Dr Huiyan Fu

Biography

Trained as a social anthropologist, I have conducted considerable interdisciplinary and cross-national comparative research on precarious work and social inequalities in Japan, China and beyond. In particular, I am interested in how gender and other social stratification variables (such as age, employment and marital status, rural-urban provenance, class, ethnicity and race) combine to create distinct modes of discrimination in work, employment and wider society. During my doctoral research, I embarked on yearlong ethnographic fieldwork inside Japanese business organisations, with the aim of exploring Japan’s female-dominated temporary agency workers’ everyday experiences. My doctoral thesis became my first book entitled An Emerging Non-Regular Labour Force in Japan: The Dignity of Dispatched Workers (Routledge 2011, 2015). Subsequently, I published an edited volume on Temporary Agency Work and Globalisation (Routledge 2015), which is interdisciplinary in approach and international in scope. My work has also appeared in highly ranked journals such as Human Relations, Gender & Society and British Journal of Industrial Relations. Among most recent research outputs is an edited book on Temporary and Gig Economy Workers in China and Japan: The Culture of Unequal Work (Oxford University Press 2023). The book explores how core cultural values impinge on the iniquitous patterns of precarious work and its surrounding institutions ranging from state policy and legislation to industrial relations and social welfare. By bridging culture and institutions and combining macro-level structural scrutiny and micro-agency empiricism, this book aims to bring a more integrated and nuanced understanding of unequal work, with a view to casting fresh light on social change in a wider post-pandemic world. I am currently conducting a new project on the relationship between mental health, social inequality and precarious work. I am interested in supervising PhD projects addressing the following broad topics: * Social Anthropology/Sociology of Japan and China * Precarious Work and Gig Economy * Social and Health Inequality (esp. Gender and Intersectionality Research) * Culture, Language and Power * Cross-National Comparative and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Contemporary Work & Employment Issues

Qualifications

• PhD (DPhil), MPhil, Social Anthropology, University of Oxford,