IUAES2015 panel session #9
17 July 2015, 11.00 – 12.30 hrs.
Heung Wah WONG
The University of Hong Kong
contact: hwwongc@hku.hk
Abstract
There is a general understanding among scholars or ordinary people in the street that rule through consent is more effective than physical coercion in human communities. The crucial anthropological question is how consent is manufactured by people-in-power and why such a manufactured consent would be accepted by people even though accepting such manufactured consent might be against their own self-interest? The more fundamental question is how and why such a manufactured consent can be reproduced? As an anthropologist, I would like to address all these questions in an ethnographic context in which some twenty Japanese expatriates of Yaohan, a Japanese supermarket in Hong Kong produced and reproduced their managerial domination over 2,000 local Hong Kong Chinese employees.
The important findings of this paper include that managerial control in this Japanese supermarket is multifaceted in the sense that it is materially based on the personnel system, ideologically informed by a new religion called Seicho-no-Ie (Growth of House), and hegemonically constituted by the identity politics between the Japanese expatriates and the local Hong Kong Chinese staff and among each of these two groups. Secondly, the configuration of the social relation inside the company cannot be understood through the opposition between Japanese expatriates and local Hong Kong Chinese staff not only because each of the groups are internally divided but also because there are always strategic and temporary alliances across these two groups. It follows that the relationship between Japanese expatriates and local staff cannot be reduced to the simple formula of domination and resistance. More importantly, the Japanese expatriates themselves were also the object of domination by their company. This paper therefore concludes that labors including both the local Hong Kong Chinese staff and the Japanese expatriates are the victims of modern corporate capitalism.