Competitiveness today requires being able to operate at a global scale. The financial crisis invigorated this requirement, posing new challenges to the economic viability of conventional companies and demanding alternative organizational forms of production. Although a wealth of research has focused on capitalist companies, little attention has been paid to the way these challenges affected worker cooperatives. Drawing from a qualitative case study of the Mondragon Cooperative Group, this article discusses the obstacles to internationalization faced by worker cooperatives, as well as the specific conditions and implications involved. In particular, the article analyzes Mondragon's contradiction between being forced to expand and trying to keep cooperative values during this expansion. Two main actions aimed at responding to this contradiction are analyzed: the creation of mixed cooperatives and the extension of the corporate management model. The analysis of this process will shed light on actions for the global expansion of worker cooperatives.

In this study, we argue that the specific process of the proletarianization of Chinese migrant workers contributes to the recent rise of labour protests. Most of the collective actions involve workers' conflict with management at the point of production, while simultaneously entailing labour organizing in dormitories and communities. The type of living space, including workers' dormitories and migrant communities, facilitates collective actions organized not only on bases of locality, ethnicity, gender and peer alliance in a single workplace, but also on attempts to nurture workers' solidarity in a broader sense of a labour oppositional force moving beyond exclusive networks and ties, sometimes even involving cross-factory strike tactics. These collective actions are mostly interest-based, accompanied by a strong anti-foreign capital sentiment and a discourse of workers' rights. By providing detailed cases of workers' strikes in 2004 and 2007, we suggest that the making of a new working class is increasingly conscious of and participating in interest-based or class-oriented labour protests.As a result of 30 years of reform, today China has become a "world factory" giving a sense of pride to a nation which was once conceived as a developing country and now poses a challenge to the global economy. A factor that has been little considered is the formation of a new working class whose life struggle has been continuously part of the process of making China a "world factory." The process of proletarianization in reform-era China has contributed to a new working class which is now increasingly conscious of and participating in various forms of collective action. Spontaneous strikes by migrant workers in South China have been multiplying since the mid-1990s.

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Neo-liberal economic globalization and acceleration in information and communication technologies have strengthened the competitiveness of transnational corporations by making it easier for them to stretch their global commodity chains to developing countries. Such control from a distance threatens national states' capacity to regulate TNCs and their impact upon environment, labour and human rights in developing countries. This has prompted anti-TNC sentiments and campaigns that challenge brand-named TNCs on labour exploitation in the south. These changes have triggered discussions on setting labour standards in the international arena. With the WTO distancing itself from the 'social clause', this has prompted the TNCs, NGOs and other stakeholders to self-regulate by introducing codes of conduct. Concentrating on the clothing industry, this paper examines the emergence of company and multi-stakeholder codes of conduct that require the involvement of subcontractors and NGOs in developing countries. The moving of ethical codes to developing countries condenses and reproduces, under the twin pressures of competitiveness and social auditing, the paradoxes of ethical transnational production in the internal organizations of local firms. These paradoxes are demonstrated from a case study of a workplace in China. The paper ends by outlining three paradoxes and commenting on the development of a managerialist 'audit culture' in workplace practices as commodification of ethical code.

Apple's commercial triumph rests in part on the outsourcing of its consumer electronics production to Asia. Drawing on extensive fieldwork at China's leading exporter-the Taiwaneseowned Foxconn-the power dynamics of the buyer-driven supply chain are analysed in the context of the national terrains that mediate or even accentuate global pressures. Power asymmetries assure the dominance of Apple in price setting and the timing of product delivery, resulting in intense pressures and illegal overtime for workers. Responding to the highpressure production regime, the young generation of Chinese rural migrant workers engages in a crescendo of individual and collective struggles to define their rights and defend their dignity in the face of combined corporate and state power.

Apple's commercial triumph rests in part on the outsourcing of its consumer electronics production to Asia. Drawing on extensive fieldwork at China's leading exporter-the Taiwaneseowned Foxconn-the power dynamics of the buyer-driven supply chain are analysed in the context of the national terrains that mediate or even accentuate global pressures. Power asymmetries assure the dominance of Apple in price setting and the timing of product delivery, resulting in intense pressures and illegal overtime for workers. Responding to the highpressure production regime, the young generation of Chinese rural migrant workers engages in a crescendo of individual and collective struggles to define their rights and defend their dignity in the face of combined corporate and state power.

How can voluntary service organizations (VSOs) emerge and survive in a relatively conservative social and political environment? How can such organizations contribute to the development of civil society in contemporary China? To answer these questions, this study applies the qualitative approach and a triangulation of methods to a case study of the city of Jinan. The findings indicate that self-chosen moral resource I, socially recognized moral resource II, ascribed political capital I, and self-achieved political capital II are the key elements that have an impact on the development of civil society in China. Moral resource I is crucial to the success of VSOs in promoting civil society, whereas moral resource II, political capital I, and political capital II may help them to gain the government’s trust, thus facilitating their survival and growth in a relatively conservative social and political environment.

In refuting Guy Standing's precariat as a class, we highlight that employment situation, worker identity and legal rights are mistakenly taken as theoretical components of class formation. Returning to theories of class we use Dahrendorf's reading of Marx where three components of classes, the objective, the subjective and political struggle, are used to define the current formation of the working class in China. Class is not defined by status, identity or legal rights, but location in the sphere of production embedded within conflictual capital-labour relations. By engaging with the heated debates on the rise of a new working class in China, we argue that the blending of employment situation and rights in the West with the idea of precarity of migrant workers in China is misleading. Deconstructing the relationship between class and precarity, what we see as an unhappy coupling, is central to the article.