New Political Economy

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The gendered political economy of control and

resistance on the shop floor of the multinational
firm: A case-study from Malaysia

Juanita Elias

To cite this article: Juanita Elias (2005) The gendered political economy of control and resistance
on the shop floor of the multinational firm: A case-study from Malaysia, New Political Economy,
10:2, 203-222, DOI: 10.1080/13563460500144751

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Published online: 04 Aug 2006.

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New Political Economy, Vol. 10, No. 2, June 2005

The Gendered Political Economy of

Control and Resistance on the Shop
Floor of the Multinational Firm:
A Case-study from Malaysia
JUANITA ELIAS

The female factory worker features widely in feminist or ‘gendered’ approaches in

international political economy (IPE).1 Such studies draw attention to the way in
which the spread of labour intensive, export-oriented manufacturing has depended
on the construction of gendered production processes that are based on the exploi-
tation and control of low waged female labour. In this article I draw upon case-
study research conducted in Malaysia in order to show how the low waged,
supposedly ‘docile and diligent’ factory ‘girl’ is produced through the articulation
of both multinational-corporate and state level gendered regimes of control. These
gendered practices of control are shown to operate at a number of different levels:
at the level of an authoritarian state effectively preventing organised labour resist-
ances in the most feminised sectors of the export economy; at an ideological level
(in the construction of ideas concerning the ideal female factory worker); and at a
material level (how these ideas feed into a gendered hierarchy within the work-
force that confines certain groups of mainly female workers to low paid assembly
line work and subjects them to an intensive factory discipline).
And yet what the research presented makes clear is that these interrelated pro-
cesses of worker control cannot be adequately understood without looking at
responses and resistances to them. Thus, whilst an argument is made concerning
the dominance of a (masculinist) factory discipline that constructs female
workers as essentially ‘docile’, the article is also motivated by a concern to
explore how such practices are challenged. After all, back in 1981, in Elson and
Pearson’s classic essay, ‘The Subordination of Women and the Internationaliza-
tion of Factory Production’, the authors suggested that the idea of the docile
female worker was a ‘mirage’2 – women simply display a ‘characteristic subser-
vience’ in front of managers which disappears when supervisors are absent.3 In
looking beyond this ‘characteristic subservience’ I adopt an approach, common
within studies of social anthropology and industrial sociology, which focuses on
the gendered nature of ‘everyday’ forms of resistance to capitalist – and more

Juanita Elias, Government, International Politics and Philosophy, University of Manchester, Oxford
Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK.

ISSN 1356-3467 print; ISSN 1469-9923 online=05=020203-20 # 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd
DOI: 10.1080=13563460500144751
 Juanita Elias

specifically Taylorist – discipline.4 Debates about resistance in IPE have tended to

concentrate on organised political responses to neoliberal economic globalisation
which have seen a networking of local resistances, creating not so much a new
politics of anti-globalisation, but rather a ‘globalisation from below’.5 Feminist
scholars have brought an additional dimension to this research suggesting that
we can identify quite distinctively gendered forms of political resistance, high-
lighting in particular the activities of women’s movements worldwide.6 But is
this a complete picture? What happens when these forms of resistance are not
evident, or are of limited impact? Is there usefulness in bringing the issue of
workers’ ‘everyday’ struggles against factory control into a wider understanding
of the politics of resistance in IPE?
What is discovered, through an analysis of the case-study material, is that
everyday acts of resistance by women factory workers (such as absenteeism, or
so-called ‘spirit possession’ incidents) actually feed into highly localised
regimes of workplace control. Managers, through company recruitment practices,
have constructed low waged, closely supervised work on assembly lines, around
essentialised notions of the traditional Malay rural woman and an image of the
‘backward’ rural woman is utilised by managers in explaining these acts of resist-
ance. Acts of resistance can also be conceptualised as playing a part in strengthen-
ing the ideological construction of ‘feminine’ work (and hence the reproduction of
gendered forms of inequality within the firm). By contrast, it is found that certain
groups of male workers have effectively organised around ethnic identity and have
acted to protect their interests within the firm.
The focus on these everyday acts of resistance and their limitations in bringing
about change in the workplace unfolds in the article as follows. I begin by looking
at how gendered regimes of control are produced through the articulation of global
management practices centred around the ideal of the docile ‘factory girl’. It is
argued that systems of assembly line control are not simply a product of standar-
dised global management practice, but reflect, also, how these practices intersect
with localised social power relations. The argument thus develops to suggest that
states, such as Malaysia, pursuing anti-labour policies and seeking to attract
foreign direct investment, are crucial intermediaries in the relationship between
a masculinist managerialism and localised gender cultures organised around a
politics of ethnicity. I then examine how these arguments regarding the relation-
ship between the global and the local in producing a gendered culture of control
are developed in relation to the case-study research. Finally, the focus turns to
consider how workers seek to resist the gendered forms of control that they face
on a day-to-day basis.
The case-study firm examined in this article is a UK multinational company
(MNC) that invested in Malaysia in the early 1990s. This research draws upon
fieldwork conducted in the firm’s (wholly owned) Malaysian subsidiary involving
interviews with managers, in particular human resources (HR) managers, involved
in the recruitment of workers.7 What is not discussed is how workers themselves
conceptualise their acts of resistance. This, in part, stems from the fact that this
research developed as a study of everyday managerial practice in the construction
of gendered workplaces within the multinational firm,8 but it is also a reflection of
one of the central concerns of the article – an interest in the managerial control
204
 Gendered Control and Resistance on the Shop Floor

structures that reveal something of the masculinised nature of power within the
multinational factory setting (and, more widely, in identifying how ‘hegemonic’
notions of masculinity operate at the global and the local levels).

Gendering the multinational firm

The significance attached to gender relations in understanding practices of control
and resistance within the capitalist firm reflects the gendered political economy
framework adopted in this article. By viewing gender relations as crucial to the
functioning of markets,9 gendered political economy upsets conventional under-
standings of the firm within IPE. It challenges the way that the discussion of
MNCs within studies of globalisation has been conducted in largely gender-
neutral terms, highlighting the significance of gendered forms of employment
and inequality to the spread of multinational systems of production worldwide.10
In fact, applying ‘gender-sensitive lenses’11 to how we study the MNC exposes
the firm, not as a gender-neutral ‘rational actor’, but as a site for the production of
gender identities. The bringing of questions concerning gender identity into the
way we study the MNC in IPE is approached in this article in terms of two inter-
related processes. On the one hand, we might identify how the firm itself gets
constructed in mainstream globalisation discourse as embodying (hegemonic)
masculinist qualities such as rationality,12 aggression and competition. On the
other hand, we can point to the role of the firm in the production of gender iden-
tities centred around notions of the ‘docile’ factory ‘girl’ or what Salzinger labels
‘productive femininity’.13 Thus it is useful to draw upon Robert Connell’s notion
of the ‘global gender order’ in which he charts the emergence of globally accepted
universalised notions of ‘masculinities’ and ‘femininities’.14
We can identify, within this global gender order, the privileging of a certain set
of hegemonic masculine identities which, Connell argues, provide the ideological
basis for male power in the global political economy. Examples of how these
hegemonic masculine ideals come to be privileged can be found in what
Cameron and Palan label a ‘business-globalisation’ literature15 in which the
firm is constructed as a key agent of globalisation, spreading the benefits of
closer economic integration worldwide.16 John Dunning’s writings, for
example, introduce us to the ‘efficiency seeking’ multinational firm: rational
acting, embodying a competitive capitalist spirit and aggressively pursuing new
market opportunities.17 Essentially, these are the kinds of hegemonic masculine
characteristics that Connell has labelled ‘transnational business masculinity’.18
Writings from management studies/organisational behaviour provide insight
into how this hegemonic masculinist discourse of the rational, utility maximising
firm is embedded in management practice. Because of their commitment to
rational business practice and efficiency, MNCs are characterised as developing
superior management and employment practices to local firms and potentially
even as undermining gender inequality in the workplace.19 However, the develop-
ment of thoroughly rationalised, rigorous management systems focused on all
elements of employee control (e.g. recruitment and retention, performance, work-
place discipline and remuneration) is a process that feminist scholars have exposed
as reflecting deeply embedded notions of gender identity20 – not least because the
205
 Juanita Elias

promotion of this masculinist managerialism in global systems of production

depends upon the construction of low-waged, controllable, feminised employment.
For example, in garment sector firms, ostensibly gender-neutral selection tests
are designed specifically to target certain manual dexterity skills (‘nimble
fingers’). These are skills that are, at the same time, viewed as inherently ‘femi-
nine’. Thus we find that, across the globalised garment industry, certain ideas con-
cerning the ‘natural’ suitability of women to sewing machinist work are regularly
identified in recruitment strategies and techniques.21 These ideas extend beyond
garment production and into a whole range of feminised industries. As Salzinger
notes in her research into feminised factory employment in Mexico, managers’
understandings of feminine employment and female characteristics contribute to
the ideological hegemony of powerful discourses concerning the docile and
dexterous female factory worker. Freeman’s study of women’s ‘pink collar’ infor-
matics employment in Barbados also depicts the pervasiveness of ideas concern-
ing (young) women’s natural propensity for monotonous work, including the
notion that the ‘docile girl’ is, ‘without a doubt, the most idealised caricature of
the global assembly line worker’.22 Salzinger’s work makes central the idea that
this docile and diligent productive femininity is as much a product of global capi-
talist production as the garments, electronic goods and services that these women
are employed to produce. We will see in the case-study section of this article, for
example, that not only do firms specifically seek to recruit women who adhere to
the ‘docile and diligent’ stereotype, but that these workers are themselves sub-
jected to intense forms of factory control and discipline. Within the garment indus-
try we find that the labour process is often so closely monitored and supervised that
the ability of workers to create a successful culture of resistance is effectively
curtailed.23

Bringing in the state: supporting and mediating gendered production

Whilst accepting that there is a certain universality to these notions of flexible and
productive femininity, what is of interest to this research is how such ideas are
reconstituted and challenged within the local context. Gendered regimes of
control within the factory setting not only are constructed by MNCs, but are
produced in relation to localised social power relations and inequalities
(namely, ethnicity and class) that are, ultimately, the product of political construc-
tion. Importantly (and reflecting the emphasis on the political construction of
markets in the economic sociology of Polanyi24 and others25), one needs to
acknowledge the role of the state in the construction of gendered and racialised
labour markets for productive female labour.
How global and local forces play out in the reconstitution of gender relations in
specific national contexts is a theme addressed in Truong’s work on the interaction
between local patriarchal states and global capitalism in the construction of the
East Asian developmental state.26 Han and Ling also present a gendered analysis
of the capitalist developmental state viewing state policy making (in Korea) as a
‘hypermasculine’ product of Western masculinist capitalism developmentalism
and Confucian paternal governance.27 These feminist writings point to something
206
 Gendered Control and Resistance on the Shop Floor

that has often been recognised in studies of capitalist economic development –

that the development of a capitalist mode of production is dependent upon the
active exploitation of pre-existing (pre-capitalist) socioeconomic structures28
(within which I would include structures of gender and ethnic inequality).
Whilst wanting to avoid a characterisation of state-led economic development
in Asia that is excessively orientalist (a critique that can be levelled mainly at
the assumption of labour regimes that reflect a specifically Asian ‘despotism’),29
Truong’s work suggests that feminist scholars can maintain a focus on the inter-
sections between capitalist development and the culturally specific socioeconomic
(including household) practices that have enabled a particular form of gendered
social relations to emerge out of the experience of economic development. Put
simply, as Seguino argues, states in Asia that have had the highest levels of
gender inequality have also experienced the highest rates of growth.30
In terms of the themes concerning control and resistance developed in this
article, a focus on the Malaysian state is relevant because it highlights the way
that states, firstly, have constructed the gendered/racialised divisions and hierar-
chies that firms have been able to draw upon and, secondly, have developed
policies to attract MNCs by limiting the space for labour organisation. On the
first point, the importance of ethnic divisions and inequalities to the political
economy of Malaysia cannot be understated.31 In 1970, following racial riots in
1969, the government of Malaysia launched the New Economic Policy (NEP)
in an effort to stimulate economic growth through export expansion, restructure
the economy away from Chinese-owned business and improve the economic
status of the ethnic Malays.32 The assumption amongst Malaysian development
planners was that it would be (Malay) men who would be the potential new
recruits in the foreign-owned multinationals.33 This is an important point
because it indicates, on the one hand, how the emergence of a gendered model
of export-led growth was less of a deliberate strategy on the part of the Malaysian
state (at least initially) and reflected more the requirements of multinationals for
feminised employment. Yet, on the other hand, the targeting of a rural Malay
population for employment in the new factories was the result of deliberate
government intervention through the NEP.
On the issue of labour repression, there is considerable debate as to how the
authoritarian nature of politics in Malaysia can be conceptualised – either as ruth-
lessly repressive34 or as a form of authoritarian democracy.35 Nonetheless, the
Malaysian state seems to fit quite closely the model of the ‘exclusionary labour
regime’ that has been noted across East and Southeast Asia.36 Significantly, the
highly feminised export sectors that were central to the Malaysian government’s
export-led development policy were also the sectors that faced most restrictive
anti-union policies (by both the state and corporations).37
That women lack access to formal trade union politics is hardly surprising in a
state that has only recently started to recognise the contribution of women to econo-
mic development. Although in the ten years following the adoption of export-
oriented industrialisation the women’s employment rate in the formal (waged)
sector doubled,38 it was not until the Sixth Malaysia Plan of 1991 (two decades
after the launching of the NEP) that the state made any explicit reference to
women’s role in the industrial sector. Yet a reading of the women in development
207
 Juanita Elias

chapter from this Sixth Plan conveys the message that women are, first and fore-
most, reproducers and homemakers:

Women play an important role in national development. As wives

and mothers, they are the primary force behind the development of
future generations of caring and progressive Malaysians. Outside
the home, they are an important economic resource.39

Implicit within this statement is a meeting of globalised and localised masculinist

modes of thinking about the role and position of women. On the one hand, there is
an obvious connection made between women and domesticity that has been a
dominant theme in women-specific development and population policies in
Malaysia.40 Yet, on the other hand, we can also see the emergence of ideas con-
cerning the use of women as an ‘economic resource’ for the foreign-owned multi-
nationals operating in the country’s export sector. Such a finding resonates with
Truong’s claim that ‘cultural values, sanctioned by the symbolic meanings of
gender, are circulating in state policies and industrial practices to conceal
women’s contribution to industrialisation, and create repressive patterns of
social relations’.41 It is to this linkage between the gendered nature of economic
development and repression (within the workplace) that the discussion now turns.

Control and resistance within the factory setting

The firm analysed in this article is a UK-based garment manufacturing firm pro-
ducing for the UK-based retailer Marks and Spencer (M&S). Up until the late
1980s M&S maintained a close relationship with a group of UK-based supplier
firms and advocated a ‘buy British’ policy. Facing increased competition from
other retailers, the company began during the 1990s to source from abroad and
encouraged its suppliers to move into overseas production. The establishment of
a subsidiary in Malaysia in the early part of the decade was the firm’s first
venture into overseas production. It established two factories in Malaysia. These
factories, though not located in an Export Processing Zone (EPZ), were granted
a Licensed Manufacturing Warehouse status which effectively gave them the
same tax and import duty concessions as firms located in EPZs. This was followed
by the establishment of factories in Morocco and Indonesia later in the 1990s (as
well as factory closures and cutbacks in the UK), underlining the firm’s commit-
ment to move ‘offshore’.42 In line with other garment firms, it also sought to
increase its overseas capacity through the utilisation of networks of subcontractors
or ‘partner’ factories in a number of different East/Southern European, North
African and East Asian countries. The growth of the garment industry into a glo-
balised network of subcontracting relationships is itself one of the mechanisms of
control that the industry has over workers – for the threat is that workers who
strike or agitate for higher wages will lose out as contracts go to other firms.43
The globalised garment industry, which is dependent on a supply of low cost
female labour, is at pains to preserve the connection between women and low
waged work. Once in employment, workers face a multitude of forms of work-
place control, including monitoring and surveillance as management practices,
208
 Gendered Control and Resistance on the Shop Floor

measurement and direct forms of disciplinary action. In this firm, for example,
work is organised along classic Taylorist assembly lines; monitored and measured
through the setting of targets (determined by industrial engineers); and subject to
intense surveillance by supervisory, training and quality control staff. It should be
noted that the exercise of power by managers within the firm is often subtle, indir-
ect and reflective of a wider set of ideological practices at work within both the
workings of the capitalist firm and the everyday practices of local communities.44
Power is exercised not only through the (gendered and ethnic) division of labour
and direct (Taylorist) forms of control (measurement, supervision etc.), but
also through a localised culture of paternalism which acts to tie localised norms
regarding appropriate female behaviour into the wider structures of corporate
control.
We can view recruitment practices as a primary mechanism through which
Taylorist management processes are neither ideologically nor gender neutral,
embodying both the needs of the business to secure low cost ‘nimble fingered’
labour and also the requirement for ‘docile and diligent’ workers to work as
sewing machinists. These skills are tested for during the recruitment process via
a number of different ‘dexterity tests’. In the case-study firm, one such test
involved the timing of workers placing marbles on a grid. Such tests are clearly
gendered, as recruitment staff commented that men rarely display the level of
manual dexterity necessary for sewing machine work. The effective impact of
these recruitment strategies is the crowding of women workers into the lowest
paying, lowest status jobs within the factory, not least because of the way in
which recruiters construct the manual dexterity skills displayed by female
workers as innate/natural and thus not deserving of higher rates of pay.45 The
firm also actively seeks to recruit women who might conform to the ‘diligent and
docile’ stereotype of the female assembly line worker. One manager, for example,
commented on the kinds of questions that they ask female interviewees:

We will ask a girl in interview something like ‘how would you feel
if your supervisor used a loud voice and makes you feel uncomfor-
table?’ The right kind of response would be that she would discuss
the matter with the supervisor later, but the wrong response would
be that she shouts back. We don’t want people like that. So you
would also ask questions like ‘at work, how would you feel if you
were told to keep un-picking the seam that you are working on?’

Conversations with recruiters and managers at the firm revealed that the job of
sewing machinist is constructed not only as essentially feminine, but also as a form
of employment that is well suited to Malay women’s supposedly natural skills and
abilities. For example, one (Malay) personnel executive involved in the interview-
ing and selection process suggested that Malay women in particular made good
sewers. During a tour of one of the factory sites, she put forward the suggestion
that, as women raised in ‘traditional’ (meaning rural, Muslim) households,
Malay women inevitably acquired a level of skill in sewing work that non-
traditional (meaning urban, Chinese) women did not generally possess. She told
me that in the interview process she always asked the women whether they
209
 Juanita Elias

enjoy sewing and what sort of experience they have had of sewing – with Malay
women most likely to answer positively to these questions. Such managerial per-
ceptions act to marginalise the majority of Malay women within the workforce.
They are viewed as unskilled rural women and will remain within sewing work
during their (often lengthy) tenure of employment. Managers at the firm
claimed that they do not target a particular group of people in their recruitment
practices, but it was obvious from observing the job applicants each morning
and talking with personnel staff that these applicants tended to be mainly
female, young, Malay (and sometimes Indian but rarely Chinese) and to come
from the surrounding rural areas. In fact, the firm does undertake recruitment
drives that are clearly targeted on the rural, demographically Malay, areas. For
example, it pays local bus contractors to bring in potential new recruits and
makes announcements over the company tannoy calling for workers (the majority
of whom are Malay) to bring in friends and family for interview. Table 1 presents
data on the ethnic and gender breakdown of the sewing machinists at the firm. We
can see that Malay women constituted 79.3 per cent of the firm’s sewing machi-
nists. Far from being a scientific/objective process, recruitment represents a highly
gendered and racialised everyday international business practice and constitutes
the key mechanism through which localised social inequalities and hierarchies
are reproduced within the workforce of the firm.
TABLE 1. Breakdown of sewing machinists at the case-study firm by gender and race,46 June 1999

Chinese Malay Indian Other

Male Female Male Female Male Female Male Female

No. % No. % No. % No. % No. % No. % No. % No. %

0 0 63 9.4 12 1.9 531 79.3 0 0 61 9.1 0 0 2 0.3

Source: Company document, Distribution of Staff by Race as of June 15, 1999.

Further evidence of the localisation of managerial control mechanisms is seen

in a culture of paternalism that replicates the idea of women as dependent and sec-
ondary employees. The firm benefits from having numerous family members
working within the same factory, not least because these family ties place
additional pressure on new recruits to conform to standards of behaviour and
comply with modes of control already in place. There are many examples of
workplace practices that are meant to secure the loyalty of employees through
non-wage based rewards (e.g. ‘employee of the month’ schemes) and mutual
obligations between the firm and the employees that extend to non-work-based
activities. This emphasis on loyalty acquires an overtly gendered dimension
through a familial/paternalistic discourse. For example, the firm operates activities
such as ‘family days’ whereby workers and their families are provided with an
outing by the company, thus sustaining an association between the firm and famil-
ial structures/obligations. Human resources executives will also visit workers who
are off sick and expect workers to come to them if they are experiencing problems
in their personal lives. What these discussions with managers revealed was
a meeting of a masculinist corporate culture based upon rational scientific
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 Gendered Control and Resistance on the Shop Floor

managerialism with a localised culture of paternalism, although central to both

was a reliance on worker ‘feminisation’ in sustaining workplace mechanisms of
control.
Of course, the employment of notions of femininity in the construction of the
ideal ‘docile and diligent’ factory worker is a process that is in constant flux
and being negotiated alongside other forms of identity. Thus, for example,
Chinese women have been able to avoid an association with assembly-line pro-
duction in this firm and tend to be found in supervisory, training and management
positions. One point worth emphasising is that the ‘feminisation’ of workers never
maps straightforwardly on to female bodies. Indeed, it has been suggested that
the extent to which this global discourse of productive and docile femininity
has been de-linked from the material world of gender inequality is such that it
has potentially been freed from its association with female bodies at all.47 This
raises an important issue, something that I came across in my research when I dis-
covered how groups of deaf male workers, employed in some of the most mono-
tonous jobs in the factory, were described in similar terms to the female workers
employed in assembly-line production (as easy to control and having a ‘natural’
temperament for monotonous work). The problem of essentialising notions of
femininity in terms of something that can only be performed by female bodies
was also revealed in my research as managers struggled to explain the employ-
ment of a trans-sexual worker as a sewing machinist. However, my research indi-
cated, nonetheless, that in practice these notions of femininity do map on to female
bodies – and more specifically, on to specific groups of female workers (in this
case-study, rural Malay women as Table 1 clearly demonstrates). The construction
of productive femininities needs to be understood as more than simply a discursive
process; it involves the targeting of a specific group of female workers through
company recruitment strategies and the subjecting of this group to highly super-
vised assembly line work.

Feminised forms of resistance? The limits of the everyday

Have women workers sought to resist the notion of the docile factory worker? And
how might these resistances be conceptualised in terms of wider practices of resist-
ance to capitalist discipline? It was revealed to me in interviews with managers
that the factory had experienced a number of ‘spirit possession’ incidents (bouts
of mass hysteria), the worst of which had occurred in 1994. Episodes often
involve workers claiming to have been corporeally invaded by some kind of
‘spirit’ entity, or to have, at least, seen a spirit. The incidents usually lead to
time-off for the specific workers involved and the 1994 incident had led to a
three-day factory closure. Some kind of ‘spirit possession’ or attack of hysteria
occurs fairly frequently, as the HR director commented to me:

These are incidents when lots of the girls are falling over and are
hysterical. Over the last seven to eight years this phenomenon
has developed – it’s always the young girls who are involved in
it and it’s not just a few of them either. Last year we had a spate
of hysterical cases, and even this morning a girl was hysterical
211
 Juanita Elias

and went to the clinic saying that she had seen an old lady in the
toilet. I think that it’s all in the mind, but just to be on the safe
side the spirit man, the bomoh, the ‘ghostbusters’ come in and
throw water around.

This is a well documented phenomenon in studies of gender and employment in

Malaysia – in particular in the studies by Ackerman48 and Ong,49 in which spirit
possession is viewed in terms of the difficulties faced by a new female Malay
working class in adapting to the rigours of capitalist productions.50 Ackerman
in particular argues that the lack of unionisation, or of other channels through
which to voice grievances, inevitably leads to a reversion to alternative forms
of resistance.
Evidence of worker resistances might also be ascertained from the high levels
of absenteeism amongst sewing machinists and other assembly line workers (such
as those who do ‘finishing’ (ironing) work). The problem of employee absentee-
ism was something that was commented on by almost all of the managers at the
firm, and has been deemed to be a particular problem amongst women (in particu-
lar, women with young children51). On top of perceptions of high levels of absen-
teeism, the firm also faced a problem of high levels of labour turnover amongst
sewing machinists – a situation that was worsened by the fact that the firm was
trying to expand its workforce. Thus, although the HR director insisted that ‘I
am looking for unmarried ladies to take on the job of sewers’, the company has
experienced considerable problems in attracting young unmarried women.
Younger women are seen to prefer the better paid jobs found in the electronics
sector. These jobs are regarded as easier, less intensive and carrying more
employee benefits,52 and it is common for younger women to leave the garment
sector in order to pursue opportunities in electronics.
Worker resistance to factory control and the specifically gendered forms that
this takes can be understood as representing an everyday form of resistance.
Within studies of social anthropology and industrial sociology there are a multi-
tude of writings that deal with the issue of everyday resistances. For many
writers this form of resistance by the weak against the powerful (be they emplo-
yers, landowners or other forms of elites) is evidence of an agency that is lacking
in more structuralist accounts of power and domination. James Scott’s influential
account of agency, resistance and struggle in rural Malaysia, Weapons of the
Weak, focuses on clandestine peasant resistances and argues for an appreciation
of the ways in which enduring, everyday forms of resistance are evident in the
behaviours, traditions and consciousness of subordinate groups.53 The most sys-
tematic attempt within IPE to incorporate notions of everyday resistance into an
understanding of a wider politics of resistance is found in Roland Blieker’s
work. Drawing upon the work of the social theorist de Certeau,54 Blieker argues
for a focus on the many and varied forms that dissent takes, suggesting that every-
day practices of resistance play a role in upsetting discursive forms of domina-
tion.55 In both Scott’s and Blieker’s work attention is also drawn to the quite
distinct ways in which men and women have sought to engage in everyday prac-
tices of resistance, thus underlining the extent to which a politics of the everyday
is intimately bound up with gendered meanings, identities and agencies.56
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 Gendered Control and Resistance on the Shop Floor

Unsurprisingly, then, a recent article on gender and resistance to globalisation by

Marianne Marchand cites Scott’s work in discussing ‘everyday’ acts of resistance
by women.57
However, questions must be asked about the impact of these forms of resist-
ance. Firstly, whilst various empirical studies have indicated that resistances are
gender-specific, it has also been noted that women are less likely to engage in
‘militant’ worker behaviour (strikes, sit-ins), preferring ‘low risk, low gain
plans’.58 Secondly, as Gupta argues in a study from India, the limited forms of
resistance that the rural poor employ are used by elites to construct this class as
an essentially ‘backward’ social grouping – with elites exaggerating the impact
of everyday acts of rebellion in order to justify the continued repression of the
peasant class.59 In this sense, whilst everyday practices of resistance are
observable among weak and oppressed groups, the question remains as to just
how significant these ‘weapons of the weak’ are if they simply feed into a replica-
tion of existing power structures. Gupta’s work further emphasises the need to
look at resistances from the perspective of the powerful, asking questions about
how elite groups utilise ideas about the disobedience of a subordinate group to
legitimate their status.
In terms of my own case-study research, it was clear that systems of workplace
control that constructed the female Malay worker as essentially docile were pro-
blematic in the face of widespread everyday workplace resistances. However, this
resistance to capitalist authority needs to be understood as a phenomenon that (i)
does not significantly upset gender roles within the factory and (ii) feeds into the
construction of the Malay female as ‘backward’ and ‘irrational’ and therefore
unsuited to higher status work. Thus the idea that these rural women inhabited
some kind of backward social order was utilised by managers in order to
explain how and why certain forms of resistance occurred. I would suggest that
spirit possession is a form of resistance that does not upset prevailing gender ideo-
logies since it is almost expected of women to behave in such an ‘irrational’
manner, especially if these women are from rural Malay backgrounds. Rather
than disrupting discourses of domination (to use Blieker’s terminology), these
resistances uphold dualistic modes of thinking about gender whereby the (mascu-
linist) rational management practice of the firm is set in contrast to the irrational-
ity/emotion/hysteria of the young Malay women.
Ackerman has labelled mass hysteria a ‘safety valve institution’, claiming that
it is a form of industrial conflict, but is never acknowledged as such. Instead, she
argues, ‘the existing structure of relations in the factory is maintained rather than
challenged by the ritualization of conflict since no direct confrontation between
opposing interests is seen to occur by the workers or management’.60 Thus, whilst
managers viewed spirit possession as not ‘real’ and ‘all in the mind’, they effec-
tively sanctioned it by allowing cleansing rituals to be performed after incidents
had taken place. Considering Ackerman’s research, one might conclude that
management was happy for acts of resistance to continue to take on this ‘superna-
tural’ form as it did not threaten management control in any substantial way.
The widespread perception that women are more prone to these ‘irrational’ out-
bursts is closely linked to fears regarding women’s sexuality as women move out
of the household and into factory employment.61 This view was clearly articulated
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by the HR director of the case-study firm when he suggested that it is not just that
women (being the ‘weaker sex’) are more prone to spirit possession, but rather that
the ‘girls’ who suffer from these attacks are likely to be young women who do not
fit into the norms of traditional Malay family life.62 He suggested that they may
come from broken homes, be malnourished, be experiencing problems with a boy-
friend, or have had an abortion. More importance, however, was attached to women
who ‘are making no headway in their social life’. He suggested that in Malaysian
society getting married is ‘a critical issue’, such that ‘girls aged 23 plus in relation-
ships with guys and not getting married can cause problems’. During this conver-
sation, he went on to use the Malay word bohsia, meaning loose woman, to
describe some of the women whom he felt were particularly susceptible to these
attacks. He commented: ‘I see this hysteria as a state of anxiety for people who
have not fulfilled what they want in life and it reaching a level of them not
being able to control their mind. We use the word bohsia for these sorts of girls.’
Concerns regarding the sexuality of young female workers have been an issue
in Malaysian public debate since women were first recruited into the export fac-
tories in the 1970s.63 Such concerns led to the government launching a research
project looking into the welfare of new Malay women workers64 and also saw
both government and Islamic groups taking action to highlight the supposed
‘moral threats’ that women faced in the new factory environment.65 Although it
has been suggested that ‘the issue of cultural and social stigmatization of
women workers is no longer relevant’,66 it was clear even from my interviews
with managers that there were still concerns about the way in which entry into
full-time waged employment could have some form of corrupting effect on the
younger women employed in the factory.67 This suspicion of factory women’s
sexual and moral vulnerability plays a part in underlining the notion that
Malay women are not ‘by nature’ factory workers. It is yet another discursive tech-
nique that identifies Malay women as struggling to conform to the rigours of
factory production (and thus being unsuited to higher waged, less intensive
employment).
The way in which the (Malay female) body becomes a site for the preoccupa-
tion of concerns about the impact of capitalist development in the Malaysian
context features in the work of both Ong and Healey, with Healey suggesting
that Malay women are viewed not only as bearers of culture, but as ‘icons of cul-
tural anxiety’.68 Most recently, the Islamic opposition party PAS (Parti Islam se
Malaysia) attempted to pass legislation in the states that it controlled concerning
the kinds of dress that women were allowed to wear in the workplaces.69 This con-
troversy followed events of 1999 in which the state leader of the PAS-controlled
state of Kelantan, Nik Aziz, apparently made statements condemning working
mothers. Although commentators argued that Aziz’s comments were taken out
of context and reflected more the government’s desire to discredit the main politi-
cal opposition at a time of economic and political crisis,70 these incidents are
highly relevant because they indicate the extent to which debates concerning
the appropriate role and position of women in traditional Malay society are part
of Malaysian political discourse (in particular in debates between the ruling
party (United Malays National Organisation71) and its main Islamic opposition
as to who best represents the interests of the ethnic Malays). Worker resistances,
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then, feed into a politics of control within the factory and, also, outside of the
factory as the post-NEP shift of Malay women out of the rural household
context potentially upsets notions of a Malay Muslim identity.

Masculinities and resistance: meeting a localised gender culture

A gender perspective on resistance is also useful because, in this case-study firm, it
was observable that attempts amongst male employees to resist factory control had
proven much more successful. Taking an example from an area of the factory
known as the cutting floor (the department where garment pieces are cut and pre-
pared for sewing assembly), I will now illustrate how everyday acts of resistance
by men actually act to improve their career and earning prospects. The findings
presented in this section of the article therefore reflect Cockburn’s classic work
on masculinities within a print works in which she documents how the articulation
of male power on the shop floor (through both the trade union and unorganised
strategies) effectively excluded women from the labour force.72
Within the cutting floor there are a variety of job roles. Women dominate the
lowest paid, most closely supervised (and also piece-rated) jobs which include
operating machines to fuse garment collars and cuffs to an inner lining, pinning
cut garment pieces and inspecting cut panels. Men, by contrast, dominate jobs
such as spreading cloth prior to being cut into pattern pieces (the ‘spreaders’)
and the actual cutting of the cloth (the ‘cutters’). When I asked the manager
who showed me around this department why this gender division occurred, she
responded that not only were men unsuited to meticulous work, but that men
got bored easily, were prone to discipline problems and were unwilling to work
for the low rates of pay offered to workers in the fusing section. The irony is,
however, that she then went on to comment that, because of these problems
with male employees, she tried to ensure that they were transferred out of jobs
such as fusing when an opportunity opened up for them in spreading. The transfer
into spreading is an effective step on to an internal career ladder, since spreaders
are viewed as the natural recruitment ground for the better paid, more highly
skilled job of cutter. Interestingly, spreading and cutting workers have consi-
derably lower levels of labour turnover and absenteeism compared to fusing
work – a fact that the manager explained in terms of the low paid and monotonous
nature of fusing work. Given that fusing tends to be female-dominated, these
levels of absenteeism and turnover would suggest that, like men, women workers
are equally unhappy with this type of work. Yet it is the male employees who are
ultimately rewarded for their resistances through promotion. Perceptions about
female docility thus disadvantage women in gaining promotion into the higher
skilled/paid jobs in the department.
The ability to confine women to low waged, low status, monotonous work is key
to understanding how firms are able to secure a supply of low cost labour. Male
workers have been able to resist these practices. Aside from the above example
of the cutting floor, the operation of localised masculinities in maintaining the status
of male employees within the factory is also evident amongst the male Chinese-
dominated managerial and supervisory roles. In particular, senior managers within
the firm had promoted informal and ad hoc recruitment practices for managerial and
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 Juanita Elias

supervisory employment that were both highly informal and based upon a level of
ethnic networking and acted to consolidate the position of Chinese men within the
upper echelons of the employment hierarchy.73 Chinese men in particular appeared
to be the main beneficiaries of this ‘ethnic networking’, for interviews with this
group of managers revealed that they had fairly average educational backgrounds
(especially compared to some of the highly educated senior Chinese women in
the firm) and had little in the way of previous work experience, being employed
largely on the basis of personal ties to a former (Chinese) managing director. Clearly,
the promotion of these kinds of recruitment practices has acted to prevent certain
groups from entering into managerial employment.
Whereas the firm targets relatively uneducated Malay females for sewing
machinist work, the recruitment for higher-ranking positions within the factory
has tended to favour Chinese employment. The ad hoc approach to recruitment
of this group is a real contrast to the highly regulated recruitment process for
sewers (aimed at securing the most efficient workforce possible). These practices
are infused with notions of gender and ethnicity, yet it is in the managerial and
supervisory jobs that recruitment practices come to reflect much more strongly
a localised culture of ethnicity. Recruitment for sewing machinists was tied in
with established global practice across the labour intensive (‘efficiency-
seeking’74) garment sector in which firms aim to keep labour costs at the minimum
whilst ensuring an efficient productive workforce. These efficiency-seeking
concerns (and the standardised recruitment practices that accompanied them)
have been markedly absent from recruitment practices for the more senior level
staff at the firm.
What these examples suggest is that a gendered global management culture
based upon ideas of efficiency and rationality actually breaks down when con-
fronted with localised masculinities. Hence women workers are subjected to
Taylorist patterns of measurement and control in corporate recruitment and
employment practices which are backed up by a local paternalism (including a
concern with the moral susceptibility of the young female worker). But, for
male workers, localised masculinities (often infused with a politics of ethnicity)
have proved more resilient in resisting factory control and/or in protecting the
interests of certain groups of male employees.

Conclusion
Connell argues that the ‘globalisation of gender’ can be understood in terms of ‘the
structure of relationships that interconnect the gender regimes of institutions, and
the gender orders of local societies’.75 Thus the MNC, as a globally significant
actor operating within local states and societies, can be viewed as a site of both
globalised and localised ‘gender cultures’. Recognition of this interplay
between the global and the local is central, then, to an understanding of how
both regimes of workplace control and the articulation of employee agencies
can be understood. MNCs play a key role in the construction of women as a
low wage, diligent and, more importantly, ‘docile’ workforce; yet this is not to
suggest that women workers in the factory simply accept the structural hierarchies
within which their labour force participation takes place. Hence this article has
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 Gendered Control and Resistance on the Shop Floor

been motivated by a concern to try to bring some discussion of women’s agency

into my research. As Gills argues, ‘the analysis of women’s labour in globalization
should not simply be a description of suffering’.76 However, when we examine
gendered acts of resistance from the perspective of managers within the firm, it
is evident that, whilst women workers are able to exercise some kind of agency
and resistance to the structures of factory discipline, these acts do little to alter
their status within the factory setting. What this article has perhaps done is to
show the real limitations of looking to everyday resistances as part of a wider fem-
inist informed understanding of resistance to globalisation. Viewing these resist-
ances as political acts is clearly problematic because they are actions that
confine Malay women to ‘traditional’ (and low paid) women’s work. Much of
the literature on everyday acts of resistance comes from social anthropologists
conducting ethnographic research in which the aim is to identify how acts of resist-
ance are symptomatic of cultures undergoing rapid social change.77 What this
literature is less concerned with is whether or not a kind of nascent class or
gender consciousness is embodied in these acts. On the basis of the case-study
research presented in this article, I would suggest that we should proceed
with caution if we are to include such practices – a kind of politics of the
everyday – in a feminist understanding of the politics of protest within IPE.
Having outlined the interplay between gendered forms of control and resistance
within the global factory setting and emphasising the real limitations of everyday
resistances in bringing about positive change for female workers, it is worth
reflecting on where change might come from. Culturally specific forms of resist-
ance, although a valuable insight into women’s agency, do little to challenge the
way in which women are constructed as diligent, dexterous and nimble-fingered
workers – by both global capital and the capitalist developmental state. This is
a rather depressing conclusion; it is one thing to be ‘the most feminized of femi-
nine subjects’,78 but is there a space – in spite of the interplay between the control
mechanisms of global and local masculinities – for the articulation of the interests
of women workers? Theobold, for example, discusses the multiple forms of resist-
ance in which women workers in Thai electronics firms are involved, but then
quickly moves on to look at how this resistance has taken an organised form
and how it might be linked to top-down ‘anti-globalisation’ forms of resistance.79
Elsewhere, emphasis has been placed on the need for women’s movements to
work and organise transnationally in order to address global gender inequalities.80
The focus, then, is always on the need to organise to resist. For certain scholars the
opportunities for women’s organising to resist repressive workplace practices in
the garment sector lie in the campaigns around corporate codes of conduct that
have forced companies to adopt a commitment to improving labour standards
within their supply chains.81 However, a note of caution must be sounded when
considering these codes. After all, even when they do engage with gender
issues, as corporate controlled instruments of regulation, it is unlikely that they
can be used to challenge meaningfully the structural inequalities that women
workers face. Codes are usually presented, within mainstream studies of the
impact of multinational systems of production, as a mechanism through which
firms might play a role in improving conditions for (specifically female and
child) labour.82 However, such a perspective does not take into account how
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 Juanita Elias

corporations themselves actively produce the structures of control and inequality

that characterise global production in sectors such as garment manufacture.
To sum up, the need for a gendered political economy critique of the role of the
MNC in today’s global economy was the starting point for the argument presented
in this article. The analysis has focused on the way in which the MNC has sought
to construct a supposedly ‘docile and diligent’ workforce through a variety of
different control mechanisms. Tools and mechanisms of control within the
factory setting were seen to reflect a hegemonic masculinity founded in ‘rational’
Taylorist production processes; yet these tools intersected with locally based
forms of repression (be they culturally specific concerns relating to the moral sus-
ceptibility of the Malay female or state-sanctioned anti-unionism). Thus multi-
national firms need to be viewed as actors that do not break down established
patterns of gender subordination, but act instead ‘to elaborate and reinvent
principles of male and racial superiority’.83

Notes
Earlier drafts of this article were presented at the International Studies Association Convention, Montreal, March
2004 and at the University of Manchester Centre for International Politics Research Colloquium. My thanks to the
participants at both for their insightful comments, in particular Sophie Hague, Philip Cerny, Lucy Ferguson,
Stuart Shields, Richard Jackson and Andrea Bertone. My thanks also go to Rorden Wilkinson and to the two
anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on earlier drafts.
1. Cynthia Enloe, Beaches, Bananas and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Pandora,
1989), ch. 7; V. Spike Peterson & Anne Sisson Runyan, Global Gender Issues, second edn (Westview,
1999), pp. 142–7; Shirin M. Rai, Gender and the Political Economy of Development (Polity, 2002), pp.
147–50; and Jan Jindy Pettman, Worlding Women: A Feminist International Politics (Allen & Unwin,
1996), ch. 8.
2. Diane Elson & Ruth Pearson, ‘The subordination of women and the internationalization of factory pro-
duction’, in: K. Young, C. Wolkowitz & R. McCullagh (eds), Of Marriage and the Market (CSE Books,
1981), pp. 18–40.
3. Elson and Pearson base these arguments on Noeleen Heyzer’s 1978 study of women workers in textile firms
in Singapore. See Heyzer, ‘Young women and migrant workers in Singapore’s labour-intensive industries’,
unpublished paper presented at Conference on Continuing Subordination of Women in the Development
Process, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, 1978.
4. Aiwah Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia (SUNY Press,
1987); Anna Pollert, Girls, Wives, Factory Lives (Macmillan, 1981); and Ruth Cavendish, Women on the
Line (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982).
5. Richard Falk, ‘Resisting “globalization-from-above” through “globalization-from-below” ’, in: Barry Gills
(ed.), Globalization and the Politics of Resistance (Palgrave, 2000), pp. 46– 56.
6. Dong-Sook S. Gills, ‘Globalization and counter-globalization’, in: Dong-Sook S. Gills & Nicola Piper (eds),
Women and Work in Globalizing Asia (Routledge, 2002), pp. 13 –31; and Marianne Marchand, ‘Challenging
Globalization: Towards a Feminist Understanding of Resistance’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 29,
No. 1 (2003), pp. 145–60.
7. The research presented in this article was carried out over five full days of research visits to the case-study
firm’s Malaysian operations in March and August l999. The principal research method used was the semi-
structured interview. Interviews were conducted with four senior level managers, ten middle and junior
‘executive’ level managers or ‘officers’ and five supervisory level staff (those employees who supervise pro-
duction lines); I was also able to interview the company’s (male) trade union representative. Although some
of these interviews were conducted in a formal setting, many involved being shown around different sections
of the factory floor; hence the interviews often served to provide me with observational data. In addition,
some of the research data highlighted in the article came from company documents that I was provided
with by the firm.

218
 Gendered Control and Resistance on the Shop Floor
8. Juanita Elias, Fashioning Inequality: The Multinational Company and Gendered Employment in a Globaliz-
ing World (Ashgate, 2004).
9. Georgina Waylen, ‘Gender, Feminism and Political Economy’, New Political Economy, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1997),
pp. 205–20.
10. Susan P. Joekes, Women in the World Economy: An INSTRAW Study (Oxford University Press, 1987);
Guy Standing, ‘Global Feminization through Flexible Labor’, World Development, Vol. 17, No. 7 (1989),
pp. 1077–95; Guy Standing, ‘Global Feminization through Flexible Labor: A Theme Revisited’, World
Development, Vol. 23, No. 3 (1999), pp. 583–602; and Adrian Wood, ‘North-South Trade and Female
Labour in Manufacturing: An Asymmetry’, The Journal of Development Studies, Vol. 27, No. 2 (1991),
pp. 168–89.
11. Peterson & Runyan, Global Gender Issues, p. 1.
12. This association of masculinity with rationality is rooted in the Cartesian method which privileges rationality,
dispassion and detachment over what feminist scholars point out are essentially ‘feminine’ qualities
(emotion, irrationality etc.). Thus it can be argued that discussions of globalisation are predicated upon
the construction of these gendered theoretical dualisms whereby dominant groups are described in masculine
terms while subordinate groups are feminised. Such a strategy not only sets up masculine hierarchies but is
based upon, and reinforces, a discourse associating men and masculinity with power.
13. Leslie Salzinger, Genders in Production: Making Workers in Mexico’s Global Factories (University of
California Press, 2003), p. 2.
14. Robert W. Connell, Masculinities (Polity, 1995); and Robert W. Connell, The Men and the Boys (University
of California Press, 2000), pp. 51 –2. For a discussion of how Connell’s writings have been developed within
IPE, see Charlotte Hooper, Manly States: Masculinities, International Relations and Gender Politics
(Columbia University Press, 2001).
15. Angus Cameron & Ronen Palan, The Imagined Economies of Globalization (Sage, 2004), pp. 89 –91.
16. A critique of this position is developed by Louise Amoore, ‘International Political Economy and the
“Contested Firm” ’, New Political Economy, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2000), pp. 183–204.
17. John H. Dunning, Multinational Enterprises and the Global Economy (Addison Wesley, 1993), p. 80.
18. R.W. Connell, ‘Masculinities and Globalization’, Men and Masculinities, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1998), pp. 3–23; and
Connell, The Men and the Boys, p. 51.
19. On superior employment conditions in MNCs, see Dunning, Multinational Enterprises and the Global
Economy, pp. 372–3; and UNCTAD, World Investment Report 1994: Transnational Corporations, Employ-
ment and the Workplace (United Nations, 1994). On the role of the firm in undermining gender inequality, see
UNCTAD, World Investment Report 1994, pp. 202–3.
20. Susan Halford & Pauline Leonard, Gender, Power and Organisations (Palgrave, 2001); and Anne Ross-
Smith & Martin Kornberger, ‘Gendered Rationality? A Genealogical Exploration of the Philosophical and
Sociological Conceptions of Rationality, Masculinity and Organization’, Gender, Work and Organisation,
Vol. 11, No. 3 (2004), p. 281.
21. Diane Elson, ‘Nimble fingers and other fables’, in: Wendy Chapkis & Cynthia Enloe (eds), Of Common Cloth:
Women in the Global Textile Industry (Transnational Institute, 1983); and Ellen Israel Rosen, Making Sweat-
shops: The Globalization of the US Apparel Industry (University of California Press, 2002), pp. 240–7.
22. Carla Freeman, High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy (Duke University Press, 2000), p. 102.
23. Maria Angelina Soldatenko, ‘Made in the USA: Latinas/os? Garment Work and Ethnic Conflict in the Los
Angeles Sweatshops’, Cultural Studies, Vol. 13, No. 2 (1999), pp. 319–34.
24. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Beacon Press,
1944).
25. See, for example, Fred Block, Post-industrial Possibilities: A Critique of Economic Discourse (University of
California Press, 1990), pp. 21–45; Richard Swedberg & Mark Granovetter, ‘Introduction’, in: M. Granovetter
and R. Swedberg (eds), The Sociology of Economic Life (Westview, 1992), pp. 1–28; and John Lie, ‘Embedding
Polanyi’s Market Society’, Sociological Perspectives, Vol. 34, No. 2 (1991), pp. 219–35.
26. Thanh-Dam Truong, ‘The Underbelly of the Tiger: Gender and the Demystification of the Asian Miracle’,
Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 6, No. 3 (1999), pp. 133–65.
27. Jongwoo Han & L.M.H. Ling, ‘Authoritarianism in the Hypermasculinized State: Hybridity, Patriarchy and
Capitalism in Korea’, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 1 (1998), pp. 53– 78.
28. Aidan Foster-Carter, ‘The Modes of Production Controversy’, New Left Review, No. 107 (1978), pp. 44–77.
29. Aiwah Ong, ‘The Gender and Labour Politics of Postmodernity’, Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 20
(1991), pp. 284–6.

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 Juanita Elias
30. Stephanie Seguino, ‘Gender Inequality and Economic Growth: A Cross Country Analysis’, World Develop-
ment, Vol. 28, No. 7 (2000), pp. 1211–30.
31. For more detailed accounts of the role of ethnicity in the political economy of Malaysia, see J.V. Jesudason,
Ethnicity and the Economy: The State, Chinese Business and Multinationals in Malaysia (Oxford University
Press, 1990); and Rasiah Rajah, ‘Class, ethnicity and economic development in Malaysia’, in: Gary Rodan,
Kevin Hewison & Richard Robison (eds), The Political Economy of South-East Asia: An Introduction, first
edn (Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 121 –47.
32. Malaysian society is made up of three main ethnic groups: the (mainly Islamic) Malays who comprise 65.1%
of the population, Chinese (26% of the population) and Indians (7.7%). Figures are for 2000.
33. Christine B.N. Chin, In Service and Servitude: Foreign Female Domestic Workers and the Malaysian
‘Modernity’ Project (Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 171; and Linda Lim, ‘Women Workers in Multi-
national Corporations: The Case of the Electronics Industry in Malaysia and Singapore’, Michigan
Occasional Papers in Women’s Studies, No. IX (1980).
34. Hua Wu Yin, Class and Communalism in Malaysia: Politics in a Dependent Capitalist State (Zed, 1983).
35. Harold Crouch, ‘Malaysia: neither authoritarian nor democratic’, in: Kevin Hewison, Richard Robison &
Garry Rodan (eds), Southeast Asia in the 1990s: Authoritarianism, Democracy and Capitalism (Allen &
Unwin, 1993), pp. 133–58.
36. Frederic C. Deyo, Beneath the Miracle: Labour Subordination in the New Asian Industrialism (University of
California Press, 1989).
37. Elizabeth Grace, Shortcircuiting Labour: Unionising Electronic Workers in Malaysia (INSAN, 1990);
K.S. Jomo & Patricia Todd, Trade Unions in Peninsular Malaysia (Oxford University Press, 1994); and
Vicki Crinis, ‘The stratification of the garment and textile industries and labour movements in Malaysia’,
in: Gills & Piper, Women and Work in Globalizing Asia, pp. 154–68.
38. Noeleen Heyzer, ‘Asian Women Wage Earners: Their Situation and Possibilities for Donor Intervention’,
World Development, Vol. 17, No. 7 (1989), p. 1117.
39. Malaysia, Sixth Malaysia Plan 1991–1996 (Government Printers, 1991), p. 422.
40. Jamilah Ariffin, From Kampung to Urban Factories: Findings from the HAWA Study (University of Malaya
Press, 1994); and Richard Leete, Malaysia’s Demographic Transition: Rapid Development, Culture, and
Politics (Oxford University Press, 1996).
41. Truong, ‘The Underbelly of the Tiger’, p. 147.
42. I use the term ‘offshore’ in this context because of its prevalence in the literature on foreign direct investment
and the use of the term amongst the firm’s UK-based senior management who were interviewed as part of this
research. However, in discussing the notion of ‘offshore’ some care needs to be taken. Palan and Cameron
have identified ‘offshore’ as one of their ‘imagined’ economies of globalisation (locating offshore financial
centres and EPZs within this definition). Their notion of the ‘offshore’ is, however, presented as a powerful
ideational consensus around globalisation as an essentially business-led process—which obscures the extent
to which the ‘offshore’ is politically constructed in its origins. Importantly, in this article it is argued that the
management practices of firms can only be understood in relation to the societies in which they invest. In this
sense I do not wish to infer that the ‘offshore’ economy of the EPZ is in any way de-linked from an ‘onshore’
economy. See Cameron & Palan, The Imagined Economies of Globalization. The concept of the ‘offshore’ is
developed in Palan’s earlier work. See Ronen Palan, The Offshore World: Sovereign Markets, Virtual Places,
and Nomad Millionaires (Cornell University Press, 2003).
43. Angela Hale, ‘Technologies of Control and Resistance: New Technology and Women Workers in the
Globalized Garment Industry’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Vol. 2, No. 3 (2000), pp. 406–
8. Indeed such threats are indicative of the way in which the ideational consensus around the idea of the ‘off-
shore’ economy serves to legitimate business interests. See note 42 above.
44. Ong, ‘The Gender and Labour Politics of Postmodernity’, p. 285.
45. Elson & Pearson, ‘The subordination of women and the internationalization of factory production’; and
Juanita Elias, ‘Stitching-up the Labour Market: Recruitment, Gender and Ethnicity in the Multinational
Firm’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2005), pp. 90– 111.
46. I have generally chosen to refer to ethnicity rather than race. However, the use of the term ‘race’ in this table
is because this is what appears in the company personnel statistics the table was adapted from.
47. Salzinger, Genders in Production, p. 37.
48. Susan Ackerman, Cultural Processes in Malaysian Industrialization: A Study of Women Workers, unpub-
lished PhD thesis, University of California, 1980.
49. Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline.

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50. A study of spirit possession in Malaysian factories (and in a range of other locations) is also found in Mary
Keller’s recent book, The Hammer and the Flute: Women, Power, and Spirit Possession (Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2002).
51. It is rather problematic to view absenteeism as a form of worker resistance, given that absenteeism generally
reflected women’s position within the household as the primary child carer. However, absenteeism was con-
structed by managers as a ‘discipline problem’ and was thereby seen as a form of worker resistance.
52. Maznah Mohamad & Celia Ng, New Technologies and Women’s Labour: Case Studies of Two Electronics
Firms in Malaysia, Institut Kajian Malaysia dan Antarabangsa (IKMAS) Working Paper No. 5, Universiti
Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi, 1996.
53. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (Yale University Press, 1985).
54. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press, 1984).
55. Roland Blieker, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2000),
pp. 200–7.
56. Scott, Weapons of the Weak. For a wider discussion of the role of gender in Scott’s work, see Gillian Hart,
‘Engendering Everyday Resistance: Gender, Patronage and Production Politics in Rural Malaysia’, Journal
of Peasant Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1 (1991), pp. 93– 121. Blieker’s focus on gendered patterns of everyday
dissent focuses largely on women’s political agency in the former East Germany. See Blieker, Popular
Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics, pp. 160–70.
57. Marchand, ‘Challenging Globalization’, p. 154.
58. Nina Shapiro-Perl, ‘Resistance struggles: the routine struggle for bread and roses’, in: Karen Sacks &
Dorothy Remy (eds), My Troubles are Going to Have Trouble With Me (Rutgers University Press, 1984),
p. 194.
59. Dipak K. Gupta, ‘Everyday Resistance or Routine Repression? Exaggeration as Stratagem in Agrarian
Conflict’, Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2002), pp. 89– 108.
60. Ackerman, Cultural Processes in Malaysian Industrialization.
61. Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline, pp. 184– 5, 220.
62. See also Ackerman, Cultural Processes in Malaysian Industrialization, pp. 160, 188 for examples of
company managers expressing similar views.
63. Ariffin, From Kampung to Urban Factories; Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline; Amriah
Buang, ‘Development and factory women: negative perceptions from a Malaysian source area’, in: Janet
Henshall Momsen & Vivian Kinnaird (eds), Different Places Different Voices: Gender and Development
in Africa, Asia and Latin America (Routledge, 1993), pp. 197– 210; and Fatimah Daud, ‘Minah Karan’:
The Truth about Malaysian Factory Girls (Berita Publishing, 1985).
64. Ariffin, From Kampung to Urban Factories, pp. l –2.
65. This point is raised by Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline, and Ariffin, From Kampung to
Urban Factories, pp. 1 –2, and was also raised in interviews with a women’s NGO activist from the organ-
isation Sahabat Wanita (19 March 1999). It is apparent that concerns about the moral susceptibility of young
women workers have been articulated by nationalist groups within a number of states in which there has
been growth in female export-sector factory employment. See, for example, Caitrin Lynch, ‘The Politics
of White Women’s Underwear in Sri Lanka’s Open Economy’, Social Politics, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2002),
pp. 87–125.
66. Maznah & Ng, New Technologies and Women’s Labour, p. 46.
67. This point was also raised in a number of interviews and conversations that I undertook whilst in Malaysia—
for example, interview with members of the MTUC Women’s Committee, Petailing Jaya (12 February 1999)
and interview with member of Sahabat Wanita (19 March 1999).
68. Lucy Healey, ‘Gender, Power and the Ambiguities of Resistance in a Malay Community of Peninsular
Malaysia’, Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 22, No. 1 (1999), p. 49.
69. Jonathan Kent, ‘Malaysian city rules on women’, BBC News Online (World Edition), 5 January 2004; and
‘PAS chief makes about-turn on dress code’, New Straits Times, 21 March 2004.
70. Mazhah Mohamad, ‘Men foil as women toil’, Aliran Monthly (on-line edition), April 1999, available at
http://www.aliran.com/high9904.html
71. The United Malays National Organisation constitutes the largest party within the ruling coalition the Barisan
Nasional (National Front).
72. Cynthia Cockburn, Brothers: Male Dominance and Technological Change (Pluto, 1983).
73. Rasiah notes that this ethnic networking is common amongst the Chinese business community, reflecting a
sense of solidarity among Chinese businessmen who saw recruitment of other Chinese into their firms as

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some form of counter-measure towards what they perceived to be the discriminatory practices of the NEP.
See Rasiah, ‘Class, ethnicity and economic development in Malaysia’, pp. 10–11.
74. Dunning, Multinational Enterprises, p. 129.
75. R.W. Connell, ‘Globalization, imperialism, and masculinities’, in: Michael S. Kimmel, J. Hearn &
R.W. Connell (eds), Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities (Sage, 2005), pp. 71– 89.
76. D.S. Gills, ‘Neoliberal Economic Globalization and Women in Asia: Introduction’, in Gills and Piper,
Women and Work in Globalizing Asia, pp. 1–12.
77. Healey, ‘Gender, Power and the Ambiguities of Resistance’.
78. L.M.H. Ling, ‘Sex Machine: Global Hypermasculinity and Images of Asian Woman in Modernity’,
Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1999), pp. 277 –306.
79. Sally Theobold, ‘Working for Global Factories: Thai Women in Electronics Export Companies in the
Northern Regional Industrial Estate’, in Gills and Piper, Women and Work in Globalizing Asia, pp. 146 –50.
80. Hale, ‘Technologies of Control and Resistance’.
81. Gills, ‘Globalization and Counter-globalization’, pp. 13–31.
82. Amy Luinstra, Toil and Sweat: What Can be Done to Improve Working Conditions in Developing Countries?
(World Bank, 2001).
83. Ong, ‘The Gender and Labour Politics of Postmodernity’, p. 289.

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