ABSTRACT
Since the late 1960s, following the phenomenal recovery of the Japanese economy after the Second World War, a number of East-Asian countries have seen unprecedented economic growth. The great diversity in area and population size, culture, social organization and historical legacy among these countries continues to frustrate scholars who struggle to find ‘grand theories’ or linear explanations for these ‘economic miracles’. The rise of Asia-Pacific and the corresponding decline of the hegemonic ‘West’ provide a fertile ground for competing theories of capitalist economic development that generally focus on one or more of the following: cultural values, social institutions, a strong state, geopolitical factors and the world economic system. While the role of labour figures prominently in these theories, it is generally more taken for granted than given serious analysis. When it is examined, labour is either genderless or male. It is not until very recently, with the increasing awareness of the gendered nature of relationships between economic policy and labour use and the penetration of feminist thought into Asia-Pacific studies, that we began to see discussions of the different roles of male and female labour in the East-Asian ‘economic miracle’ and of how this ‘miracle’ has impacted on male and female labour differently.
