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Book Review: Jenny Chan, Mark Selden and Pun Ngai, Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn, and the Lives of China’s Workers

on work, emphasising that ethnicity or gender are more relevant in some contexts. This argument is linked to her general critique regarding the traditional understanding of work. If ‘normal’ work is implicitly or explicitly understood as production or factory work, done by male workers and in industrialised countries in the Global North, then this means ignoring other forms of work, especially women’s work, non-productive work, work in other parts of the world and work outside capitalism. Taking industrialisation as the point of departure for work research has important implications: ‘The history of industrialisation is inseparable from this history of colonialisation and slavery’ (p. 35f.). In dealing with current challenges, such as gig-work and precarisation, the author points out that not all of the bad conditions that have been linked to them are entirely new. This, too, is a matter of perspective: ‘If you slice the historical cake differently, the current moment of an emerging gig economy stops seeming like an aberration from this norm of full employment for male breadwinners’ (p. 63). Two further crucial points are emphasised in the book: questioning the universality of capitalism and scrutinising the explanatory power of ‘the confused, overextended idea of neoliberalism’ (p. 87). Pettinger takes up the concept of ‘capitalocentrism’, highlighting that capitalism is not the only economic system to be found in the world at the moment, and warns against accepting ‘the quick explanation of “it’s all neoliberal”’ (p. 95). Regarding technology and green work, she discusses how new technology causes problems that are worse than those it was supposed to solve. She is cautious about the issue of rising automation as it neglects the automation that already exists and draws attention away from other current issues (e.g. informal work, care work, programming work). She also criticises the notion of green work, noting that lower environmental damage does not always go together with decent work. This book is easy to understand and can be an inspiring read for scholars in the field of sociology and work research as well as other interested readers, from academia and beyond. Pettinger’s critique is harsh but comprehensible. The structure of the book can at times seem a bit confused; it is not always clear how chapters are built up, or why some topics receive different kinds of attention. However, the strength of this important book is not that it is complete or seamless, but that it makes gaps visible and brings new framings to topical issues.