My dissertation research critically engages with ongoing debates in international political economy, globalization studies and neoliberalism through an examination of the restructuring of the taxi business and the deregulation of the taxi supply in Bangkok, Thailand. In addition, the dissertation includes an in-depth examination of the informal migration networks and changing labor practices of the rural Northeastern Thai men that make up the majority of Bangkok’Äôs taxi drivers. Like others in service-oriented work on the bottom rung of the economic ladder, taxi drivers subsidize Thailand’Äôs national economic development ’Äì development that is closely tied to the Thai economy’Äôs participation in, and contribution to, the global economy.
In recent years, a considerable body of literature has described how the restructuring of work in the developing world produces globalization at the local scale, and analyzed how globalization is, in fact, made possible through the labor, and often at the expense, of the poor. Although there have been excellent analyses of localized globalization and the increasingly insecure nature of work in factories and home-assembly work, in the financial and clerical service sectors, in sex work, and in domestic work, among others, there has been little in-depth qualitative research on the restructuring of work in the transportation sector, despite this sector’Äôs crucial role in the operation of the global economy across multiple geographic scales. My dissertation addresses this gap in the literature and strengthens political economic analyses by providing empirical data and theoretical insights on the relationships between the restructuring of transportation work and the livelihoods of transportation workers. Based on ten-months of intensive fieldwork, I demonstrate that the deregulation of the Bangkok taxi supply in 1992 has led to both a devolution of economic risk and a re-placing of responsibility for workers’Äô success or failure away from the state or the structure of the market and squarely on to the shoulders of the individual taxi drivers.
Furthermore, I argue that this “devolution of risk” can be understood as not just the result of policy shifts, but also, crucially, as a consequence of a discursive “re-positioning” of male migrant labor through the systematic conflation of the “traditional” Thai value of isara (freedom) with the construction of new neoliberal political subjectivities. I argue that in the period following reform in 1992, the taxi trade has become an “always-available” discursive occupational option for men from a broad cross-section of Thai society and particularly for Northeastern rural migrant men. This population, considered unemployable by the multinational corporations setting up assembly plants in Thailand during the 1980s and 1990s, could always, theoretically, find work driving a cab once the supply of taxis was deregulated. The Thai government, particularly under former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’Äôs Thailand Incorporated policy initiatives, played an active roll in promoting these neoliberalized “traditional” values in the taxi trade, as well as in society more broadly, while drivers, for their part, have both adapted to, as well as struggled to reshape, these discourses to their own ends.
Finally, because the vast majority of all taxi drivers are men, taxis are also a crucial site for investigating shifting discourses and practices of gender. Recent research on working-class labor in Southeast Asia has focused on the “feminization” of the workforce and how this new female labor force often provokes widespread cultural anxiety about changing gender roles. In contrast, scholarly interest in the ways in which economic change is drawing on or challenging local discourses of masculinity has only recently emerged. Yet shifting discourses of masculinity are also provoking anxiety and debate in Thailand and elsewhere. In Bangkok, taxi drivers provide a focal point for social debates over gender relations as they are highly mobile men who regularly come into unsupervised contact with female customers. At the same time, as service workers and ethnically-marked migrants, taxi drivers must re-evaluate what it means to “be a man” in terms of their shifting postionalities in both urban and rural Thai society. My research documents the ways in which drivers view themselves as migrants, workers and men, and provides new insights into the connections between globalization, national identity, and changing class and gender relations in Thailand. As a consequence, this case study on working-class masculinity has implications for gender theory more broadly as it contributes to more rigorous and thorough understandings of the meanings and practices of masculinities across and within cultures in an increasingly economically, and politically, connected world.
My dissertation research was funded by grants from the U.S. Department of Education Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) program and the Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship (SSRC IDRF) program. My project was selected for funding from large applicant pools of doctoral students from across the United States in both of these highly selective fellowship competitions. At this time, I am actively revising my dissertation, and scheduled to defend in March 2010.
As the dramatic and divisive political events currently unfolding in Thailand clearly demonstrate, issues of class and national identity have become increasingly contentious within Thailand over the past two decades, leading to deepening political struggles over the direction of political-economic development and the cultural meaning of “Thai-ness.” Recent political struggles within Thailand, beginning with the anti-government protests and the eventual coup d’Äôetat of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra in 2006, have made it impossible to further deny or ignore deep and long-festering regional, cultural, political and class divisions within Thai society. Historically, class has been under-theorized in the Thai context, suppressed since the political struggles of the 1970s, and sublimated into debates and struggles over ethno-regional political divisions, resource control and management, and highly specific clashes over the deeply uneven and increasingly divergent consequences of economic development throughout the 1980s, 1990s and into the current decade. The explosion of political violence in the past few years, coupled with the increasing animosity between the urban-based anti-Thaksin “yellow shirts” of the PAD and the rural-based largely pro-Thaksin “red shirts” of the UDD have revealed the depth and seemingly intractable nature of socio-economic class divisions within the Thai nation-state.
My dissertation research on Bangkok’Äôs taxi drivers provided an excellent opportunity to observe the complex interplay between national discourses of class, migration, ethno-regionalism and gender from both the perspectives of the hegemonic culture and from the “street level” perspectives (literally) of rural Northeastern migrants. Building on the dissertation fieldwork, my post-doctoral research will further interrogate the complex and mutually constructive interrelationship between discourses of social and economic class in the Thai context. I argue that a re-invigorated and re-conceptualized theorization of class has the potential to make a significant contribution to the political-economic analyses of Thailand and more broadly in the fields of political economy and critical development studies, and has relevance at both the academic and policy levels. The research will consist of three complementary projects: 1) Conceptualizing class in Thailand: An overview of scholarly approaches, 2) Migrant Identities and the Public “Face” of the Thai Working Class, and 3) Family Relationships, Economic Migration and Educational Aspiration in the pursuit of Class Mobility in Thailand. em> I am happy to provide a more detailed outline, including research methods, timelines, and anticipated publications, for each of these projects on request.