Outstanding Academic Titles 2022: China
Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn and the Lives of China's Workers (Jenny CHAN, Mark SELDEN, PUN Ngai)
January 25, 2023
Outstanding Academic Titles
This insiders’ story about industrial protest within the
international tech sector makes for an insightful volume. Authors Chan (Hong
Kong Polytechnic Univ.), Selden (Cornell Univ.), and Pun (Univ. of Hong Kong)
seek to assess the extent to which the Chinese state and global tech
corporations have fulfilled their responsibilities to protect workers in the
context of transnational production. The book comprises 12 chapters. Foxconn,
the world’s largest electronics manufacturer, is the focus of chapters 1–4. The
coverage of chapters 5–8 ranges over student interns, human costs of technology
empire-building, unsettled lives, love, and desire for consumption. The current
environmental crisis, work-related injuries, industrial protests, and labor rights
are treated in chapters 9–12. The authors believe that “when workers, with
support at home and abroad, unite to reclaim their dignity and right to fair
labor,” there is a chance of improvement. The case of Foxconn, including both
its present international profile (plants in 29 countries and territories) and
its proposed extensions into the US, Europe, Asia, and the rest of the world,
“could inspire a new round of global labor struggles.”
CHOICE’s 2022 Outstanding Academic
Title: China
Jenny CHAN, Mark SELDEN, PUN Ngai
Chicago:
Haymarket Books & London: Pluto Press (2020); Seoul: Narumbooks (translated
into Korean in 2021)
CHOICE
editors consider several factors in their decisions, including:
-Overall
excellence in presentation and scholarship
-Importance
relative to other literature in the field
-Distinction
as a first treatment of a given subject in book or electronic form
-Originality
or uniqueness of treatment of their subject
-Significance
in building undergraduate collections
