Sweatshop Exchanges: Gifts and Giving in the Global Factory

Abstract

Purpose – This chapter asks what we should make of the gift exchanges that take place between workers and their managers on the floor of a massive offshore manufacturing unit in South India. Such exchanges appear anomalous in the ethnography of global manufacturing yet here they underpinned the organisation of hyper-intensive production processes.

Findings – Following diverse acts of giving, this chapter shows how these transactions constituted the performative and relational grounds on which workers came to know themselves and sought to shape the world around them. In doing so it extends the anthropology of work and labour by showing that acts of giving are integral to global commodity production.

Citation

Cross, J. (2012), "Sweatshop Exchanges: Gifts and Giving in the Global Factory", Matejowsky, T. and Wood, D.C. (Ed.) Political Economy, Neoliberalism, and the Prehistoric Economies of Latin America (Research in Economic Anthropology, Vol. 32), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 3-26. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0190-1281(2012)0000032005