Scientific Management in Home/Factory — Global Factory/Electronic Cottage

This entry considers the 1997 Asian financial crisis as a moment marking the turn of the miracle economies of East and Southeast Asia from an export-oriented industrialization predicated upon disciplinary regimes of labor to the new creative economy powered by an entrepreneurial class capable of marrying local know-how and world-class technology. It examines the competing accounts of racialized capital that unraveled during the crisis and thus foreclosed any critique of global capitalism itself. These accounts, variously promulgated by neoliberal and nationalist factions, are secured by figuring the crisis through the particular and anachronistic: either oriental despotism or white colonial capitalism. They thus fail to reckon with the reterritorializing forces of contemporary global capital, just as Haraway’s theorization can conversely be said to fall short of fully addressing the reinscription of the nation-state in this turn toward the global factory / electronic cottage.