Research was carried out in Taipei and central Taiwan during three visits between the summer of 1988 and the winter of 1990 for a total time of ten months. Methodology included surveys and interviews of entrepreneurs and workers in shoe factories, workshops and trading companies and in households. The dissertation also relied on extensive surveys and reports made by the Taiwan Footwear Manufacturing Association and the Department of Industry, Ministry of Economics.;The dissertation looks at the factors which have influenced the decentralized organization of the shoe industry, Taiwan's third largest export industry. These factors include (i) the labor-intensive production process itself in which economy of scale provides no cost savings, (ii) the marketing-dependent relationship to the world market, (iii) the need for rural labor which is partly committed to domestic and farm work, (iv) the entrepreneurial behavior of local agents who want to realize a larger share of industry profits through ownership, and (v) the reliance on a "culture of place" to mediate labor relations.;The dissertation counters the oversimplified conceptions of Taiwan's rural industry as an aggregation of mom and pop shops and instead reveals the complexity of the subcontracting system in which a three-level manufacturing process--factory, workshop and household production--is linked to large domestic petrochemical firms at one end and large foreign marketing and retail firms at the other end. The study also refutes the notion of compatibility between rural industry and agriculture and domestic work. The insatiable demand for rural labor spawned by export industry has pulled labor away from both farm and household, which has resulted in the degradation of agriculture and the traditional patterns of family reproduction.
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