ABSTRACT
This chapter considers some issues related to labour force formation and the role of the household economy under the above conditions of industrialization, and its conjunctures, in a peripheral formation. It seeks a common theoretical and methodological framework to link micro-level processes (the conjunctural) with the macro-level processes (the structural), and to relate the culturally specific experiences in Penang with the depiction in other diverse parts of the world economy. The capitalist world economy have taken their turn in exercising hegemony over the system as a whole during periods of expansion, while new zones of accumulation have emerged during the contraction phases as the older centres of accumulation declined. The secular transformation of societies, central or peripheral, under the impetus of the self-expansion of world capitalism, masks the cyclical patterns in the development of the world economy. The Penang case study is a culturally specific experience of the impact of macro-social processes on the household economy in the periphery.
