Social Science Research Council

"Driving Globalization: Bangkok Taxi Drivers and the Restructuring of Work and Masculinity in Thailand"

This ten-month dissertation research study examines the ways in which the Bangkok taxi industry is being restructured through localized globalization, and explores how migrant Northeastern Thai taxi drivers are taking part in the development of new social and political identities in contemporary Thailand. Utilizing a number of qualitative research methods, including both structured and open-ended interviews with taxi drivers, interviews with key informants, archival research and participant observation, this project seeks to understand the role of the Bangkok taxi industry in the Thai economy, and to investigate how the labor practices of the taxi industry have changed in response to economic and cultural globalization over the past thirty years. This study will contribute to contemporary theoretical debates on the impacts of economic restructuring and localized globalization in the developing world, especially in terms of the impacts on the livelihoods and political identities of the working poor. In addition, careful attention will be paid to the ways in which the economic restructuring of taxi work is connected to the reworking of gendered identities, including subordinated masculinities, in the Thai context. This study will yield new theoretical insights to the fields of critical development and globalization studies, labor geography, and critical feminist theory by extending understandings of gendered divisions of labor, occupational restructuring, the reorganization of households and communities, and the role of emerging political and social identities in localized processes of economic globalization. The empirical aim of this research project is to collect primary and secondary data that will provide in-depth qualitative information on transportation work, an understudied sector of both the Thai and the global economy, as well as on the experiences and identities of Northeastern Thai working-class migrant men, a group that has received little in-depth scholarly attention in gender studies.