Temporary and Gig Economy Workers in China and Japan The Culture of Unequal Work

While a large number of studies exist on political-economic institutional explanations for the prevalence of precarious work, few have delved into the elusive yet critical domain of culture. This is highly pertinent to China and Japan whose shared tradition of Confucianism (broadly defined) continues to inform many aspects of society. In particular, core values such as hierarchy, harmony, and the subordination of individual interests to collective requirements impinge importantly on the iniquitous patterns of precarious work and its surrounding institutions ranging from state policy and legislation to industrial relations and social welfare. The pervasiveness and entrenched nature of culture has been especially evidenced by Japan's distinctly gendered and China's rural-urban citizenship-based labour market stratifications.

By bridging culture and institutions, Temporary and Gig Economy Workers in China and Japan brings a more integrated and nuanced understanding of unequal work, casting fresh light on social change in China, Japan, and beyond. Emphasis is placed not only on macro-level structural scrutiny but also on micro-agency empiricism, i.e. real people's experiences in everyday life. This holistic and comparative approach, as demonstrated by the book, will go a long way towards tackling the negative consequences of precarious work in a wider post-pandemic world.

Huiyan Fu, Senior Lecturer, University of Essex

Huiyan Fu (PhD, Social Anthropology, University of Oxford) is Senior Lecturer at University of Essex. Her main research interests lie in precarious work, social inequalities, and critical management studies. She is the author of An Emerging Non-Regular Labour Force in Japan: The Dignity of Dispatched Workers (Routledge 2011, 2015) and the editor of Temporary Agency Work and Globalisation (Routledge 2015). Her work also appears in highly ranked journals such as Human Relations, Gender & Society, and British Journal of Industrial Relations.

Introduction: The culture of unequal work: Temps and giggers in China and Japan, Huiyan Fu
1. Old and new inequalities: Citizenly discounting and precarious work in a changing China, Huiyan Fu
2. Gender, precarious labour and neoliberalism in Japan, Saori Shibata
3. Teleworking in pandemic Japan, Machiko Osawa and Jeff Kingston
4. Organising around precarity in China, Jude Howell
5. Precarious work and challenges facing Japanese unionism, Arjan Keizer
6. Organising temporary agency workers in Japan: Two types of inclusive union responses, Akira Suzuki
7. Negotiating gender, citizenship and precarity: Migrant women in contemporary China, Nana Zhang
8. Hierarchies, shadows and precarity: Cultural production on online literature platforms in China, Elaine Jing Zhao
9. Making sense of inequalities at work: The micropolitics of everyday negotiation among non-regular workers in Japan, Shinji Kojima
10. 'I'm not a real freeter': Aspiration and non-regular labour in Japan, Emma E. Cook