Everyday Multiculturalism at Work: Race and Multi-ethnic Coexistence in Singaporean Workplaces

• In Event: 392 - Section on Asia and Asian America Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 07. The Sociology of Culture. Case Studies from Asia

Abstract

This paper presents findings from and theoretical reflection on current research among workers in multi-racial Singaporean workplaces. The paper explores how race and cultural difference is negotiated in Singaporean workplaces amongst ‘locals’, ‘immigrants’, and ‘foreign workers’. Singapore is an immigrant society consisting of a Chinese majority (74.1%) followed by Malays (13.4%), Indians (9.2%) and ‘Others’ (3.3%). Singapore’s permanent population numbers about 3.7 million people and additional 1.3 million people reside there on some form of temporary work visa, who make up 34.7% of the Singaporean labour force.
Micro-publics are spaces of mundane, habitual encounter and engagement with difference. As a key space of inter-ethnic encounter, the workplace provides a useful laboratory to study a multicultural “micro-public” (Amin 2002) and the workings of everyday race relations. Yet the workplace is a special kind of micro-public, where the rules and codes of contemporary working cultures interplay with collegial and hierarchical relationships (Du Gay 1996, Willis 1981), which in turn mediate interethnic relationships (Essed 1991). In Singapore, which relies on a large immigrant workforce, this is overlayed by a hierarchical regime of racial differentiation and immigrant status. The paper explores how cultural differences and identities are experienced, negotiated, understood and transformed in everyday situations of enforced intercultural interaction like the workplace. The paper argues that structural, governmental and institutional factors like neo-liberal workplace changes and variegated visa regimes—as well as spatial and material factors, broader national discourses, media cultures and stereotypes mediate intercultural relationships in Singaporean workplaces.

Author

• Amanda Yvonne Wise, Macquarie University