From Disposable to Empowered: Rearticulating Labor in Sri Lankan Apparel Factories

Annelies Goger
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Annelies Goger: Department of Geography, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Saunders Hall, Campus Box 3220, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3220, USA

Environment and Planning A, 2013, vol. 45, issue 11, 2628-2645

Abstract: This paper engages the dis/articulations perspective to analyze everyday processes of upgrading in the Sri Lankan apparel industry Using feminist ethnographic methods that see management discourses as tools of interpellation that partially configure systems of power, I examine how managers are rearticulating worker subjectivities, restructuring the labor process to organize consent, and selectively mobilizing ‘Sri Lankan’ culture to legitimate a shift to flexible production. I argue that value is not only produced through interfirm or firm–state relations, but is also determined by the labor process as it is shaped by legacies of colonialism, persisting hierarchies, and the everyday reproduction of social difference. This research suggests that upgrading cannot be reduced to an economic logic and that it does not guarantee sustained global competitiveness or more egalitarian development. These findings call for more attention to be paid to the ways in which upgrading is a complex process of disarticulation and rearticulation that is occurring through an embodied, global labor-management process.

Keywords: global value chains; upgrading; lean manufacturing; apparel; articulation; Sri Lanka (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envira:v:45:y:2013:i:11:p:2628-2645

DOI: 10.1068/a45694

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