Abstract
The economic reform and opening-up policy in China had brought changes such as large influxes of foreign investment, transformations in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and development of private-invested enterprises (POEs) all over the country. In China labour studies, previous literature mainly focused on eithermigrant workers working in foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs) in South China or laid-off workers from SOEs in North China, with little attention paid to contemporary labour practices in domestic enterprises. To fill the gap, this study aims to explore the factors shaping the factory regimes, particularly in SOEs and POEs, under the changing institutional contexts of contemporary state regulations and market competitions. This study posed two questions. First, what are the management practices and labour responses in SOEs and POEs and what their differences? Second, what factors have accounted for the differences? To answer these questions, data were collected from participant observations and in-depth interviews in two printing factories, an SOE and a POE, in Beijing.Be Guided by the factory regime theory expounded by Burawoy (1983; 1985), this study analyses the interplay of economic and political factors that shape management practices and responses of workers in factories with different forms of ownership. Management practice in the SOE studied was greatly influenced by state intervention and less driven by market force, while that in the POE was majorly driven by market competitions and less by political factors. As a result, welfare provisions in the SOE and POE were different with a certain proportion of state workers in the SOE still enjoyed the welfare protection brought forward from the socialist era. Welfare provision, the state and the market interacted to influence the labour process in the two factories.
It is suggested that in the SOE, the legacy of socialism and strong influence from state had given rise to a bureaucratic management and local workers were more likely than migrant workers to resist management control. In the POE that employed migrant workers only, fierce market competitions had led to a despotic management. Workers there resisted through building workshop level solidarity.
This study also shows that factory workers in both the SOE and the POE in the Beijing printing industry were passive and silent. To reveal the labour conditions and labour processes in Northern factories help to understand the causes of weak labour resistance in North China.
| Date of Award | 23 Aug 2016 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Lai Ching LEUNG (Supervisor) |