Resilience and reworking practices: Becoming the first-generation of industrial workers in Can Tho, Vietnam

TY - JOUR

T1 - Resilience and reworking practices

T2 - Becoming the first-generation of industrial workers in Can Tho, Vietnam

AU - Hauge, Mads Martinus

AU - Fold, Niels

PY - 2016/12/1

Y1 - 2016/12/1

N2 - For more than a decade, labor geography has stressed the importance of ‘giving primacy’ to workers in the analysis of global economic restructuring. However, the majority of contributions have focused on organized workers, leaving the issue of individual labor agency much in the dark. The aim of this article is to shed light on the agency of individual workers involved in rapid industrialization processes. In this endeavor we draw inspiration from recent contributions that have integrated Cindi Katz's threefold categorization of agency as reworking, resilience and resistance. In combination with this categorization, we apply a distinction between workers’ intentions to enter the industrial labor market and the consequences of doing so (i.e. the outcomes of their engagement). The discrepancy between intentions and outcomes is indicative of labor agency and points to the structural constraints that condition the labor market. The empirical part of the article draws on interviews with local and migrant first-generation workers in two settlements located next to an industrial zone in Can Tho Province in the Mekong River Delta Region of Vietnam. It is suggested that the alternating practices of reworking and resilience can be conceptualized as transformative trajectories - workers’ situated knowledge and practices evolve and change over time and is conditioned by the specific labor market contexts through which the individual moves.

AB - For more than a decade, labor geography has stressed the importance of ‘giving primacy’ to workers in the analysis of global economic restructuring. However, the majority of contributions have focused on organized workers, leaving the issue of individual labor agency much in the dark. The aim of this article is to shed light on the agency of individual workers involved in rapid industrialization processes. In this endeavor we draw inspiration from recent contributions that have integrated Cindi Katz's threefold categorization of agency as reworking, resilience and resistance. In combination with this categorization, we apply a distinction between workers’ intentions to enter the industrial labor market and the consequences of doing so (i.e. the outcomes of their engagement). The discrepancy between intentions and outcomes is indicative of labor agency and points to the structural constraints that condition the labor market. The empirical part of the article draws on interviews with local and migrant first-generation workers in two settlements located next to an industrial zone in Can Tho Province in the Mekong River Delta Region of Vietnam. It is suggested that the alternating practices of reworking and resilience can be conceptualized as transformative trajectories - workers’ situated knowledge and practices evolve and change over time and is conditioned by the specific labor market contexts through which the individual moves.

KW - Agency

KW - Labor

KW - Resilience

KW - Reworking

KW - Vietnam

U2 - 10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.10.013

DO - 10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.10.013

M3 - Journal article

AN - SCOPUS:84994030112

SN - 0016-7185

VL - 77

SP - 124

EP - 133

JO - Geoforum

JF - Geoforum

ER -