Precarious Asia

"Precarious Asia fills a much-needed gap, challenging mainstream economics by combining historical institutional and critical political economy approaches to understand how national institutions structure precarious employment and its outcomes."
—Leah F. Vosko, Professor and Canada Research Chair in the Political Economy of Gender & Work, York University "An insightful and fascinating exploration of the drivers of precarious work in Asia, and of the variable, politically contested ways in which governments have sought to balance the competing agendas of firms requiring employment flexibility and of workers demanding basic social and livelihood protections."
—Frederic C. Deyo, Bartle Professor of Sociology, SUNY Binghamton "Precarious Asia stakes out a commanding perspective situating country cases on a broad canvas that stretches across both the region and the globe. The authors open the field of vision to expose the scarred landscapes of labor relations and deep social fault-lines of precarity."
—Heidi Gottfried, Associate Professor of Sociology, Wayne State University "Kalleberg, Hewison and Shin are compassionate in addressing the difficult situation confronting working people in an age of increasing precarity... Their comparative analytical framework will be very useful to scholars and activists who wish to further investigate and monitor the long-term development of Japan, South Korea and Indonesia from the perspective of employment rights. The dynamism of Asian capitalism and labor politics, mediated by national states and other political actors across different levels, receives an insightful analysis in Precarious Asia."—Jenny Chan, Journal of Contemporary Asia "Precarious Asia is informative, as its audience can trace the changes of precarious work in the three Asian countries. The authors successfully discover the patterns of precarious work in the labor market and, more important, compare how international pressures played out distinctively as well as similarly."—Yooseop Chun, Industry and Labor Relations Review "With case studies of Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia, this multidisciplinary, comparative research raises serious questions about how the global economy, capital, and labor interact to create this outcome. ... Recommended."—Z. Zhu, CHOICE "Precarious Asiais an important addition to the fields of political economy, global capitalism, work and labor, stratification and inequality, and welfare states. Readers will greatly benefit from the broad comparative knowledge that the book offers regarding the changing shapes of employment and their implications for socioeconomic inequality in contemporary neoliberal capitalism."—Yoonkyung Lee, Social Forces "In Precarious Asia: Global Capitalism and Work in Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia, Arne Kalleberg, Kevin Hewison, and Kwang-Yeong Shin provide a comprehensive view of precarious work in three of Asia's most important economic powers. Their effort is an ambitious one, spanning the history of precarious work in each country, the global and domestic forces that have shaped the extent and type of precarity, and the consequences for inequality and poverty."—Mary C. Brinton, American Journal of Sociology "Precarious labor has had a long history in advanced capitalist economies and has always dominated the majority of the world's population in the Global South. It is thus important to understand the distinctive political, social, cultural, and economic processes of precarization in different parts of the world, as precarity can be shaped by colonialism and the developmental state as much as by neoliberalization. This book, therefore, is a welcome addition to the existing discussions on precarious labor by incorporating the Asian experiences and taking a comparative and institutional lens."—Xiaoshuo Hou, H-Asia