Locating the ‘‘Everyday’’ in International PoliticalEconomy: That Roar Which Lies on the OtherSide of Silence

Review by Juanita Elias

Griffith Asia Institute, Griffith University

Everyday Politics of the World Economy. By John M. Hobson and Leonard Seabrooke.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 254 pp., $36.99 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-521-70163-1).

Transnational Tortillas: Race, Gender, and Shop-Floor Politics in Mexico and the United States.By Carolina Bank Munoz. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. 216 pp., $18.95paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-7422-4).

Taking Southeast Asia to Market: Commodities, Nature and People in the Neoliberal Age. ByJoseph Nevins and Nancy Lee Peluso. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. 277pp., $24.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-7433-0).

Introduction

The three excellent books reviewed in this essay all, in different ways, challengeconventional understandings of how and what we study within InternationalPolitical Economy (IPE)—emphasizing the role of everyday social relations,actions, and the perspectives of nonelite groups and actors in the making of theglobal political economy. Of the three books reviewed here, only one of thebooks specifically locates itself within the field of IPE and engages specificallywith an IPE literature (Hobson and Seabrooke’s collection Everyday Politics of theWorld Economy). However, the other two books that are written from the perspec-tive of social anthropology (Nevins and Peluso’s collection Taking Southeast Asiato Market) and labor ⁄ industrial sociology (Munoz’s Transnational Tortillas) shouldrightfully be considered within a review essay focussing on the topic of ‘‘everydayIPE’’ in the sense that they are representative of literature that explores theinterconnectedness between global processes of neoliberal political and eco-nomic governance and the roles that everyday actors perform in both reproduc-ing and resisting these global shifts.

Nonetheless, the three books reviewed here have very different aims. Hobsonand Seabrooke seek to demonstrate the significance of everyday actors and theeveryday sources of political–economic change to an IPE audience more com-monly preoccupied with discussions of economic ‘‘high politics’’ (what theylabel regulatory IPE). By contrast, the collection by Nevins and Peluso is part ofan emerging body of literature focussed on ‘‘combining the cultural with thepolitical economic’’ (p. 4) in demonstrating how the deepening reach of capital-ist social relations into all aspects of everyday life is an issue that needs to betaken much more seriously by social anthropologists. These two volumes are use-fully reviewed side by side because for Nevins and Peluso, the everyday shouldnot be privileged at the expense of an appreciation of the broader structures ofglobal capitalism, while for Hobson and Seabrooke, it is the global ‘‘regulatory’’

doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2486.2010.00965.x� 2010 International Studies Association

International Studies Review (2010) 12, 603–609

level that should not be privileged at the expense of everyday social relationsand actions. Finally, Munoz’s book belongs to a rich tradition of scholarshipthat examines the gendered social relations at play within transnational produc-tion. The book focuses on factory workers located in the US and Mexican opera-tions of a tortilla manufacturing firm and considers not only how genderrelations are (re)produced through systems of capitalist production (including,importantly, the production of workplace masculinities as well as femininities),but how these identities also intersect with race, class, nationality, and migrationstatus.

From Regulatory to Everyday IPE

Central to the approach adopted by Hobson and Seabrooke is a rejection ofwhat they term Regulatory IPE (RIPE). RIPE’s adherents might be positivistscholars engaged in identifying the sources of governance and regulation in theglobal economy, or they might be critical scholars who reify the significance ofcapitalist structures in their understanding of the global political economy. Thepoint is that regardless of the theoretical and methodological persuasions of itsadherents, the regulatory perspective is one that is overly top-down in itsapproach. This is not to say that a focus on international institutions, worldorders, or the mechanisms of capitalist hegemony is not important issues forIPE. Rather, they are not the only issues, and a focus on the regulatory at theexpense of the everyday results in us losing sight of some important questions.For example, ‘‘how [do] the subordinate mediate and at times shape these so-called top down processes?’’ (p. 4) or ‘‘how can we understand regimes in theworld economy only by focussing on formal institutions without recognising themany informal regimes that are created by everyday actors?’’ (p. 9). As Sharmanargues in his chapter that looks at the everyday agency of tax havens, top-downperspectives do not just dominate the academic study of IPE, but also reflect theway in which dominant powers have conceptualized how regulatory standards (inthis case, in relation to tax and financial regulation) can be ‘‘imposed’’ on lesspowerful developing world states. And yet, small states are able to resist thesepractices, not least because their ability to appropriate the language of economiccompetitiveness and tax regulation enables them to subvert these norms to theirown ends. In this sense, Sharman challenges a tendency within critical IPE toview norms as ‘‘one more weapon in the arsenal of dominant states in extendingtheir hegemony to the ideational sphere’’ (p. 59). Normative regimes are thusreconceptualized as providing, to use James C. Scott’s term, potential ‘‘weaponsof the weak’’ (Scott 1985).

Inevitably, resistances and exertions of agency are central concerns in the Hob-son and Seabrooke volume. Ford and Piper, for example, chart the rise of pro-migrant worker informal activist regimes in Southeast Asia aimed at addressingthe problems and issues faced by the region’s female migrant domestic workers.These regimes provide a counter to formal migration and industrial relationsregimes in the region that serve to regulate and exploit female migrant workers.Even though the results that these pro-migrant worker activist groups haveachieved are frequently ‘‘piecemeal and context specific’’ (p. 78) and the infor-mal regime is itself ‘‘partial and fragmented’’ (p. 79), it does have the potentialto influence and challenge formal labor migration regimes. Adam Morton’schapter on peasant resistances in Latin America is an important inclusion in thevolume—not least because his chapter demonstrates the ways in which criticalIPE scholarship grounded in a Gramscian tradition can and does engage witheveryday acts of resistance and struggles against capitalist hegemony. Mortonargues that ‘‘due recognition has to be granted to the intertwined histories ofhegemonic and resistance practices’’ (p. 136). These resistances are important

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not least because, as the example of the EZLN rebellion in Chiapas demon-strates, they have had significant influence across Latin America. Thus, anotherconcern of the book is to consider the role that everyday actors and places playin the constitution of the global political economy, particularly as drivers ofchange. Both Seabrooke and Langley, for example, have written chapters thattake a look at the everyday sources of global financial power.

One of the more unique contributions made by this volume is an emphasis on‘‘Eastern agents,’’ an attempt to challenge the pervasive Western-centricity ofmuch IPE scholarship in which global economic change is viewed in terms ofthe extension of a specifically Western economic modernity into a culturally‘‘backward’’ non-West. Hobson and Suzuki, for example, have written chaptersthat seek to challenge the Western-centricism that is implicit to current under-standings of both ‘‘globalization’’ (Hobson) and ‘‘hegemony’’ (Suzuki). As Hob-son suggests ‘‘myriad forms of axiorational behaviour and agency… conductedby numerous everyday Eastern agents… in aggregate, led on to the rise of glob-alisation and the rise of capitalist modernity’’ (p. 141). Furthermore, as Wilsonsuggests in her chapter which draws upon examples from the Thai retail sector,the rise of capitalist modernity relies heavily upon preexisting sets of deeply gen-dered social relations. Thus, the growth of the retail sector in Thailand via anethnically Chinese diaspora depended in large part on the invisible contributionof female family labor.

Commodification and Everyday Life in the Global Political Economy

The significance of Eastern agents as drivers of change in the global economy isa perspective that sits reasonably comfortably alongside the analysis presented inthe volume Taking Southeast Asia to Market. This engaging and important book isconcerned with the commodification of people and resources in the SoutheastAsian region. The contributing authors provide a diverse range of examples(from small-holder coffee production in Sumatra to the trade in live fish fromIndonesia to Southern China to the rise of the Malaysian biotech industry) thatillustrate the centrality of the changing nature of commodity-producingprocesses to the everyday lives of the region’s inhabitants. Commodity produc-tion is understood fundamentally as an ‘‘embodied social and cultural process’’(p. 226), one that must be understood through focussing on people’s lives.

The chapters in the book present detailed and historicized analyses of how theeveryday lives of Southeast Asians are being transformed through engagementwith increasingly marketized social spaces. However, like Hobson, Nevins andPeluso stress the agency of these actors—‘‘they are not mere cogs in aneconomic machine’’ (p. 225), rather:

these actors are producers of histories, geographies, social relations, and‘‘Nature’’—just as they are shaped by the forces of time, space and society as wellas by the physical environment. In these regards, they are both the makers ofSoutheast Asia and its literal embodiment. (p. 225)

Nonetheless, contemporary processes of commodification need to be contextu-alized within a ‘‘deep history of mass violence’’ (p. 2) initiated by the forcefulopening up of the region during the colonial era and then intersecting with theauthoritarian nationalism of the region’s postcolonial developmental regimes.Commodity production is characterized by ‘‘dispossession, appropriation, disci-plining, boundary making and exploitation’’ (p. 4) as the market gradually pene-trates all corners of everyday life; a process that serves to both intensify andrecompose socioeconomic disparities. In this sense, the ‘‘everyday’’ described inNevin’s and Peluso’s work is a much more violent and oppressive world, one

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marked by the ‘‘violence of everyday life’’ (Scheper-Hughes 1992, p. 3) than thatfound in Hobson and Seabrooke.

The focus on the processes of commodification enables the authors to chartthe widening and deepening of capitalism into all areas of everyday life in thecontemporary neoliberal era as well as the tensions and resistances that aresparked by this process. The commodification of nature is something that is ofparticular concern to many of the contributors—be it through the ‘‘enclosure’’of forests in the form of national parks and the granting of logging permits orthe building of dams and canals, which serve to commodify and regulate accessto water and waterways. A Polanyian lens is central to many of the accounts ofcommodification provided in this book. This is seen in an emphasis on thecentrality of the state in enacting the processes of commodification. Thus,Maclean’s chapter highlights how the ‘‘entrepreneurial turn’’ (p. 141) withinBurma’s ruling junta has played a role (alongside mass political violence) inmaintaining control over resource-rich areas of the country, while other contrib-utors point to the deliberate ceding of state control over natural resources tocorporate actors (as occurred in postcrisis Indonesia). Furthermore, resistance isconceptualized in terms of a Polanyian double movement—viewed as integral tothe processes of commodity production. Thus, Barney’s chapter focuses on theemergence of Lao’s forestlands as commercial spaces serving the Chinese timbermarket, a process that, he argues, is being ‘‘produced by a series of ‘violentbreaks’ and enclosures, often accompanied by ‘double movements’—or socialoppositions to the totalizing production and capture of fictitious commodities’’(p. 92).

What many of the chapters in this collection point to is how the rise of neolib-eralism in Southeast Asia has been predicated upon the ongoing embeddednessof the market in existing systems of social relations (much as Wilson points outin her chapter in the Hobson and Seabrooke volume). For example, Rudnyckyjlooks at the use of Islamic spiritual training programs undertaken in Indonesia’sstate-owned enterprises in the lead up to privatization demonstrating how every-day cultural practices are harnessed in ways that bolster neoliberal reform butalso produce locally specific forms of capitalist modernity. Hence, ‘‘rather thanseeing neoliberalism as a universal logic, unfolding in Hegelian fashion andremaking the postcolonial world in its image,’’ the author stresses those ‘‘config-urations that emerge in the conjunction of neoliberal technologies and localizedpractices’’ (p. 77).

Labor in the Everyday IPE

It is notable that one of the key topics connecting all three books is a focus onthe role of labor in the everyday politics of the global economy. For the authorsin the Nevins and Peluso volume, labor is understood as one of Polanyi’s ficti-tious commodities—something that is ‘‘freed’’ to create a labor force that makescapitalist accumulation viable. Tsing, in her chapter on forestry production,highlights how the commodification of labor in this manner accompanies thecommodification of the forests themselves. Using the example of a Korean log-ging firm, Tsing shows how the production of a waged labor force in the forestsof Kalimantan depended upon assumptions regarding the need to discipline‘‘lazy natives.’’ This approach was embodied in the development of a pidginlanguage of management instruction. The need to control and discipline laborthrough repressive workplace regimes is something that is perhaps much easierto pursue in factory settings. Tran, for example, focuses on regimes of workplacecontrol in the Vietnamese garment industry pointing to the centrality of genderto these regimes. Asian multinational corporations are shown to draw upon,and benefit from, the way that state nationalist discourses reproduce feminine

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identities based around ideas of obedience and hard work. However, theserepressive workplace regimes are also resisted by workers employing alternativediscourses related to notions of working-class solidarity that were central to thenation’s experience of communist rule.

Munoz’s book Transnational Tortillas is an in-depth account of employmentpractices in the tortilla industry. As with Tran’s analysis, Munoz highlights thesignificance of state power in fashioning workplace gender (as well as racial)inequalities (Munoz 2008). Drawing upon research from a Mexican companywith operations in both the United States and Mexico, the book explores why itis that quite different regimes of workplace control emerge in two distinct factorysites—in Baja California and over the border in California—even though thesites are owned by the same firm and produce the same product. The authorwas inspired to undertake this study having read Ching Kwang Lee’s now classicbook Gender and the South China Miracle (1998) that compared gendered work-place regimes in a factory operating sites in Hong Kong and China’s Guangdongprovince. Conducting research of this nature was not at all easy—with the authornoting the difficulties in gaining access to managers and workers in both loca-tions in a useful methodology section. However, Munoz succeeds in producing asophisticated work that possibly even rivals the book that originally inspired herresearch.

The ethnographic data presented in the book are impressive. The authorobserved workplace practices in both factory sites and interviewed managers andworkers, giving us an insight not only into the mundanities of workplace practiceon the production lines of a transnational tortilla firm, but also providing a lookat the everyday lives of the workers themselves. The introductory chapter pro-vides vignettes from the life stories of some of the workers interviewed duringthe course of the research which, from the outset, enable the reader to contextu-alize the analysis in terms of the everyday life experiences of ordinary people liv-ing in Mexico and the United States. However, it is important to note that this isnot the sort of ethnographic research that privileges micro-level experiences overan analysis of broader socioeconomic and political structures. Rather, Munozseeks to revive the significance of the work of the industrial sociologist MichaelBuroway, which emphasized the significance of the (capitalist) state in shapingworkplace regimes. Munoz seeks to bring Buroway’s arguments up-to-date byplacing the discussion of labor control within a transnational context, consider-ing how new (neoliberal and also militarized) forms of state power influenceworkplace regimes, and perhaps most importantly, looking to the intersectionsbetween state power, the labor market, race, class, and gender in constructingfactory regimes. Munoz’s work is thus part of an important body of scholar-ship to have emerged within labor studies that emphasizes the social construc-tion of labor in the global economy as a gendered and racialized process(Taylor 2009).

The militarization of US borders following 9 ⁄ 11 meant that family migrationfrom Mexico was gradually replaced by more male-dominated patterns of migra-tion. The case study firm at the center of her study has benefited from thesedevelopments—employing a largely feminized low-wage workforce in its Mexicanplant made up largely of women providing for families ‘‘left behind’’ by malemigrants and a largely male workforce in the United States. Despite the historicalassociation between women’s work and the production of tortillas, the US factorypreferred to employ a male workforce because the unstable employment statusof the mainly undocumented workforce meant that this group of workers couldbe tightly controlled—a process aided by the repressive anti-immigrant stancetaken by the US government in recent years (and the consequences of thesepolicies in terms of making it increasingly difficult for migrants to return home).Male rather than female undocumented workers became the employees of

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choice because they were perceived to have less family responsibilities that couldinterfere with the firm’s productivity.

Workplace control in the Mexican firm operates in a quite different, butequally gendered and racialized, manner. Here, the female workforce areemployed on less than subsistence wages and subjected to persistent workplacesexual harassment by managers who also differentiate workers according to theirskin color (‘‘a despotic shop-floor regime regulated by a competitive and sexual-ized shop floor environment’’ p. 165). Furthermore, neoliberal economicreforms in Mexico have served to fundamentally weaken the power of organizedlabor making resistance to these workplace strategies increasingly difficult. Thus,the book also serves to make the more general point that the state’s increasingwillingness to police the movement of people across borders and decreasing will-ingness to regulate the power of business (for example in the area of labor stan-dards) are both part and parcel of neoliberalism as both strategies are‘‘consistent with the business interests that drive neoliberal policy’’ (p. 168).

Conclusion

Despite the emphasis on the increasing power of corporate capitalism underneoliberalism in Munoz’s study, the author is also keen to stress that ‘‘[g]lobalpolitics… cannot be divorced from the internal production machinery of thefactory’’ (p. 170). Thus, what studies such as Munoz’s as well as those providedin the Nevins and Peluso and (perhaps to a lesser extent) the Hobson andSeabrooke volumes serve to do is to focus our attention on the human facesbehind the processes of economic transformation. Importantly, what many ofthe different authors reviewed here demonstrate is that these human faces existat the intersection of gendered, classed, and racialized forms of identity. As afeminist scholar working in the field of IPE, the increased emphasis on the every-day in IPE is certainly something that should be welcomed. Feminist IPE haslong recognized the significance of the everyday gendered experiences of womenand men in the global economy and the way in which these experiences areboth shaped by and constitutive of global politics. One only needs to open up acopy of Cynthia Enloe’s Bananas Beaches and Bases (1989) to see an early exampleof what Hobson and Seabrook term ‘‘everyday IPE.’’ Perhaps then, the ongoingdevelopment of an everyday IPE perspective will play a significant role in bridg-ing the gaps that exist between feminist and non-feminist IPE scholarship(see for example Waylen 2006).

The book Everyday Politics of the World Economy is an important one because itpresents IPE scholars with a challenge—asking them to roll their sleeves up andto become embroiled in the messy stuff of everyday life. If IPE scholars are torise to this challenge, then it might be useful for them to read books such asthose by Munoz or Nevins and Peluso. This is because these two books provideexcellent examples of how an everyday IPE, rooted in a theoretically informedfine-grain approach to empirical field work, might be done. An everyday IPE thatengages scholars more thoroughly in detailed empirical research collection inthe field will require scholars to think much more carefully about qualitativeresearch practices such as ethnography and how such practices can enable IPEscholars to make sense of the complicated messiness of everyday life.

References

Enloe, Cynthia. (1989) Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics.Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.

Lee, Ching Kwan. (1998) Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women. Berkeley,CA and London: University of California Press.

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Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. (1992) Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berke-ley, CA: University of California Press.

Scott, James C. (1985) Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: YaleUniversity Press.

Taylor, Marcus. (2009) Who Works for Globalization? The Challenges and Possibilities of Interna-tional Labour Studies. Third World Quarterly 30(3): 435–452.

Waylen, Georgina. (2006) You Still Just Don’t Understand: Why Troubled Engagements ContinueBetween Feminists and (Critical) IPE. Review of International Studies 32(1): 145–164.

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