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Poor But Not Powerless: Women Workers in Production Chain Factories in China
Lang Ma and Francine Jacobs Journal of Adolescent Research 2010 25: 807 originally published online 28 May 2010 DOI: 10.1177/0743558410371124 The online version of this article can be found at: http://jar.sagepub.com/content/25/6/807
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Poor But Not Powerless: Women Workers in Production Chain Factories in China
Lang Ma1 and Francine Jacobs1
Journal of Adolescent Research 25(6) 807 838 The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0743558410371124 http://jar.sagepub.com
Abstract The present study demonstrates the processes by which 12 young women working in four production chain factories in China shape their own lives their developmental trajectories during the period following their entry into factory work. One-on-one, in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted in August, 2005, as part of an evaluation project that assessed the labor practices and interpersonal relationships in production chain factories. These interviews revealed considerable personal agency among the women, and prompted us to examine how this agency manifests itself, and what individual and contextual factors influence it. Operating from a developmental systems perspective, and using a grounded approach to identify active, personal agency as the organizing construct for this investigation, we adopted the selective optimization with compensation (SOC) model to guide data analysis and presentation, after initial data coding indicated its suitability. Findings suggest that activity within these three components (selection, optimization, and compensation) is oriented toward fulfilling both the womens family goals and their career goals. These workers sought to improve the well-being of their families and themselves through selecting to work in these particular production chain factories, optimizing their factory experiences, and compensating for the attendant losses personal and careerrelated. Individual characteristics, such as marital status, migrant status, and
Tufts University, Medford, MA
Corresponding Author: Lang Ma, Tufts University, Medford, MA 02155 Email: lang.ma@alumni.tufts.edu
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Journal of Adolescent Research 25(6)
educational background, in combination with contextual factors, such as family socio-economic background and factory labor practices, influenced these women workers decisions, and thus, their developmental course. Keywords women workers, production chain factory, agency, individual characteristics, context The transition to adulthoodthe mechanisms by which adolescents take their place in the adult worldhas been largely neglected by developmental psychologists until relatively recently (Hamilton & Hamilton, 2009; R. M. Lerner, personal communication, January 22, 2009). Redress has come from two schools of theorists: (a) Developmentalists who view this period as a distinct developmental stage, often called emerging adulthood, are interested in its particular features and how it is manifested across cultures and nations (Arnett, 2000, 2004) and (b) life-span developmental scientists view these systemic processes as more similar to, than different from, those that provoke development and change in human beings across the life span (Hendry & Kloep, 2007) and study youth, explicitly, through this lens (Hamilton, 1987). Regardless of orientation, this increased attention comes none too soon to help understand the experiences of the millions of young Chinese workers, many of them women migrants, who have flooded to production chain factories over the past 25 years. Because so little is known of how these women select their factories and the particular jobs within them, assess the quality of their work and living arrangements, think about and fulfill their obligations to their families, and imagine their futures, this current study is an initial foray onto this terrain. It adopts a life-span development perspective to analyze in-depth interview data collected from 12 young women workers; additional analyses might then assess the extent to which the promising emerging adulthood framework fits, clarifying the developmental portrait that emerges.
Production Chain Factories as a Context for T ransition to Adulthood

Since China began implementing its opening up economy policy in the late 1970s, numerous foreign investment enterprises have established operations in mainland China (Jackson & Bak, 1998; Smart, 1999; Zhu, Thomson, & de Cieri, 2008); an enormous influx of capital has accompanied tremendous
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growth in the production chain factories (also called contract factories) of multinational companies there. These factories produce consumer commodities, such as apparel, footwear, toys, and electronic appliances, for the international market. As a result, these manufacturing industries have created, and continue to create, a huge demand for labor (Zhu et al., 2008), and millions of workerscalled Dagongzai (working boys, male workers) and Dagongmei (working girls, female workers)have been drawn to the factories (Pun, 2005b; Smart, 1999). The vast majority of these workers are young, peasant, migrant women from impoverished rural inland provinces; however, local workers from areas in which these factories are located are also employed (Chan, 1996, 2003; Pun, 1999, 2005a; Tan, 2000). Mistreatment of workers has been reported to be widespread, if not ubiquitous, in the production chain factories (Asia Monitor Resource Center and Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee [AMRC & HKCIC], 1997; Chan, 1996, 1998; Chen, Han, & Jiang, 2004; Chiu & Frenkel, 1999; Pun, 2005a, 2005b). Accounts by both advocacy groups and academic researchers reveal wages below the legal minimum; excessive and unpaid overtime; abusive treatment by management, including yelling, physical punishment, and routine body searches; unsafe and unhealthy working environments; and crowded, unsanitary, and dilapidated living conditions (Chan, 2002; Lee, 1998; Pun, 2005a; Smart, 1995; Wang, 1998). These workers are often depicted as an undifferentiated mass of desperate individuals, powerless in the face of these inhumane labor practices (AMRC & HKCIC, 1997; Chan, 1996, 1998, 2003; Chiu & Frenkel, 1999; Frenkel, 2001). To an extent, these criticisms are legitimate, and given the lack of broader support to improve labor practicessuch as effective enforcement of the national Labor Lawworkers are indeed limited in their ability to protect and promote their own well-being (Frenkel, 2001). However, describing all production chain factories as abusive, and all the workers as powerless, represents an overgeneralization that, in turn, leads to the conclusion that workers lives are more or less identically miserable, no matter where they work and what their individual characteristics are. We find this position empirically and theoretically flawed.
Empirical andTheoretical Underpinnings for the Current Study

Existing research suggests that neither the production chain factories nor the workers are homogeneous groups. For example, in a study of four Taiwanese footwear factories in Guangdong Province in the late 1990s, Frenkel (2001)
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found that, although the prevailing management style was authoritarian, the degree of authoritarianism varied across factories, as did labor practices. Factories with more human-oriented management placed more emphasis on improving workers wages, working environments, and living conditions. In a review of studies on human resource management in Chinese firms from 1979 to 2005 (Zhu et al., 2008), considerable variation in management practices was documented, both contemporaneously and over time. Workers do share some characteristics: Most are peasant, young women in their late teens and early 20smigrants from impoverished, rural, inland provinces (AMRC & HKCIC, 1997; Andors, 1988; Tan, 2000). However, there are also noteworthy intragroup differences in gender, age, marital status, migrant status, and educational background (China Population and Development Research Center [CPDRC], 2004; Pun, 1999; Smart, 1999). Moreover, the workers are not uniformly powerless in, or passive about, determining the contours of their lives. In search of a benign, or more benign, factory, some move from one to another, occasionally returning to an earlier workplace (Chan, 2002; Chang, 2008). They also strike to protest wages being withheld or excessive overtime, risking retaliatory loss of employment (AMRC & HKCIC, 1997). Although detrimental work environments and the huge power imbalance between workers and factory management constrain these efforts, workers do, also, bring about positive changes in their working conditions (Gaetano & Jacka, 2004; Tan, 2000). Theoretically, depicting the workers as a homogeneous group also conflicts with what we know about how young people develop. General systems theory posits that all organisms create, and respond to, stimuli in their environments (von Bertalanffy, 1968); developmental systems theory stresses that the basic processes of human lives involve mutual influences between the individual and context. Individuals are active agents in shaping their own development, and individual characteristics and contexts interact in determining the individuals developmental trajectories. Different configurations of individual characteristics and contexts create different bidirectional individual context relationships and hence cause different developmental outcomes (Lerner, 2002, 2006). It is reasonable to believe, then, that these workers also shape their own life trajectoriesthat they are not simply passive recipients of contextual influences. How does this process of expressing personal agency unfold in these workers postadolescent years? The selective optimization with compensation (SOC) model of human development (Baltes & Baltes, 1990; Freund & Baltes, 1998, 2000), an important contribution to life-span developmental theory, provides a useful theoretical framework. From this perspective, human
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development occurs in the interplay of three types of decisionsselection of a course of action, optimization to maximize the gains, and compensation to balance out the losses; decisions are due to both the individuals characteristics and the contexts in which the individuals are embedded (Baltes & Baltes, 1990; Baltes, Lindenberger, & Staudinger, 2006; Freund & Baltes, 1998, 2000). Recent research in adolescence suggested that young peoples selection, optimization, and compensation represent a global process that predicts positive developmental outcomes (Gestsdottir & Lerner, 2007). As women represent the preponderance of workers in the factories (AMRC & HKCIC, 1997; Andors, 1988; CPDRC, 2004; Tan, 2000), we focus here on women workers agency, addressing two main research questions: First, how does this agency come to be and what mechanisms are at play? Second, how do these workers individual characteristics and contexts influence their decisions? We expect that individual characteristicssuch as marital status, migrant status, and educational backgroundand particular contextsincluding socioeconomic background and factory labor practicesare influential in this process, creating different profiles of agency across informants. Given that most of these young workers arrive at the factories doors soon (though not necessarily immediately) after leaving junior high or high school, their ages fit those of emerging adulthood (see Arnett, 2000, 2004, 2007). Features of this period, according to Arnett (2004), include a sense of being in-between, a focus on identity exploration and on oneself, a sense of optimism and opportunities, and the experience of instability (e.g., in living arrangements, romantic interests, plans for future careers, etc.). Many developmental researchers have found validity to the concept (e.g., Gibbons & Ashdown, 2006); others dispute its existence as a distinct developmental phase, seeing it more precisely as a domain-specific process that some young people, in some contexts (primarily Western), experience, more or less, or possibly not at all (Bynner, 2005; Ct & Bynner, 2008; Hendry & Kloep, 2007). For example, college-bound or college-educated youth are generally the sample for this genre of research; the applicability of the emerging adulthood framework to poor or working-class young people, whose material conditions may preclude their engagement in necessary elements of this life stage, has not yet been explored in-depth (Ct & Bynner, 2008; Hendry & Kloep, 2007). As Arnett (2000, 2004) wisely suggests, emerging adulthood is a cultural construction, and it is inappropriate to assume that young people across cultures and communities would experience it similarly. A promising body of research is developing that applies the emerging adulthood paradigm to populations of youth in countries other than the United States (e.g., Douglass,
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Table 1. Names (Pseudonyms), Ages, Marital Statuses, and Parenthood Statuses of 12 Women in the Four Production Chain Factories in China, 2005 Names (pseudonyms) Jiaxian Meimei Fang Zhu Hua Tao Wen Jie Fu Ying Tiantian Nana Ages (years) 28 22 22 21 23 30 28 23 28 29 19 24 Marital statuses (married/single) Married Single Single Single Married Married Single Single Married Married Single Single Parenthood statuses (no child/ number of children and their age) One; 2 years old No child No child No child One; 2 years old Two; 10 years old and 5 years old No child No child One, 1 year old One, 5 years old No child No child
2007; Galambos & Martnez, 2007); to date, however, studies in non-Western countries are still limited. In Chinathe country with the greatest number of young people in the worldonly a handful of studies have tested the notion of emerging adulthood, and their focus is on the college-educated population, a small fraction of all Chinese young people (e.g., Badger, Nelson, & Barry, 2006; Nelson, Badger, & Wu, 2004). We, then, view this present study of a small sample of young, working-class people in the factory environment as preparing the groundwork for such an investigation.
Method Participants
The 12 participantsline workers, supervisors, and senior supervisors were recruited from four factories producing footwear for a U.S.-based multinational company. Ten of the women were migrants, and 2 came from rural areas within same province as the factory in which they worked. Their years of schooling ranged from 8 to 12, with a mean of 9.33 (SD = 0.99); their tenure in present factories ranged from 12 to 108 months, with a median of 26.50. They ranged from 19 to 30 years of age, with a mean of 24.75 (SD = 3.65). There were 5 married women, all with one or two children; as a group, they tended to be older than the single women (see Table 1).
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Procedures
The multinational company selected the factories using criteria provided by the researchers, including some variation in geographical location, ownership nationality, and human resources management practices. Two factories were Taiwanese owned, located in coastal Guangdong Province in south China; two were Korean owned, located in coastal Shandong Province in north China. In the Taiwanese factories, the vast majority of workers came from rural inland provinces, whereas in the Korean factories, about half the workers were migrant. These factories had been operating in China for 4 to 18 years, with workforce ranging from about 1,000 to 10,000 workers. The fieldwork was undertaken in January and August 2005, with facilitation and coordination by the multinational company and the factories. On each trip, we spent about 2 to 3 days in each factory, touring the factory compound and interviewing workers and managers. The worker interviews reported here were conducted in August 2005. In each factory, two to four women were recruited on a voluntary basis from the shop floor to participate in the interviews; selection criteria, proposed by the researchers, included variation in age, marital status, migrant status, tenure, and job position. Semistructured interviews were conducted on a one-on-one basis in private venues, usually in small conference rooms in the factory administration building. The interviews lasted from about 45 minutes to almost 2 hours. The researcher, an advanced doctoral student from China studying human development at Tufts University, conducted the interviews in Mandarin Chinese, the native language of all the informants. After securing informed consent in written form, the interviews were tape-recorded. The data were then transcribed into rich text files by the interviewer and another Chinese doctoral student at Tufts University. Procedures to protect the confidentiality of the participants were approved by the universitys Institutional Review Board.
Instruments
The Worker Interview Protocol was developed to guide the semistructured, indepth interviews. The interviews were conducted for an evaluation project assessing labor practices and interpersonal relationships in Chinese production chain factories. We first collected demographic information and next engaged the women in free talking about how they came to work in the factories, their factory experiences, factory labor practices, and their future prospects. Questions included the following: People talk about good factories versus bad factories. In your view, what are the things that make a factory good? Five years from now, what do you think youll be doing? Where will you be living?
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Table 2. Thematic Conceptual Matrix: Reasons/Objectives for, Behaviors of, and Contexts of Selection, Optimization, and Compensation Among 12 Women Workers in Production Chain Factories in China, 2005 Selection Reasons/ objectives Failing to pass college entrance exam Family financial difficulties No job at home Wanting to see the world Choosing a good factory Optimization Learn knowledge and skills Do a good job Get promoted Make money Buy apartment Be with spouse and child Have family time Seek a family-like environment Be eager to learn knowledge and skills Find matching job Plan to attend supervisor training Build good interpersonal relations Buy apartment in city Buy apartment in cityplan Send money to parents Facilitate learning knowledge and skills Facilitate matching job Challenge workers to develop Compensation Childhood in rural area Dropping out of school Cannot be with family and friends
Behaviors
Research factory
Invest in career development Finance young relatives education Give child a good living environment Settle down in city Go back to visit Call family
Contexts
Present factory is better than it was before
Provide a school-like environment Provide basic education Pay well
(continued)
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Table 2. (continued) Selection Present factory is better than other factories Present factory is better than prior factories Optimization Inspire and educate workers Facilitate promotion Provide a caring environment Facilitate good interpersonal relations Pay well Provide a stable job/income Facilitate being with spouse Facilitate fulfilling family obligations Welcome returning workers
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Compensation Facilitate home visit
Will you be working? What job will you have? We also asked participants to complete two tables, one assessing the importance of certain aspects of factory labor practices and the second detailing their satisfaction with the current status of these practices in their factories. The interview protocol was designed in English and translated into Chinese by the interviewer. A professor of Chinese at Tufts University reviewed and verified the translation.
Analysis
The data analysis was conducted in English using the qualitative data analysis software ATLAS.ti 5.0.66. Given the limited understanding about how agency is expressed by young working-class people in the Chinese context, we took a grounded approach and started by open coding (Miles & Huberman, 1994). After the first round, we noticed that the emerging themes reflected in the descriptive codes about the womens agency fit those proposed in the SOC model of human development (Baltes & Baltes, 1990; Freund & Baltes, 1998, 2000)selection, optimization, and compensation. We developed three
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metalevel pattern codesselect, optimize, and compensateand grouped the first-level codes underneath, which provided more explanatory power (Miles & Huberman, 1994). Some examples of these codes are Select: because of family financial difficulties, Optimize: objective: learn knowledge and skills, Compensate: behavior: give child a good living environment. We then adopted the conceptually ordered display for developing descriptive conclusions, as suggested by Miles and Huberman (1994), to build thematic conceptual matrices for the data. Through an iterative process, we modified and fine tuned the codes, focusing on questions such as why the women workers select/ optimize/compensate, how they select/optimize/compensate, and what factory contexts promote their abilities to select/optimize/compensate. The interview data eventually were organized into a three-by-three thematic conceptual matrix, with the columns Selection, Optimization, and Compensation, and the rows Reasons/objectives, Behaviors, and Contexts (see Table 2). We did not find the SOC model constraining on cultural grounds, as it does not assume a particular developmental trajectory. Rather, it provided a conceptual structure, allowing us to describe the challenges, opportunities, and losses in these womens lives and how they made their choices and made sense of their experiences.
Reliability and Validity

Given the small number of factories and participants included here, and the manner in which the factories and participants were selected, we make no claims of representativeness. In fact, considering what we know about labor practices in many factories, we assume the contrary: These factories appeared more humanely operated than what we understand to be the norm. As such, this is a best case, rather than a representative, study. From a human development perspective, it demonstrates the extent to which the young women workers agency could possibly be activated in benign factory contexts. We should note that these workers did not seem practiced in how to answer our questions. A few women confessed that this was the first time they had ever been interviewed, and they appreciated the opportunity to share their life stories and opinions. We selected 86 quotations from six interviews in four factories for an intercoder reliability study, covering a wide range of codes. The interviewer and the Chinese student who helped with transcribing the interview data independently coded the 86 quotations using the intercoder reliability study protocol and the same code list. Intercoder agreement and intercoder reliability using number of agreement, that is, same code for the quotation, and number of disagreements (Miles & Huberman, 1994) was calculated at 87% and 82%, respectively.
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Results
Our findings present these workers as active agents in shaping their own lives through a complex weave of selection, optimization, and compensation decisions. To the extent that these workers goalsfor themselves and their familieswere clearly articulated, their decisions generally appeared to follow a logical and well-considered plan. In addition, individual characteristics and contextual factors influenced their decisions and hence their developmental trajectories. We have categorized the womens goals as either family focused or career focused. Family goals pertained to ensuring and enhancing the well-being of their families, with two subcategoriesthose oriented toward their parents and extended families, and those pertaining to their nuclear families, particularly their children. Career goals pertained to work-related aspirations and expectations. These goals often involved gaining the knowledge and skills necessary for promotion or improved employability elsewhere. The womens selection, optimization, and compensation behaviors were oriented toward their selected goals.
Selection
As noted earlier, all the women came from rural areas, and many chose production chain factory work due to their families financial straits. Nevertheless, they did not randomly walk into any factory that would hire them. Instead, they had a clear image of a good factory and actively sought one. Moreover, indeed, they landed in comparatively good factories. Of the 12 women, 7 talked about the devastating economic circumstances at homeparticularly the lack of arable land and limited job opportunities for young peopleand 5 attributed their decisions to enter the factories as immediately necessary for their families. Four also noted that they had dropped out of school because of poverty. Ying (29 years of age), from northern China, left her toddler son at home and came to the factory 2 years ago: In the year of 2002, we suffered a natural disaster. It was snow. The crops were crushed and destroyed before the harvest season. It was impossible to reap. We did not have much option but came here to make a living. A vast number of people emigrated from my hometown. They went to everywhere. Wen (28 years of age) had to drop out after junior high school, and as a teenager, supported herself by working in a factory:
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[I did not go to high school] because of the financial situation in my family. It did not allow me to continue my education . . . My parents simply could not afford the education for my younger siblings and me . . . My head teacher visited my family half a dozen times to try to get me back to school. But, I had no choice. I had to quit, otherwise, my younger sister or younger brother would have had to quit. The informants spoke as if they had no reasonable alternatives, repeatedly using sentences such as we did not have much option and I had no choice when describing their decision-making processes. These statements also conveyed how difficult the decision was and their relative reluctance to make it in this way. A few women mentioned other reasons for selecting factory work: Meimei failed to pass the college entrance exam, and Jie wanted to see the outside world and determine how well she could fare independently. These women were selective during their job searches, with sets of explicit criteria for assessing the quality of a factory they were considering. A sample of this discussion follows: I do not want to work in a bad factory, where there is a lot of overtime, the workload is too heavy, you do not get paid on time, or the welfare is not good, that kind of stuff. (Jiaxian, 28 years of age) Basic personal protection equipment should be distributed in a timely manner. When there are mistakes, the supervisors ought not to scapegoat the workers. (Wen, 28 years of age) Usually, the workers have little power to make their voices heard in the factory. Therefore, good supervisors ought to understand and appreciate the workers hardships . . . There should be basic respect for human rights. (Jie, 23 years of age) These criteria overlapped, but were not identical, across workers. For example, women intent on easing their distant families financial burdens generally put good wages, pay on time, no deductions, and reasonable overtime pay high on their lists of good factory criteria. Others believed that a good factory should provide educational training in addition to good wages. Several workers proactively researched the candidate factories before making their selections. For example, Zhu talked to workers from another potential factory to get a sense of what the pay, dormitory, and meals were
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like; Fang consulted her sister who worked in a candidate factory and also took a factory tour; and Tiantian carried out a more in-depth, comparative study among candidate factories. As Tiantian (19 years of age) reported: Actually I looked at several factories before I decided which factory to choose. I selected my present factory among four factories. I did not like the other three factories as much as I liked this oneit is newer than the other factories, and I believe that newer factories are better. I checked out information about these four factories: how well the workers are treated, in terms of overtime, meals, and training programs. I am particularly interested in the training programs, which will allow me to pursue my interests in English, Korean, and computer, etc. I do not want a lot of overtime; a little bit of overtime is fine . . . I do not care much about wages, as long as I can pursue my [intellectual] interests. I really enjoy learning English. Likely as a result of this process, six women said that their present factories are better than peer factories about which they were knowledgeable. Previously employed women also voted with their feetthey simply left subpar factories. Six informants had worked in other factories prior to the current one, and five of them talked about trading up, to good or better factories: Well, I worked in that factory for a long time. I noticed that there was little chance to get promoted. I interviewed for a better job in another department, and I got that job. But my supervisor did not allow me to leave. I was so pissed off. That is why I came to this factory. You know, everyone wants to move up the management ladder and get better paid. (Fang, 22 years of age) I was thrilled when I got my first pay in this factory. It was more than RMB 1,000 (about US$126)! Wow, I really did not expect that much! In my previous factory, I only got paid RMB 500-600 (about US$63-US$75), plus, I had to work 13 hours per day. [In the present factory, the workers work 8 hours per day.] (Jianxian, 28 years of age) The Korean managers in my previous factories yelled at and scolded Chinese employees. But the Korean managers in this factory are pretty goodusually they do not yell at or scold Chinese employees. The Korean managers in this factory would rebuke you if you made a
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mistakeit is like a parent disciplining a child. They would tell you what you did wrong and how to correct it. In my previous factories, the Korean managers yelled at and scolded us, and we did not understand what they were yelling about. (Fu, 28 years of age) Of course, besides entering these factories, other options for work were available. For instance, Jiaxian had tried managing a mobile food cart with her father, and Jie had worked in a supermarket. However, they decided that factory work would be a better choice.
Optimization
Having entered the factories, these women next attempted to make the most of their experiences there; optimization in this context often meant progressing on achieving their family and career goals. Here as well, the informants had clear ideas about the steps they needed to take for such progress to occur, such as gaining new knowledge and skills, seeking promotion opportunities, performing well, and making good money. Eleven women rated promotion opportunities as highly important, and 10 talked more generally about earning high incomes. Among the many optimization statements are the following: I want to set up my own business. My father is a chef, and I want to run a small restaurant with him in this city. I do not want to work in a factory foreveryou do not make a lot of money by working in a factory . . . As soon as we accumulate enough capital, we will start our own businesses. (Hua, 23 years of age) I will not go back home until I make enough money. Why? If I make enough money, I would be able to support my future education so I can return to school and learn more . . . I know there is a lot to learn, and China needs well-educated people, you know. I do not plan to work in a factory forever. (Tiantian, 19 years of age) Capitalizing on opportunities for basic education, job-related training (transferable skills, such as developing computer and foreign language competencies), and professional development outside their current positions figured prominently into this equation, with virtually all (10) informants discussing these issues repeatedly and in an animated fashion. Examples include the following:
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It is extremely important for us workers to have opportunities to continue basic education because most workers who dropped out of school . . . come to recognize the importance of [such] knowledge . . . Whitecollar and blue-collar work are completely different. Every worker should study hard to learn new knowledge . . . I read during my spare time. I read the Western classics . . . This year, I am very into Chinese classic poems. I also read books about Korea. I think that cultures in different countries and ethnic groups are very rich. It is not easy to understand a different culture as an outsider. I am learning Korean and Korean culture . . . because I am working in a Korean-owned factory. I want to better understand them. (Jie, 23 years of age) I learned how to use a computer in a school outside the factory. I paid RMB 200 [about US$25] for the training. I learned how to type, that kind of stuff . . . If you speak good English and have good computer skills, you can get the position of a translator or secretary. Otherwise, you . . . stay on the assembly line. (Hua, 23 years of age) Our manager teaches us English . . . I am taking an English course with some other workers. We have class everyday 5:00 to 6:30 p.m. before dinner. Sometimes it is exhausting [after a 10-hour work day]. (Tiantian, 19 years of age) Importantly, without a facilitative environment, these optimization objectives would be unrealizable. All four factories provided preservice training and on-site mentoring. There were also free, basic education courses at night and training programs to build skills not directly related to production work, ranging from computer and foreign languages skills to hairdressing. Moreover, two factories had management training programs. These opportunities were greatly appreciated: When I first came, I knew little about the materials or how to cut them. My supervisor was very nice. She told me to take my time to get familiar with different procedures and materials. If I did not understand something, she was there to teach me. (Jiaxian, 28 years of age) My goal is to have more education . . . What we have learned will become inadequate or outdated in the near future. I want to learn through taking more Korean and English courses. Because English is an international language that is used in all countries, English proficiency is always useful wherever I go. I am working in a Korean
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factory, and I want to be able to speak their language. It would make communication much easier. Our factory provides multiple training opportunities for us. We have a night school . . . You see, we have 2 hours of class for one subject every day. So we have enough time to learn. Our factory hires teachers for us. We do not need to pay any tuition. I am really grateful to the company for making it tuition-free [laughs], and the factory even provides us with textbooks, notebooks, and penseverything . . . When I started to attend the night school, I was not sure how long I would stay here in this company . . . When I graduated, I knew I do not want to leave because I have developed an attachment to the company. (Jie, 23 years of age) The factory environment also challenged and encouraged these workers in informal ways: The factory is like a school to me. I used to be very laid-back, well, rather lazy, at home. I used to be quite dependent on people around me, friends, and schoolmates. Working in the factory, I have learned to be independent. Actually it is quite simple: You cannot always depend on others; you must rely on yourself. (Meimei, 22 years of age) I feel that the factory does not need someone who can only do one kind of work. The management needs workers who have multiple skills and can work on multiple tasks. I have learned how to trim and shine since I came. I am now a distributor . . . When I dropped out of school, I thought that the value of doing academically well was overemphasized. But when I came to this factory, I realized that knowledge is valuable in the society and gaining knowledge makes a huge difference [in ones life]. I mean it. (Jie, 23 years of age) I have learned so much in this factory, including production skills and how to improve myself as a human being. I think, all these would be very helpful when I set up my own business in the future. (Tiantian, 19 years of age) I used to feel that lack of education is a large hurdle for me in terms of promotion. I only graduated from junior high school, and this is a big factory producing for the international market. I read an article in the factory newsletter written by the general manager. He said that a good manager does not have to have a lot formal education or master all the
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techniques used on the shop floor. The key is to know how to practice people-oriented management and how to be an effective leader . . . I feel I still have hopeI can do it. (Jiaxian, 28 years of age) So far, these womens family goals and career goals seem to go hand-inhand in their optimization efforts. Increasing knowledge and skills makes one a more competent worker and a stronger candidate for promotion or other professional development opportunities. Promotions, in turn, bring higher wages, which then can be used variously to enhance family well-being. However, family goals are not always compatible with career goals; indeed, six women spoke of conflicts between the two. The workers differed in their approach to mediating these conflicts, and marital status was a key indicator for predicting such differences. For the married women, goals related to their children, including bearing a subsequent child, were central. Three mentioned conflicts between fulfilling these family obligations and pursuing professional development, and each gave priority to their families. For example, Fu and Ying forwent foreignlanguage courses offered by their factory, explaining that they have young children and spend most of their afterwork time caretaking. Interestingly, neither expressed a desire for promotion. Another mother, Jiaxian, also passed on training courses to care for her preschooler; she wrestled with the choice of having another child or participating in training for promotion. Unmarried workers family goals focused on eventually getting married. For migrant workers, such goals were intertwined with the obligation to comply with their parents wishes to return home. Three of the six single women who mentioned both family goals and career goalsZhu, Jie, and Nanatalked about conflicts in fulfilling these two sets of goals. In contrast to the married women, these women were more likely to prioritize their own career goals. As Nana (24 years of age) said, I want to learn more while I am still young . . . My parents keep asking me to return to my hometown to get a boyfriend. My parents are really worried that I would stay here forever. When I first left home, I just wanted to see the outside world. I would always be a child if I stayed with my parents . . . That is why I left my parents and came to a place so far away. In my hometown, the custom is for a girl to get engaged at around 17 or 18 years old. When I was 17 years old, my mother wanted me to become engaged to a boy. I said, Isnt it too early? I am not ready to settle down yet, and I might fall in love with another boy. . . . Now I am 24 years old. I bet my mother will ask me to get engaged when
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I go home for the National Day holiday . . . Well, I can pick a boyfriend myself. I am old enough to do that . . . Five years from now, if I plan to stay in this company, I want to be promoted to be a senior supervisor or a junior manager. Actually, I plan to get myself a boyfriend here. I do not want to return to my hometown to settle down. Having chosen to work in these particular factories, the informants then made a set of seemingly reasoned choices so as to optimize their work experiences. When faced with conflicts between fulfilling family obligations and seeking professional development, married women tended to prioritize family goals, particularly those pertaining to their children. Single women understood their family responsibilities as either pertaining to their parents or other close family members at home, or as related to their future lives as wives and mothers. They were more likely to place their career aspirations ahead of these family-focused goals.
Compensation
Many employment decisions require workers to imagine possible gains and losses, and then consider whether specific actions might neutralize, to some extent, the anticipated losses; these women were no different. Two types of losses stood out as salient: For the migrant workers, a key loss was being physically separated from their families and significant others. For those who dropped out of school, it was being unable to complete their formal education. For these 10 migrant women, electing factory work meant living distant from parents and, in some cases, children and/or significant others. Indeed, as the nearest hometown was 8 hours away by bus and there are only 10 public holidays scattered across the year, even visiting home was extremely difficult. Of the 4 married migrant women, all moved with their husbands but only 1 took her child along. Among the 3 single women with boyfriends, 1 lived with him where her factory is located; the boyfriends of the other 2 worked thousands of miles away. Seven of these women spontaneously shared their compensation strategies, including phoning home, visiting home during paid holidays (notwithstanding the distance), and bringing their children back with them. They also extended time at home through unpaid leaves, as Zhu (21 years of age) recounts, Over the period of 2002-2004, I only went back home once on a short leave. In 2004, I quit my job to go home to deal with a family emergency. Actually, it was also because I had been away from home for a
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long time, and I missed my dad and mom so much. I came back to the factory early this year . . . This factory is pretty good. The wages are not bad, and the managers treat workers nicely . . . I did not have any difficulty in returning to work in the factory. I have a boyfriend in my hometown. He is a driver . . . We talk on the phone about once a week. It is a little like dating. These actions were facilitated by factory labor practices allowing workers longer leaves or to quit for a period, without hassle, and be welcomed back at a later point. Meimei, a young, single woman, contemplated buying a condominium near the factory so she could settle down in the citya significant life decision. Her mother was unhappy with the news initially, and as Meimei put it, You cannot sort out such an issue over the phone. So she took a month unpaid home leave, talked to her mother, and finally received her consent. Hua and Ying, two married women, discussed missing their children, left in their hometowns. Hua was thrilled to talking with her daughter on the phone; Ying (below; 29 years of age) eventually brought her son to the city. I returned to my hometown this year before the Chinese New Year. I just came back to the factory. I went back home because I missed my son so much. He was three when my husband and I left our hometown, and now he is five. I went back home to visit my son and stayed at home for several months. I called the factory and told them [I wanted to stay at home for a period of time]. But eventually, I came back to the factory after staying at home for several months. How do I put it? The company is pretty good. I have been working here for a long time. The managers treated us workers nicely. So I called my manager from home and asked her if I may come back. She said I may if I really want to. So I came back . . . Currently, my husband, my child, and I live in a rented two-bedroom apartment outside the factory. The factories offered other vehicles through which these young migrant workers could compensate for the difficulties of factory life; creating a caring environment in which the workers voices were heard, and their wellbeing explicitly considered, was a critical support in this regard. These factory environments seemed family-like to the women and supplemented the tight social networks they left behind. Supervisors sometimes acted like older sisters, local married coworkers as aunts, and the factory management as well-meaning parents:
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The general manager (GM) is very down-to-earth, though he runs a factory of more than 10,000 workers. He never uses pretentious language, and he is very approachable. There are GM mailboxes in every production department. If you believe you are treated unfairly in your department, or if you have any suggestions, or if you have any difficulties and need his help, you can write to him. (Jiaxian, 28 years of age) You know, I worked on the assembly line during pregnancy. Basically, my work is to supervise the workers and train them. Sometimes, I do demonstrations for them on the machines . . . Our boss walks around the shop floor from time to time . . . When he saw me doing demonstrations on the assembly line, he would pull me away from the machine and tell me to rest . . . The Corporate Responsibility Department really understands the workers . . . Our factory is the best in this aspect because the management does not only care about the bottom line of the factory. The management cares more about human rights, the workers lives, and the workers emotional well-being. (Fu, 28 years of age) Our supervisor treats us nicely. She is very patient in teaching us how to do new products. She is like our parent. She is much older than us she is almost 30 years old. She talks as if she is our parent [laughs]. She used to say, Anyway, I am much older than you, and I have much more life experience and have worked in the factory much longer. I do have some advice to offer you. In this factory, whether it is in the production department or in the dormitory, it feels like home. Every sister [every coworker] in the dormitory is so nice and friendly because we are all migrants. So life is really good here. (Tiantian, 19 years of age) The married women workers treat us single young women nicely. My mother is in her 40s. Some older married women in this factory are in their 30s. Their ages are similar to my mothers age, and we call them aunts . . . Sometimes we chat with them about their children and about our mothers at home. (Nana, 24 years of age) Where it existed, factory management, supervisors, and coworkers all contributed to creating this family-like environment. But even in these bestcase factories, the picture was not uniformly positive. For example, in one factory, the welfare package, including maternal leave and meals at the canteen, was not as good as it used to be: Maternal leave had been reduced from 6 to 3 months, and some of the workers favorite dishes were taken off
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the menu. Nor were interpersonal relations always harmonious. In general, however, these factories exhibited relatively progressive labor practices and created the context for positive relations, particularly among workers. For these women, not all losses were directly associated with working in the factories; they were, instead, related to prior life circumstances, for example, growing up in poor rural areas and dropping out of school. The women strove to compensate for such losses both directly, through investing in their own professional development, and indirectly, through investing in the development of the younger generationtheir younger siblings or their children. Among the six women who discussed the loss of dropping out of school, five compensated in these ways. Similar to optimization, single women compensated in ways more oriented toward their career goals, often by investing in their own professional development. Wen, who dropped out to keep her younger siblings in school, made herself into a competent senior supervisor and a workplace leader, with an innovative and efficient management style. Although favoritism in assigning tasks is common in production chain factories (Smart, 1999), Wen refused to allocate easy tasks to her hometown compatriots. Instead, she created and implemented a rotation system on her production lines that distributed all jobs fairlydifficult and easyand in the process, trained the workers she supervised in a range of skills. Jie (23 years of age) talked about compensating for her losses as follows: I am lucky that I am a graduate from the night school. I learned English, Korean, computer science, history, and philosophy. And I also learned Chinese and algebra [laughs] . . . My parents keep asking me to return to my hometown to get a boyfriend, and I am thinking about it. But I feel that it would be hard for me to leave here. I would miss my life here . . . Although my work is just routine everyday, and it is not that busy, there is still a lot to learn. I have been doing this for quite some time, but I still need to learn more . . . I did not go to college. That is a shame. I wish it motivates me to learn. I want to learn more by myself. Married women, however, were more likely to orient their compensation decisions toward their own children and those in the extended family. The story of Jiaxian (28 years of age) is a notable example: My family was poor . . . My mother did not value girls as much as boys. You know, old-fashioned mind-set. She believed that it is enough if a girl recognizes her name. My mother wanted me to drop out when I
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was in Grade 5 [in primary school]. I really wanted to continue my education! I really wanted to stay in school! But I did not dare to challenge my mother, so I just cried. Somehow, my father gave me his permission to continue my schooling. In order to finance my own education . . . ,I rode bicycles to the city to sell vegetables every summer break. I was only in my early teens. When I was about to finish junior high and take the high school entrance exam, my mother decided that enough is enough . . . My mother told me that my older brother needed money to build a condominium and get married, but I believed my parents had enough money for my older brother. It is just discrimination. Anyway, her reasoning was that your older brother did not get much education, why should you? I never forget the loss. Because of this loss, I want to give my daughter a good living environment and a good education. If I could not give her a good living environment, I would feel guilty for failing her . . . I will not let what happened to me repeat itself with her . . . Unlike my husband and me, my daughter is very artistic, and I want her to develop her potential and pursue her interests in arts. My husband and I plan to buy a condominium here, so my daughter can have better opportunities. My husbands brothers family is poor. He wanted his daughter, my niece, to drop out of school. I was furious at hearing it . . . Knowing that my niece might have to drop out of school because of financial difficulties, I worked really hard in the factory. I told myself it is worthwhile for her. After the Chinese New Year, I called home and asked my father to pass on my message to my niece: Do not worry about money. Just concentrate on your school work. I will support your education if you pass the high school entrance exam. It is not that I am a super-kind person; it is about the pain of having to drop out of school that keeps coming back to me . . . And my niece passed the exam with flying colors. She works really hard, and she is a nice and considerate girl . . . I will keep her in school as long as she does well. I do not mind delaying buying a condominium [in the city] . . . I cannot undo my losses, but I never forget the pain, and I never will. Although subgroups of these women experienced common losses, individual characteristics and present circumstances influenced their compensation strategies. Factory practices also affected these choices: The more enlightened factories facilitated a broad range of compensation behaviors.
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Discussion
The present study intends to expand our limited understanding about the developmental trajectories of young people living in different socioeconomic and cultural contexts in China. We focus on examining how agency manifests itself among 12 young woman workers in four production chain factories. Historically, human development research in China has been influenced by Russian traditions and then by the Western paradigms (Liu, 1982), only recently becoming life spanned. Over the past decade or so, there has been increasing attention to young people, though these studies mainly concern the college-educated population (Badger et al., 2006; Nelson et al., 2004) currently a small group of elites. Given that there are millions of young people working in production chain factories (Chan, 1996, 2003; Smart, 1999), and little research to understand their lives from a human development perspective, this study presents a timely and useful addition to the literature. The results of this study shed a bit of light on this subjectchronicling the decision-making processes by which these women shape and manage their lives during this periodselecting work in particular factories, optimizing their employment experiences, and compensating for losses, both antecedent to, and resulting from, these choices. Consistent with the literature about factory workers in China (Andors, 1988; Lee, 1998; Pun, 2005b; Tan, 2000), these women came primarily from underdeveloped rural areas. Given that socioeconomic and cultural contexts influence and in some cases limit the extent to which young people are able to explore possible directions for life (Arnett, 2000), these womens humble backgrounds greatly constrained the scope of their independent exploration, for instance, via further education. However, such limitations challenged them to capitalize on their agency and actively seek routes to improve their life circumstances and those of their families (Arnett, 2000; Ct & Bynner, 2008). According to life-span developmental theory, the limitation of resources, as an inherent part of human existence, necessitates the selection of domains of functioning (Carstensen, Hanson, & Freund, 1995). These women chose factory work to ease their families financial difficulties. Previous research casts this decision as a more reflexive, or overly deterministic, oneescap[ing] from poverty or escap[ing] from parental control (Chan, 2002; Lee, 1998). Our informants, in contrast, note clear, planful goals. Despite their modest origins, they were thoughtful and ambitious, seeking to give their child(ren) good living environments and education, be promoted, establish their own businesses, and pursue more education.
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There is limited research about the process by which these workplaces are chosen. The simplistic picture is that these peasants rush to the first possible production chain factory (Chan, 2002; Lee, 1998); indeed, the demeaning term blind flow was coined to characterize migrant workers movement into the urban areas (Du, 2000). However, this study suggests the contrary: Every woman in our sample had a set of well-defined criteria for assessing whether a factory is good and worth entering. To a large extent, the criteria are oriented toward the well-being of their families and themselves, such as good pay and living environments, workplace safety, and the availability of training programs. These women purposefully picked and chose, changing factory when dissatisfied. As a result, they did seem to find relatively good factories. Securing a job in a good factory was the initial act of agency; optimization came next. Unlike the struggle-for-marginal-survival picture of the production chain factory workers depicted in previous research (e.g., Chan, 2002), these women engaged in activities that enabled them to thrive in that context. They had in mind concrete objectives that included gaining new knowledge and skills, seeking promotion opportunities, and earning as much as possible. They also were eager to capitalize on educational and training opportunities to enhance their human capital, and thus their earning capacity and future employment options. Their initiative, enthusiasm, determination, and commitment to empower themselves were evident in how they became experts in the nuts and bolts of production, paying out of pocket, and working after hours to gain transferable skills. Selection, even when it leads to the realization of opportunities, inevitably implies losses (Baltes et al., 2006) and thus makes compensation necessary. For the migrant workers, the key loss was not being physically present with families and significant others. This loss is particularly salient given that, historically, connections with family are of great importance for Chinese people (Hui, 1990). Family constitutes a crucial support network, particularly through intergenerational relationships, even as the Chinese households are undergoing substantial changes (Quach & Anderson, 2008; Xu, Xie, Liu, Xia, & Liu, 2007). The workers missed the social, emotional, and concrete support that are valuable components of their usual coping strategies; this sense was particularly potent for new workers in transition to factory life (Chan, 2002). When facing losses, a healthy response is to initiate compensatory measures (Freund & Baltes, 1998), as these women did. They regularly called homekeeping in touch with their parents, children, and boyfriendsand also seized chances to visitusing regular and extended leaves, and temporary stints of unemployment.
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As expected from a human development perspective (Lerner, 2002, 2006), these women actively shaped their lives in multiple domains. Such agency goes beyond the sense of empowerment suggested in Smarts (1999) ethnographic study in the Pearl Delta River region in Guangdong Province. She notes that migrant workers in production chain factories there felt empowered by working with modern technology and participating in the modernization process of China; they developed a perceived or real sense of the capacity to enhance their lives (Smart, 1999). This present study finds workers agency far more broadly experienced. Personal agency is never absolute; it is invariably influenced by individual characteristics and by the contexts in which the individual is operating (Baltes & Baltes, 1990; Baltes et al., 2006; Freund & Baltes, 1998, 2000). In this sense, then, all personal agencies are conditional or contingent, resulting from the interaction of factors at play for that particular individual at that point in time. The agency these women express is similarly codetermined; depending on the different combinations of factors, different profiles emerged. Below we focus briefly on the influences of marital status and factory labor practices. Two broad categories of goals emerged in this study and elsewhere as well (see Frenkel, 2001)family related and career related. These two sets of goals sometimes conflict. As Frenkel (2001) also suggests, workers often struggle with balancing commitments to home and self. In general, among married women, family goals carried more weight, whereas single women were likely to prioritize their own career aspirations, even in the face of pressure, often parental, to start their own families. Single women optimized their experiences through participating in educational and training courses and preparing for possible promotion, rather than searching for marriage prospects. Married women knowingly forwent such opportunities, choosing instead to enjoy their supportive work environments and use their extra time and energies taking good care of their immediate family, primarily their children. These different optimization patterns make sense within Chinese culture. Family interests are highly valued (Hui, 1990), and within a family, parents obligations to ensure their childrens well-being constitute an intrinsic part of parentchild relationships. When an individuals own interests conflict with her familys interests, it is expected that she will sacrifice the former for the latter. For married women, then, optimizing their own lives would certainly include prioritizing family interests, particularly those of their children. On the other hand, these single women seemed to have some leeway to postpone marriage to focus on pursuing career development, though, indeed, they were aware of the expectations that they should eventually marry, often
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in the not-too-distant future. This phenomenon is also found in other research (Jacka, 2006; Lee, 1998; Tan, 2003) and likely is multidetermined. These single women understood that, absent the opportunities more advantaged young women enjoy, career development within their factories would be the surest avenue to securing a better future (see also Chang, 2008). Their comparatively significant incomes allowed them to contribute financially to their hometown families well-being (see also Pun, 2005b) and that likely also helped convince their parents of the wisdom of investing, as young people, in enhancing their future employment options. They may well also have used their cash income as a means to resist the traditional patriarchal prerogatives in family lifechoosing a mate for ones daughter, for example (Lee, 1998). The existing literature on workers in production chain factories does not investigate this wide variation in choices and experiences, depicting workers lives prototypically and thus superficially. Examining this considerable within-group variation has substantial practical implications. There is no one-size-fits-all recipe for an ideal factory environment. Factory labor practices and worker development programs should be tailored to meet different workers needs, through helping them achieve their individual goals. Creating such a goodness of fit can best elicit job satisfaction. As suggested here, the workers are picking good workplaces that best meet their specific criteria, and they appreciate the virtues of those factories. It appears that a caring factory environment can lead to a win-win situation in which many individual workers thrive, and factories also benefit from satisfied workers with high motivation and loyalty. While applauding these women for being active agents in their own lives, we reiterate that their agency does not exist in vacuum. We do not claim that these women are inherently more resilient than woman workers described in previous researchthose portrayed as being desperately powerless when facing harsh factory management practices (Chan, 2002; Tan, 2003). Indeed, the women in this study and those in earlier research are demographically quite similar. One major difference, however, lies in the labor practices implemented in various factories. Worker agency can be facilitated, circumscribed, or distorted by these practices. Factories in this study, in essence, allow for the exercise of personal agency. With fairly reasonable work hours and a variety of free courses provided onsite, Jie takes multiple classes and Tiantian focuses on learning English. Such scenarios would be unimaginable in factories where the workers are coerced into working as long as 14 to 17 hours a day (AMRC & HKCIC, 1997; Chan, 2002). Benefiting from the factories flexibility in granting extended leaves and allowing cycles of voluntary unemployment and
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reemployment without hassle, Zhu, Nana, and Ying spend periods at home reconnecting with their families. Such home visits are impossible in those many factories where workers are forced to deposit money and identification cards that cannot be reclaimed if they quit or where they are locked up after work hours in factory compounds (Chan, 1996, 2002; Liu, 1998; Tan, 2000). In some extreme cases, workers do demonstrate their agency by walking out when they can no longer endure these conditions (AMRC & HKCIC, 1997; Cody, 2004); for them, however, it is then often more difficult to achieve family and career goals, at least in the short run. Although extant research often depicts women workers as passive recipients of the labor exploitations meted out in these factories (Chan, 2002; Pun, 2005b; Tan, 2003), there are also instances of resistance that might profitably be viewed from a developmental perspective. For instance, Pun (2005b) vividly describes an incident in which workers slowed down production to protest a managers decision to switch off their radioa critical tool in alleviating the physical and psychological stress and fatigue resulting from hours of repetitive and boring assembly line work. Such a phenomenon could be seen as optimization behavior; the women demonstrated the will and capacity to improve their lives, although the extent to which they could exercise their agency was much constrained by the harsh factory environment. The women workers portrayed in this study were more aspirational, ambitious, and optimistic than those described in previous studies. One possible reason may be that, although similar in demographic backgrounds to earlier cohorts of women (e.g., those represented in data collected by Pun, 2005b, from 1990-1996), this present cohort, with data collected in 2005, was qualitatively different in some significant waysbetter informed, through electronic media, of available life options; responding to actual, secular improvements in factory management; and so on. Confirming these interesting possibilities, however, is beyond the scope of this current investigation. In sum, this study describes the series of decisions that young women workers in production chain factories make so as to actively shape the course and content of their lives. Calls for empirical work and theoretical research to better understand the developmental processes of young people living in diverse social and cultural contexts, in this era of globalization and societal changes (see, for example, Larson, Wilson, & Rickman, 2009), have intensified in recent years. By offering a glimpse of how these young people, working in Chinese contract factories, negotiate their postadolescent years, we view this study as a modest response.
834 Authors Note
We conducted this study as part of an evaluation of a worker development program in production chain factories in Asia.
Acknowledgment
The authors thank the women workers who generously shared their experiences, and the multinational company and the four production chain factories in China for graciously coordinating and facilitating data collection. The authors also thank Yibing Li for her generous help in transcribing the interview data and in coding the data for reliability and Dr. Richard M. Lerner for his feedback on an earlier draft. The title Poor But Not Powerless is inspired by the video clip I am powerful on the CARE USA website.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
This study, as part of an evaluation project, was partially funded by the International Youth Foundation (IYF); this study was also partially funded by the Jacobs Foundation Fellowship to the first author.
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Bios
Lang Ma, MD, PhD, is the director of Child Development at Half the Sky Foundation. She received her PhD in child development from Tufts University in 2007. Before Tufts, she was trained as a pediatrician and public health worker in China. Her research interests include school bullying, development of orphaned children, and evaluation of human development programs. Francine Jacobs, EdD, is an associate professor at Tufts University, Medford, MA, with a joint appointment in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development and the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning. She has conducted, or provided consultation to, numerous evaluations of child, adolescent, and family service programs in the United States, Asia, and the Middle East.

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Journal of Adolescent Research http://jar.sagepub.

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Tufts University, Medford, MA

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Journal of Adolescent Research 25(6)

Production Chain Factories as a Context for T ransition to Adulthood

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Empirical andTheoretical Underpinnings for the Current Study

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Journal of Adolescent Research 25(6)

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Journal of Adolescent Research 25(6)

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Journal of Adolescent Research 25(6)

Present factory is better than it was before

Provide a school-like environment Provide basic education Pay well

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Compensation Facilitate home visit

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Journal of Adolescent Research 25(6)

Reliability and Validity

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Journal of Adolescent Research 25(6)

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Journal of Adolescent Research 25(6)

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Journal of Adolescent Research 25(6)

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Journal of Adolescent Research 25(6)

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Journal of Adolescent Research 25(6)

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Journal of Adolescent Research 25(6)

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Journal of Adolescent Research 25(6)

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Journal of Adolescent Research 25(6)

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834 Authors Note

Journal of Adolescent Research 25(6)

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

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Journal of Adolescent Research 25(6)

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Journal of Adolescent Research 25(6)

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