Issues and Themes
Concluding the decade of the emerging Asian economies (1980-1990) the economic recession and financial crisis of 1997-1998 have led to broad-scale market liberalization in East Asia. Anthropologists have offered revealing analyses of the ways in which neoliberal reforms have further marginalized such already disenfranchised segments of the population as migrant workers or women (Ong 2006, Ngai 2005). This symposium will focus on a demographic group—youth—that remained relatively underexplored despite the fact that young people have perhaps been the most dramatically affected by the deregulation of national economies in East Asia. The participants of the symposium will analyze youth unemployment and underemployment that they understand not so much as social anomalies, but as the new faces of labor. More specifically, the presentations will examine these trends as symptomatic of transformations (1) in the forms and conditions of work, (2) in subjectivity, and (3) in forms of sociality and expressions of solidarity in the wake of neoliberal restructuring in East Asia. As opportunities for full-time and secure employment started shrinking in the 1990s, East Asian governments began mobilizing young people into accepting precarious labor conditions by stressing the ethical self-responsibility of individuals. Scholars have lamented that in the condition in which irregular employment was becoming the dominant form of labor and the only available work option for a growing segment of the population, work started losing its meaning for the workers. The main reason for this, they contended, was that irregular work tended to exclude workers from opportunities to develop their skills and fulfill their human potential (Genda 2005, Song 2007).
By contrast, this symposium draws inspiration from the idea that neoliberal restructuring and labor market deregulation have not only disempowered youth in the realm of work, but they have also opened up new possibilities for young people to embrace work as a source of self-fulfillment. While we will remain attentive to the practices various socioeconomic institutions employed to anchor and naturalize the place of youth in flexible labor regimes, the presentations will prioritize an ethnographic approach to disclose how young people experience neoliberal restructuring. They will investigate what it means for youth to become part of the workforce in a context in which forces of economic deregulation simultaneously narrow down opportunities for secure employment and unleash possibilities for new forms of work that are less predictable but more conducive of individualism and creativity.
By investigating youth unemployment and underemployment, the symposium will contribute fresh insights to three areas—themes of broader theoretical significance that emerge with strikingly similar relevance in various East Asian contexts. First, this conference will offer a new understanding of how the forms and conditions of work are changing in an era in which growing pressures to participate in a post-Fordist global market competition force national economies to adopt flexible systems of accumulation. The sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato has argued that in an era in which providing service is at the heart of economic production, a new form of labor—immaterial labor—had grown to be one of the highest value-producing forms of labor (1996). However, the tendency that immaterial labor is coming to occupy a privileged position in the hierarchy of laboring forms is not confined to Japan and South Korea where the service industries have long served as the motor of the economy. This new form of labor is also coming to complement conventional types of work (e.g., factory work) in China—a country that is becoming a new preferred location to which to outsource labor, for instance, for software firms headquartered in the advanced capitalist world. An important aspect of immaterial labor is that it is gradually weakening an organizational model of accumulation that was dependent on the concentration of production in offices or factories and replacing it with a new organizational model of production—the network (Castells 1996). One of the goals of this symposium it to explore how network production capitalizes on young people’s willingness to adopt mobile lifestyles while simultaneously locking them in a state of mobility by driving them to respond to (and in many cases even to trail) work opportunities capriciously opened up and shut down by mobile capital.
Second, the symposium aims to infuse fresh blood into scholarly discussions of the impact of neoliberal restructuring on the transformation of subjectivity. Flexible accumulation requires a new type of worker capable of quick adaptability, self-sufficiency, flexibility, and creativity—demands that young people are more prepared to satisfy. As the capitalist industries increasingly engage them in the production of what they consume, it is more true now than ever that young people are used to being incorporated in the labor force before they formally began to work in it (Allison 2006). At the same time, scholarship on work has highlighted that labor conditions are never exclusively dehumanizing and alienating (Constable 2007 [1997], Ngai 2005). For example, factory work in Chinese free trade zones is not merely a strategy for young women to evade an undesirable village life or to meet economic necessity. It is also a chance for self-exploration and self-growth. Similarly, in Japan and South Korea, young people often willingly trade their parents’ lifelong commitment to large corporations for more flexible types of work that they view as more supportive of their talent and human potential. This symposium draws on the idea that as earlier systems of job security are eroding and labor markets are being deregulated, work becomes a privileged site where identity is constructed. In these contexts, young people create work opportunities that they pursue not so much as a bare necessity to sustain themselves, but as projects to define who they are.
Third, the dominant discursive emphasis of neoliberal forms governance on individualism does not only isolate young people from one another, but it also marginalizes older ways of communicating a sense of solidarity and belonging along affiliations of identity such as class or citizenship. This symposium will examine how transformations in the forms and conditions of work under neoliberal conditions drive young people to articulate new forms of sociality and expressions of solidarity. A point of convergence across various East Asian contexts is that neoliberal reforms seem to have successfully devalorized notions of class, class struggle, and class-consciousness. For instance, the formation of free trade zones in China has led to the massive transformation of rural young women into an industrial working class. However, a new Chinese working class could not be born because these workers entered the laboring world precisely when the departure from the Maoist period sentenced the language of class to death (Ngai 2005). Similarly, as nearly one hundred percent of the population identified as middle class in postwar Japan and South Korea, youths were unable to capitalize on the language of class (and leftist politics more generally), because the concept of class had become emptied of meaning by the time they entered the labor market. Citizenship is an equally problematic concept for youth to draw on to make sense of the changes in their lives. Aihwa Ong has argued that in neoliberal conditions citizenship is increasingly detached from political membership in national communities, as rights and benefits are redistributed to bearers of marketable talents and denied to those who are judged to lack them (2006). But does the willingness of young people to take risks and engage in flexible employment translate into greater entitlements and rights as citizens? Moreover, if young people are unable to express solidarity through class-consciousness, what new modes of expression are they embracing to articulate their political affiliations and communicate a sense of belonging? These are the key questions that the participants of this symposium will seek answers to.