will assess these practices in relation to how young people are trying to make sense of them by coining concepts such as ‘loser,’ ‘the waster,’ ‘the surplus,’ or ‘top brand human,’ ‘Mother’s Friend’s Son (the ultimate winner)’, and ‘880 Thousand Won Generation.’ I will conclude that the polarization of the classes has raised class consciousness, turning some young people to seek alternative life spaces, such as social enterprises, and others to connect to the more balanced and ecological life where one can imagine new society and practice new forms of sociality.

This paper speaks about the ways by which new subjects are shaped in the labor market, the welfare domain, the education sector and the medical system, simultaneously and co-relatedly, through the implementation of the Education Welfare Investment Priority Project in South Korea. This new project was embarked upon for the purpose of influencing the widening class gaps through ameliorating the poor living conditions of students from working poor class back grounds -- gaps identified as having derived from low quality public education and the middle class’ heavy reliance on private education market, which has been inaccessible to the working poor. The project’s approach, however, has resulted in a number of consequences, some directly adverse to its goal of easing the consequences of class division. It has produced a conflation of supporting students’ welfare with counseling for school adjustment, an intensification of the medicalization of student behavior and identities as they are understood to relate to (poor) academic performance, a difficult and particularly exploitative labor context for young female social workers, and an increase in financial and moral burdens shifted to the shoulders of local residents and community organizations. Further, this project was operated through the use of effective labor on the part of social workers, without a long-term plan for integrating social workers into the education system. It offers no authority or leverage for these social workers to handle school teachers and parents in trying to ensure basic quality of lives for students, such as stopping domestic abuse.

In an era of economic downfall, turmoil, and flux, Japan is facing radical social transformation. As lifetime employment gets replaced by flexible and irregular work, the more “territorialized” ties that once bound people to entities like company and family are eroding as well. Increasingly individuated, mobile, and detached, Japanese use digitality—on cell phones, netsites, web circuits—to make affective connections with others and to construct “homes” that are, literally or figuratively, disappearing
elsewhere. In this paper, I examine a relatively new phenomenon of what has been dubbed “net café nanmin”—people, mainly young and working at temp jobs, who live nightly in net cafes. Basically homeless, such “refugees” are highly dependent on digital connections—cell phones, computers—to secure daily employment (which is, itself, highly insecure).  I examine
here the nexus between these precariat (precariously employed) youth and the digital spaces they inhabit in terms of affect, labor, and home.

This paper sketches the short-lived movement referred to as “enjo kosai.” Often translated as “compensated dating,” the term refers to the practice of high school girls meeting men for dates and receiving money for companionship that may include sex. The panic over enjo kosai in Japan (and in other Asian countries) invoked familiar tropes over the loss of female purity, greedy girls obsessed with brand names, and the failure of the family and school to guide young people appropriately. But it was also glorified as a form of female resistance and even empowerment in both the academic and sub-popular press. My attempt is to resituate this image and practice into the ethnography of youth labor. I would suggest that its true subversive potential lay in the fact that these girls understood something that the rest of us did not at the time, but that each successive generation of Japanese youth have learned in one way or another: that labor must move to the center of the new forms of capital, not away from them, in order to be productive, no matter how precarious this center turns out to be. I would suggest that enjo kosai reconfigured the spaces of Tokyo through one of the most elemental and productive forms of affective labor—sex work. 

This paper is based on data collected over 20 years, from girls who are now women, who once practiced enjo kosai. The impetus for writing this paper came from the paradoxical statement of one informant, now nearing 40 year old, who said in anger and disappointment, “Today, you cannot do enjo kosai, not like we did. Today, these girls are just prostitutes.” I try to unravel these comments by laying out some of the historical ethnography of enjo kosai as immaterial labor: bubble-era “branding” of high school girls, new smooth-space technologies (pokeberu or pagers), gender inversion through the production of new spaces of discipline and control (terukura or telephone clubs) and new forms of sociality among the girls in order to understand the implications of this recapitalization of sex. While enjo kosai was short lived, I try to situate it as an early (rather than aberrant) starting point for emergent market practice of youth labor that have continued through freeter, NEET and haken (temp workers), one this is depended upon both a pseudo-entrepreneurial recoding of labor but also upon unprecedentedly invasive market structures that were important in the reformation of subjectivity, sociality and affect.

In the now cult film classic, Battle Royale, Beat-o Takeshi, as embattled middle school teacher of one of the infamous “collapsing classrooms” of the 1990s, awakens his abducted student group, about to be forced into peer warfare, to give them a final morning message. "Life is a game. Get tough, battle, and survive to become adults of worth." In this paper, I discuss how this message can be read as a metaphor for the much changed conditions of life and labor in recessionary Japan. I argue that the "adult of worth" invoked here represents a new orientation to temporality and value production, an orientation that has been redefined in terms of the new limits to which the subjects of labor must adapt in 21st century Japan.  In stark counter distinction to the production of a homogeneous workforce of the pre-bubble period, those entering the labor force now are compelled to find and develop themselves, by themselves, beyond the former limits of the pre-bubble period. How these new limits are articulated, how youthful subjects are attempting to fashion themselves to become the new adults of worth in a newly dividing society, and what this might mean for new constructions of national and cultural identity, are the focus of this paper.

This paper will explore the discursive production of commodities through seemingly informal social activities such as cell phone communication, care work, and the creation of intimate relationships. While consumption has long been examined as a productive force in postindustrial consumer-driven economy, where signs, images, and meanings are produced and circulated, it remains little explored as a form of labor. Miranda Joseph has recently introduced the concept of consumptive labor, the labor that performatively creates meanings and values in social identities and exchanges them to accumulate capital. Following her lead and drawing on my own ethnographic study, I will explore Japan’s host club scene, where female clients pay male “hosts” to indulge their romantic and erotic fantasies. In the club not only the host’s affective labor but also the clients’ consumptive labor fosters a commodified form of romance whereby both sides cultivate their desirable selves —successful entrepreneurial men and sexually attractive women— and assure their self-values. Affective and consumptive labor allows service providers and recipients opportunities to become agents in the creation of their ideal selves, while simultaneously objectifying themselves as commodities on which their ideal images are projected for exchange. I argue this intimate relationship among labor, commodity, and subjectivity is a distinctive characteristic of global economic trends that are tilted toward discursive production of immaterial and affective commodities.

In this presentation, I analyze a recent Japanese phenomenon, what is called the net idols—young women who produce their own websites featuring personal photos and diaries. Many net idols earn an income from maintaining these websites, thus I understand them as new labor subjectivities that have evolved in late 1990s Japan in response to the deregulation of labor markets and unprecedented developments in new information technologies. Mastering cute looks and embracing cute behavior are key to the popularity of net idols. While the culture of cute has drawn considerable scholarly attention in recent years, it has been dominantly understood as a form of resistance to work-oriented adult society, a retreat to childhood—a space within which young women find redemption indulging in infantile play and passive behavior. By contrast, I draw on the Italian autonomists’ theory of the social factory to analyze the net idols’ production of cute culture as symptomatic of the ways in which the meanings, forms, and conditions of work have changed as intangible commodities (such as cute) have become the new center of economic gravity in the wake of growing economic volatility. Equally important, by analyzing the net idol phenomenon I also aim to theorize an emerging form of rationality (the foundational logic of neoliberal governmentality) within which individuals accept and even celebrate the end of job security as a marker of a shift from the postwar order of “working to find pleasure” to the neoliberal imperative to “find pleasure in work.”