Abstract
Pursuing our mutual interest in innovation, we recently collaborated on a study to investigate the effects of a Dongguan government initiative to boost manufacturing in the area situated in Dongguan, Guangdong province, China, through automation. Dongguan’s policy, which it dubbed ‘Replacing Humans with Robots’, would provide financial support to manufacturing firms which upgraded their production processes by installing new machinery—in some cases involving robotics—to increase productivity and, ultimately it was hoped, profit. We wondered how manufacturers in Dongguan would respond to the initiative and how it might affect the labour force. After completing our research, we realised that we had happened on one aspect of a much larger phenomenon: the nature of work in East Asia was changing, in some cases dramatically, with significant consequences for relations of production in the region. This sparked our interest in marshalling a broader scholarly approach to what was happening, eventually resulting in this special issue of Science, Technology and Society, which comprises five studies on a range of related topics situated in several East Asian markets.
We and the editors of Science, Technology and Society also share an interest in advancing social constructivist critiques of technological determinism. To this end we sought studies that would situate such a critique in the context of rapidly changing employment relations in East Asia. Technological determinism implies that innovations like those discussed in the papers collected here should shape changes in social life, and there is little doubt that changing socioeconomic conditions in East Asia bear some relationship to the innovations in production processes and employment relations our authors study. The question is whether these innovations can upgrade work as proponents of technological determinism claim.
The studies we present here address these new employment relations in East Asia—in China, Japan and Singapore in particular—that are emerging through technological and other forms of innovation, including organisational and institutional innovation. The collection of papers features a mix of invited and submitted contributions, all of which underwent a multilayered process that began with a workshop at which authors read drafts of their papers and discussants responded. Following that exercise the authors revised their papers, we read them and provided additional feedback, and further revisions were made. Each of the papers was then subjected to peer review by prominent scholars (two for each paper) and yet additional revision was done before finding their way into Science, Technology and Society. The papers also offer a mix in the balance between empirical research and theoretical analysis, as we believe that the changes taking place in East Asia call for empirical study but also bear implications for theory in several disciplines. Our overarching goal was to present a stimulating collection of articles to readers which explores the relationship between innovation and social change in the region, with particular concern for the implications of these phenomena for workers.
One theme that runs across several of the studies collected here is the emergence of what has been called the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The East Asian cases show how manufacturing innovations can work compatibly with classic low-wage regimes of production so as to promote precarious employment relations. The First Industrial Revolution began, of course, in the eighteenth century, fuelled largely by the mechanisation of production enabled by steam power. The Second Industrial Revolution followed with the advent of electricity and mass production (an innovation in social technology). Most of our readers have lived through the Third Industrial Revolution, which began in the mid-twentieth century but accelerated dramatically in the 1980s with innovations in digital technology and the automation of manufacturing processes that followed. We are now experiencing the birth of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is building on the digital revolution through the development of data platforms that are being deployed across industries, including manufacturing and services.
A second theme, although not emphasised to the same degree and as uniformally as the first, is ‘everydayness’ of the technological innovation discussed in the papers. In this line of enquiry, ‘everyday’ is not a fixed term, but rather one that has to be understood in context. ‘Everyday’ is a critical concept generated by the collaborative enquiries as presented by the authors of the papers in this special issue. In this respect, the papers help forge an understanding of the present within the political and cultural geographies of East Asia.
An important outcome is a rapidly developing ‘sharing’ economy or ‘platform capitalism’ that is utilising digital interconnectivity to revolutionise how goods and services are produced and distributed. The disruptive potential of this new industrial model can hardly be overstated. Consider, for example, Uber, the ride-sharing platform, that enables customers to connect directly with service providers (drivers of their own vehicles). In the platform economy, data are the key to productivity. Uber’s corporate officers need not own physical assets—customer data provide them with an ever-growing market that they know in intimate detail, threatening the traditional taxi and delivery industries that operate under heavy regulation and rely on large capital investments to operate. It is in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution that several of the studies collected here engage with the critique of technological determinism by exploring the ‘everydayness’ of innovation as well as the changing nature of work.
We include one primarily theoretical contribution in the issue. A study by Boy Lüthje of Sun Yat-Sen University, ‘Platform Capitalism “Made in China”? Intelligent Manufacturing, Taobao Villages, and the Restructuring of Work’, explores the implications of platform capitalism for employment relations. A term that is rapidly gaining currency in the literature, ‘platform capitalism’ denotes a new model of work in which interconnectivity across Internet and wireless networks promises to have profound effects on how business owners in manufacturing and other industries procure labour and on how labourers perceive their relationship to their employers and more broadly to work itself. In this context a platform, that is, a computer application, provides access to a firm’s operations to business partners, customers, suppliers and, of course, workers. Distinguishing production-driven from distribution-driven platforms, Lüthje argues that, while Beijing’s ‘Made in China 2025’ initiative promotes the development of production-driven platforms, internet giant Alibaba has a distribution-driven platform well underway, as reflected in the establishment of ‘Taobao Villages’, online marketplaces connecting clusters of small manufacturing enterprises through its platform to multiple stakeholders. While largely rejecting technological determinism on the grounds that ‘complex relations of social and economic power’ shape how manufacturing digitisation is developing, Lüthje finds that distribution-driven manufacturing pursues ‘fragmented specialization’ that renders workers subject to ‘hardships and hazards of informalised employment’.
Among the primarily empirical studies in the set, a paper by Hallam Stevens of Nanyang Technical University, ‘The Quotidian Labour of High Tech: Innovation and Ordinary Work in Shenzhen’, shows how the maker movement in China deviates from the conventional upper-middle class trajectory by engaging in the ‘everydayness’ of technological innovation. Stevens’ study stands out for its deep ethnographic dive into Shenzhen, China’s local high-tech economy. Stevens argues that, while Shenzhen is known to many as the Silicon Valley of China, the maker/hacker culture that fuelled Silicon Valley’s rise provides a misleading model of tech manufacturing in Shenzhen. The study focuses on three spaces in Shenzhen’s economy: Huaqiangbei electronics markets, small-scale factories and product-design workshops. Shenzhen’s tech manufacturing sector has evolved from mere imitation to innovative practices including recombination, specialisation, hybridisation and adaptation primarily through local sourcing and tight integra-tion between design and assembly operations. Stevens’ research shows that citing ‘maker’ work in tech manufacturing oversimplifies the situation in Shenzhen, where multiple kinds of work drive manufacturing. He observes in particular, for example, that in the Huaqiangbei markets caregiving work plays a critical role in enabling those who design and assemble mobile devices targeting mostly non-affluent Asian markets to meet demand. Thus, Shenzhen’s high-tech ‘ecosystem’ differs significantly from Silicon Valley’s, with small-scale manufacturing prolife-rating through tight local networks of designers, suppliers, manufacturers, shippers and workers. As Stevens puts it, Shenzhen’s success is ‘a story about innovation rising from diverse forms of work and diverse people in diverse places’ where non-elite makers manufacture low-cost tech products for non-elite markets.
In our own contribution to this issue, ‘Achieving Industrial Upgrading through Automation in Dongguan, China’, we report the results of research that involved eight factories in the city that had upgraded their production processes in response to the aforementioned automation policy. Based on a well-known taxonomy of upgrading, we found that the factories we studied through interviews and onsite participant-observation engaged in several types of upgrading. The three factories on which this paper focuses engaged in three types of upgrading—process, product and functional—to achieve a variety of objectives. While all the factories in the study sought greater profits through automation, important implications of the upgrading vary depending on the type of upgrading achieved. For example, the factory that concentrated on process upgrading wanted to streamline its production process, and workers suffered from layoffs as automated production lines required fewer workers while increasing productivity. The factory that engaged in product upgrading found, however, that improving product quality also meant improving worker skills and therefore instituted an apprenticeship programme that avoided layoffs as most workers were able to undergo training to upgrade their skills to enable them to participate in designing production processes. The factory that sought to move up the value chain to replace original equipment manufacturing (OEM) with own brand manufacturing (OBM) had already become an own design manufacturer (ODM) at the time of our study, but it was unclear whether the introduction of robotics would help it successfully challenge the hierarchical control of lead firms in the bicycle helmet industry. Industrial upgrading will inevitably accompany industrial development under the Made in China 2025 initiative, but how such processes affect workers depend on the type of upgrading involved. If a factory seeks primarily to streamline its productions lines workers are likely to suffer, but if it engages in more sophisticated forms of upgrading workers can benefit. The choice to upgrade, we found, depends on a complex mix of factors reflecting a firm’s position in the global value chain.
Luke Heemsbergen (Deakin University), Angela Daly (Queensland University of Technology) and Jiajie Lu (Queensland University of Technology), in their paper ‘3D-Printed Futures of Manufacturing, Social Change and Technological Innovation in China and Singapore: The Ghost of a Massless Future,’ explore the implications of 3D printing technology through ‘backcasting’ workshops in which they asked participants in Singapore and Shenzhen to weigh in on a series of ‘ideal futures’ and the paths to those futures. The authors set the context for the presentation of their backcasting exercise with a rich review of the literature on 3D printing technology and the myriad ways it fits into the interconnected, distributed smart-industry infrastructure. They argue that while 3D printing has the potential to promote decentralised manufacturing and property ‘commons’, the use of this technology is so highly contextualised that ‘much of the focus on 3D printing outside of established industry applications remains marginal to most of society’ resulting in what they term as ‘revolution underwhelmed’. For their backcasting exercise they asked participants to imagine ideal political-economic futures across local–global knowledge and capital-commons dimensions, as the latter were summoned to ‘consider their own local histories’ in the context of variables representing ‘culture, law, markets, policy, science and technology’. Heemsberger, Daly and Lu’s study provides what they consider preliminary research results that shed light on the ‘socio-technical construction of 3D printing’.
Another empirical study that completes the set of studies selected for this issue of Science, Technology and Society shifts the focus to Japan. In ‘The Paradoxical Autonomy in Japan’s Platform Economy’, Saori Shibata of Leiden University reports the results of an ethnographic study of workers in Japan’s burgeoning crowdsourced labour market that leverages online platforms that connect workers with companies with which they engage as independent contractors. Crowdsourcing firms bring independent workers, most working from home computer systems, into contact with firms in a range of industries to conduct essentially white-collar work consisting of fragmented tasks that meet specifications set by the end-user firms. Situating these new employment relations in the context of a labour shortage in Japan that has grown in the 2010s, Shibata notes that employers and the Japanese government promote the platform economy as a means of giving workers considerable autonomy regarding when, where, and how they work and making work available to otherwise excluded subpopulations such as women and the elderly. Her research reveals a very different story, however, as she finds instead that crowd working serves primarily to ‘flexibilise’ the labour market, transforming employment relations in a way that, far from enabling workers to enjoy new levels of employment autonomy, trap them in cycles of fragmented work that features ‘late, low or absent payments or cancelled jobs’. Crowd workers must contend not only with precarity in the sense that they are not guaranteed either jobs or pay but also with intense competition for jobs, gender inequality in pay and a worsening work–life balance (one of the putative advantages of crowd work is that it enhances this balance, but on-the-ground experience belies this claim). The monitoring and evaluation of tasks and workers that crowd work enables, Shibata concludes, represents ‘a new form of control imposed on digital labour’. She argues that crowd workers’ ‘paradoxical autonomy’—autonomy through control—is more embedded in flexible employment relations than in a free and autonomous future that technological determinism vows to deliver.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution may be in its infancy, but the breakneck pace at which it is developing makes it incumbent upon scholars to explore its implications for social change and political economy. The studies we present here offer a wide range of perspectives on this onrushing technological phenomenon, and there is as yet no consensus regarding the long-term industrial future for employers or workers. Still, we believe these papers show on balance that in spite of the power of technology to disrupt employment and social relations, a complex mix of social, political and economic factors renders technological determinism inadequate to the task of making sense of the bewildering complexity of the new world of work.
The factors fuelling the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the resulting changes in employment relations seem amplified in East Asia, a region featuring rapidly developing emerging economies orbiting the immense Chinese market and manufacturing base. As we write this introduction China finds itself engaged in a perhaps manufactured ‘trade war’ with the USA, whose immense economy is on the verge of eclipsing, at least in size. China’s commitment to technological development, reflected in its Made in China 2025 initiative, will be tested as global pressures on what are widely perceived to be unfair trade practices may well force China to engage in institutional economic reform to a degree it has thus far resisted.
The papers collected here suggest that the apparently ineluctable forces of change that technology has been unleashing cannot be force-fed into a universal analytical framework, as local, regional and other contextual factors imprint unique stamps on the institutions, organisations and markets that are riding these waves of technological change. Given the embryonic status of many aspects of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, we consider this special issue of Science, Technology and Society a first step towards full scholarly engagement in multiple disciplines with the vast potential of new technology to alter social and economic life.
This special issue is part of the outcome of a collaborative project supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China (Project No. HKU C7011-16G, ‘Making Modernity in East Asia: Technologies of Everyday Life in 19th–21st Centuries’). The work in this special issue is partially supported by the collaborative project.