Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women

Rating:
Summary: An Amazing Amount of Theory for Very Few Facts
Review: The second chapter in this book produces an amazingly deep study of potential theoretical explanations (Marxist, feminist and her own hybrid) for the corporate cultures found in two southern Chinese factories. Lee explains that the factories, while owned by the same company, are microcosms of radically different cultures on and off the Chinese mainland.

While her theory is interesting and well studied, she hangs all of it on two small anecdotes; one story of life in each of the factories. While anecdotes reveal realities, I believe we would be hard pressed to think of a single phenomenon that did not occur somewhere in a nation of 1.3 billion people. It seems quite possible that she came up with her theory and then looked at a few of the thousands of factories in southern China until she found some that displayed what she wanted. She simply does not enough people to make me believe that she it really seeing a difference that generalizable or important. She may understand these two factories well, but to make a book like this worthwhile, I'd like it to offer understanding of a larger subculture than that.