Structure, Culture And Agency:Study On Resilience Of Female Migrant Workers In Shanghai

Accompanied by economic reform and social transformation, China has witnessed the great migration of the workforce and the formation of a large scale labor immigrant group which is called "Female Migrant Workers". With the question of how the female migrant workers deal with the plight of urban life and work, I began the study about what role the resilience has played on female migrant workers as a process. I try to integrate Giddens’s structure theory and the Geertz’s cultural concept in order to master the dynamic process of the resilience in the interaction between structure, culture and agency.Resilience as a new theory has already made considerable progress, but the existing theories are all based on the study of psychology, which lay too much emphasis on quantification and lack enough attention on cultural context and individual agency. What’s more, even the quantification research didn’t reach a consensus on the measure of resilience. For this reason, I transformed the perspective, neither the extent of resilience, nor the possession of the resilience, nor the presentation of resilience. I see resilience as a dynamic process, which developed from the interaction between structure, culture and agency.According to the presentation of the life history of one female migrant worker and the theme and the analysis of qualitative information, this article pays attention to the life experience of female migrant workers by qualitative research method, and collects research information by thick interview of28female migrant workers.What I have found out are as follows. Firstly, resilience is a continuously dynamic progress which has no simple results. The so-called result is just a picture of one moment of life, but life is always moving forward, in which case resilience also presents the progress of flowing and changing. This progress reflects that the female migrant workers are constantly breaking through structural constraints, making use of culture resources to redefine circumstance, making sense and seeking help to respond to the plight of life. Secondly,"structure" is regarded as the rules and resources, which individuals are involved in the day-to-day contact. Resilience is considered to be the reflective monitoring process about the interaction flow with environment, when the female migrant workers facing adversity, and this process is the process of production and reproduction to "structure" under the influence of "reflective monitoring", which means the process of production and reproduction of the rules and resources. So, the "structure" is formed in the process of resilience, and then constituted the constraints on it. Meanwhile the article carries out the elaboration from the protection factors and the risk factors of the female migrant workers’ resilience, making a conclusion that rejection by the duality system, discipline of the workshop and dormitory and the pain of life experience are the major risk factors to their structural impediments, while building up life confidence, settling expectations, and seeking social support are the part of dynamic progress of resilience presented from personal motility and structural interaction.Thirdly,"Culture" is a set of symbol system, which social interaction occurred around it. However,"resilience" shows how female migrant workers behave in action and then in action flows. The define and redefine of three cultural symbols——"home","relationship","tolerance" can show the resilience on female migrant workers in the dimensions of culture, and in which showed the agency of female migrant workers.Last but not least, as the two different social phenomena, structure and culture are not in a confrontation between relationship, but blend together dynamically with motility to show in the process of individual resilience. According to the analysis of life history of several female migrant workers, the article believes that the resilience of female migrant workers bases on the individual agency, which appear from the continued reflective monitoring of individual action structure and embeds the understanding process of the meaning of culture.The article challenges the now-existing theories based on psychology and individualism abstractly and puts forward the resilience framework focusing on integrated structure, culture and agency, relationism and dynamic. This framework responds to shortages of the now-existing theories on resilience to some extent and also provides a new perspective on female migrant workers. So the results of research also have some practical meanings.