Critical Political Economy Meets Historical Institutionalism in the Study of Asian Precarity: Assets and Liabilities of a Methodological Hybrid

Abstract

Precarious Asia: Global Capitalism and Work in Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia is an ambitious and, in my view, successful book. Arne Kalleberg, Kevin Hewison, and Kwang-Yeong Shin deploy their considerable experience in studying precarious labor to fill in a significant gap in the literature by providing a detailed analysis of the varied conditions of precarity in Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia. The comparisons and contrasts the authors engage allow them to specify some of the different conditions of work that are often subsumed under the heading ‘‘precarious’’—in particular, as they outline in Chapter One, nonstandard/non-regular versus regular employment, informal versus formal sector employment, and self-employment/household labor versus labor remunerated by others (pp. 22–26). Mainstream modernization theorists have often placed all such distinctions under headings designating the characteristics of a premodern and a modern economy, respectively, with the assumed-to-be-normal direction of historical change being from the first to the second. The authors of Precarious Asia reject this overly simplistic framework (p. 25), both because evidence from the neoliberal era suggests there is no unilinear direction of change—in fact, the evidence is that ‘‘premodern’’ conditions are becoming increasingly prevalent again—and because the nuances of difference between the three types of precarity they identify enable them to better analyze specific differences between their country cases. Thus, for example, an increase in non-regular employment, with removal of various protections against socially unacceptable practices and working conditions, has been more characteristic of the Northeast Asian states, while Indonesia, with a much larger agrarian population, has maintained a very high level of informal sector employment—that is, employment with low and volatile earnings—throughout its entire process of ‘‘modernization.’’ At the outset of the study, the choice of these country cases might strike some readers as odd. Both Japan and South Korea have been widely regarded as successful cases of industrial development under developmental states (in South Korea’s case, ‘‘late’’ industrialization), while Indonesia has never been included in the list of Asian developmental states and still today features an economy with an enormous amount of agrarian labor. Yet this choice of cases for comparison allows the authors to highlight some important variations within Asia—and not just between Northeast Asian developmental states and Southeast Asian states, a distinction that sometimes involves a geographically conventional and overly generalized binary, but between the two Northeast Asian cases themselves. Indeed, for all the conventionally assumed similariPrecarious Asia: Global Capitalism and Work in Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia, by Arne L. Kalleberg, Kevin Hewison, and Kwang-Yeong Shin. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022. 248 pp. $65.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781503610255.