Industrial Workers At Household In North Town: The Logic Of Everyday Practice And Macro-Political Economy

This paper takes "industrial workers at household" at North Town ofNorth China as a main case, to discuss the mechanism of the making of thistype of peasant worker, the process of history transformation, stateintervention and the sequent. At the micro-level, this paper illustrate how thelegitimacy of control achieve its purpose, how it restrict those workersdevelop to the citizen and working class.According to the rethinking studies of peasant workers, this paper arguesthat the working-calss formation and citizen formation are two macro-trendsin peasant workers movement. But it also has other trends: one example is thepattern of "industrial workers at household". The materials of this paper rootin two years' field work in North Town and collections of the documents fromlocal government, media reports, central government document about thoseworkers.Household production is a special mode that peasant in North Town copewith the industrialization. Those peasants make use of the space resources andculture repertory at hand, integrating those workers from other provinces intofamily system via the network of recruit, thereby constructing a legitimatecontrol system of patriarchy. This system resists the entry of new rightdiscourse through the network trap, using the traditional obedience, right,obligations to mould the behavior of workers.According to the modern meaning of production, the central governmentinitiates the program of citizen construction and the empowerment. Butbecause of the special logic of carrying out and the inertia of government, inthe same time lacking the micro supporting system, those workers absent fromthis movement. Even more, the traditional background and the dependence ofworkers on the bosses exclude them from this program.The conclusion argues that the production facing the whole country andglobal market can't result in the logic of class or class formation necessarily,the entry of rhetoric law can't result in the logic of citizen. Those mechanismsinclude the trap of production, cultural hegemony, network trap. This paperalso argues that four factors together mould the behavior style of Chinaworkers: the construction of modern right, market, (new) traditional factors,the governance of socialism.