ABSTRACT
How can we explain the different degrees of visibility among sociotechnical controversies? In today’s world, the social “visibility” of an issue is almost always figurative and mediated, especially through technology. A “visible” event might be reported on television, quickly and widely shared through social media, and commented upon in blogs, although the number of direct eye witnesses might be few.What makes controversies visible is not only technology, the so-called “newsworthiness” of events, or even the high visibility of certain actors involved in them. Using two ongoing cases of controversy about manufacturing in the global electronics industry, I demonstrate that historically constituted institutional infrastructures have a profound influence on the trajectories and outcomes of controversies, chief among them national legal institutions and international political-economic systems.These systems, I argue, shape controversy trajectories via cultures of visibility. The first case is the controversy over cancers suffered by the former employees of Radio
Corporation of America (RCA) inTaoyuan,Taiwan.Many believe the cancers to be a result of exposure to toxic chemicals at the workplace while the company operated between 1969 and 1992. Former workers are now fighting Taiwan’s first collective lawsuit against RCA. Court hearings started in late 2009, five years after the suit was initially filed, and are still ongoing in the district court. A coalition of activists, lawyers, scientists, and other academics was built in support of the RCA workers’ struggle, and continue to participate in this unprecedented science-intensive litigation in Taiwan. The second case is the Apple/Foxconn controversy. It started in 2010 with a series of
suicides of young Chinese workers at a factory complex owned by the largest electronics manufacturing firm in the world today, the Taiwanese-owned Foxconn Technology, chief supplier of Apple Inc. Media reports of seventeen successive suicides in the first seven months of that year aroused public outcry and intensive debates. Initially, prevailing public opinion blamed the young workers themselves for their inability to endure hardships. It shifted to condemning the excessive stress Foxconn, in the service of Apple, imposed on its employees as the root cause of workers’ suicides.To cope with the negative publicity,Apple undertook investigations on plants in its supply chain, following practices developed by the global apparel
industry in the name of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), a set of private labor and environmental codes enforced by the brand name on its suppliers. So far, actual changes in labor practices at Foxconn’s plants are still limited, and anti-sweatshop NGOs are closely monitoring the situation. Comparing these two cases, we can see similar underlying issues playing out in sharply
contrasting ways, despite some commonalities between them. Both cases involve massproduced high-tech electronics in Asia mainly for U.S. consumers, workforces chiefly composed of young women workers with rural backgrounds, global relocation of the assembly line in order to tap sources of cheap and docile labor, and fragmentation of the labor process into simple repetitive tasks enabling management to hire fresh hands off the street while burdening workers with monotonous and stressful workdays. Furthermore, many of the international activist networks and organizations involved in the RCA and Apple/Foxconn campaigns overlap. However, the ways these two controversies play out with respect to public visibility are dras-
tically different. The RCA controversy is now fought out mainly in the arena of scientific discourse and in arduously long court sessions. The social worlds of science and law often appear opaque and the lay public finds them hard to understand, despite each world’s explicit doctrines of openness and transparency. In the Apple/Foxconn controversy the actual tragedies and everyday sufferings of the workers take place deep inside the gigantic walled factory that are physically impossible for the public to literally see with their own eyes. Making this world visible is precisely the central area of contestation. Labor advocates and the companies have fought with media exposés, news releases and other publicity tools, each trying to move the focus of public attention to where they hope it to be. By contrast, in the RCA controversy, the action has played out in courtrooms and through legal procedures that are supposed to be transparent, but which in practice make it difficult for outsiders to “see” the debate. The ways that social visibility and invisibility are produced and reproduced in sociotechni-
cal controversies, I argue, can be most clearly understood using conceptual tools from STS for analyzing institutional infrastructures. Chief among them are the “visual culture” metaphor developed by Yaron Ezrahi (1990) through his elaboration of the work of Steve Shapin and Simon Schaffer (1985), and the social-worlds frameworks developed by analysts such as Susan Leigh Star and Adele Clarke (Clarke and Star 2007, Star 2010).Visual culture, in Ezrahi’s view, refers to “cultural codes that in any given political world fix the political functions of visual experience and govern the meanings attributed to the relations between the visible and the invisible” (1990: 70).Visual cultures are historically variable, and are shaped by legal, technological, and economic systems that prevent or enable particular ways of seeing, whether by design or not. The visibility of the Apple/Foxconn controversy was shaped, I argue, by a “theatrical” culture, and the RCA controversy by a “mechanical” culture that must be understood in terms of their historical and geographic contexts. Looking at specific contents of each controversy and its intersection with visual culture allows us a better view of its dynamics as well as its underlying historical contexts.
