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A Collaborative Ethnography on Transnational Capitalist Collaborations 

 

Rofel, Lisa, and Sylvia J. Yanagisako. 2018. Fabricating Transnational Capitalism: A 

Collaborative Ethnography of Italian-Chinese Global Fashion. Durham: Duke University Press, 

pp. 392 ISBN: 978-1-4780-0045-7 

 

Keywords: Collaborative research; Transnational capitalism; Kinship; Labor; Fashion 

 

Fabricating Transnational Capitalism is remarkable not only for its convincing argument but 

also for its form: the book is a collaborative ethnography about capitalist transnational 

collaborations. It is the outcome of a shared, multi-sited and long-term research project on 

collaborations between Chinese and Italian fashion firms, and will be of interest to anyone 

interested in processes of globalization. It contains a mix of co-authored and single-authored 

chapters by the main authors, Lisa Rofel and Sylvia Junko Yanagisako, supplemented with a 

chapter by fashion studies scholar Simona Segre Reinach.  

The co-authored introduction classically starts with a description of a social event, an Italian 

fashion show in China, followed by an outline of the book's analytical framework. Rofel and 

Yanagisako have separately studied silk industries in China and Italy respectively since 1984. 

The current book builds on the authors' previous work, both empirically and analytically, such as 

Yanagisako's seminal conceptual work on kinship and gender and Rofel's influential book on 

neoliberal subjectivities in China. The authors have moreover collaboratively studied Italian 

fashion firms in China since 2002. They argue against perceiving transnational capitalist 

collaborations as an articulation of two distinct capitalist systems. The authors understand 



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capitalism to be dynamic and contingent, not predetermined by a certain (national) economic 

logic, but enabled, constrained and shaped by cultural practices and sentiments. 

Rofel and Yanagisako argue that it is their collaboration – which seems to have taken place 

primarily at the level of analysis rather than during actual fieldwork – that has enabled them to 

transcend common understandings of transnational capitalism. They point at their 

complementary linguistic skills and their combined knowledge on the different settings the 

Italian and Chinese entrepreneurs come from. Whereas the empirical value of their collaboration 

is clear, it does not always transpire that this combined perspective was a sine qua non for their 

analytic insights. In my opinion, the analytic value of their collaboration is most convincingly 

present in the first section of the book.   

Section I, titled "The Negotiation of Value," consists of an extensive co-authored chapter on 

manager's labor value. It describes career trajectories of Italian and Chinese managers, the 

changing division of labor between them, and their perceptions of themselves and each other. 

While the Italians emphasize their "Italianness" which is equated to fashion-ability (a skill that 

would not make their labor particularly noteworthy or valuable in Italy), the Chinese emphasize 

their cosmopolitanism, their overcoming of their "Chineseness," which represents cheap rather 

than managerial labor. Thus, the authors' collaborative approach, which reveals differential 

perspectives in such negotiations, shows that labor power (in the sense of capacities) is not 

pregiven but formed in the encounter and is based in the managers' mutual interdependence 

within existing hierarchies. 

Section II, titled "Historical Legacies and Revisionist Histories," argues against perceiving 

transnational capitalism as radically different from previous forms of capitalism. Whereas 

transnational collaborations might occur more frequently than they did before, they are shaped 

by historical legacies and by specific understandings of the (non-)capitalist past, that for instance 

determine how parties involved perceive the role of the state in capitalist enterprise. Rofel's 

chapter in this section shows how young Chinese entrepreneurs' interpretation of China's 

socialist past have led them to embrace capitalism and to seek for joint ventures with foreign 

firms as a way to overcome (power) inequalities. Yanagisako's chapter emphasizes the legacies 

of the decentralized structure of production by family firms in Italy, which led Italians to look for 

multiple partners in China, to the dismay of their existing partners. The chapter thus shows that 



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distrust or conflicts in transnational collaborations are not an inevitable result of cultural 

misunderstandings but stem from specific and contingent histories that shape the strategies and 

expectations of those involved. Finally, Segre Reinach's chapter, based on the same interview 

material as the rest of the book, discusses the changing meaning of Italian fashion in China. 

Whereas Italian firms and their joint ventures with Chinese firms initially sourced material and 

produced in China for foreign markets, they at a later stage also produced for the domestic 

market. Chinese-Italian relations became more collaborative but also more competitive at this 

point, indicating that the collaborations themselves are dynamic, if persistently asymmetrical.  

Section III, straightforwardly titled "Kinship and Transnational Capitalism," discusses how 

kinship is integral to both Chinese and Italian enterprises, albeit in highly different ways. 

Yanagisako's chapter describes two types of "generation" that used to ensure the perseverance of 

family businesses in Italy, but which are affected differently by transnational expansion. On the 

one hand, the succession of generations within family firms has been secured in those firms 

successful in a transnational context. On the other hand, whereas the demise of firms previously 

gave individual family members the opportunity to start anew and thus generated new firms, 

there is little demand for small subcontracting firms in Italy anymore. This "generation" of firms 

is no longer possible, effectively restricting possibilities for social mobility. In China, in contrast, 

there are increasing opportunities for small entrepreneurs, as described in Rofel's chapter in this 

section. These new firms might promote themselves as "family firms" towards (potential) Italian 

partners, but they usually avoid at all cost to be perceived as such by other Chinese in order to 

avoid accusations of corruption. Rofel argues that the ambiguous relation between the state, 

family and business has to be seen in the light of the legacies of the socialist past yet is also 

shaped by the entrance of Italian firms that evaluate family firms positively. The chapters in this 

section contradict narrow views on capitalism that perceive capitalist enterprise as solely focused 

on financial profit without taking possible affective and social benefits or ethical discussions on 

inequality into account. 

The chapters in Section III are for a considerable part based on data from Yanagisako's and 

Rofel's previous research. Indeed, to me, the distinctive strength of the book is that it draws on 

longitudinal research on the fashion industry in both China and Italy and on a decades-long 

conceptual engagement with the topic of capitalism. Whereas the authors refer to this earlier 

work, they hardly discuss the particularities of their collaboration. For instance, the contribution 



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of Segre Reinach to the collaboration remains somewhat elusive, insightful as her chapter is. The 

book would have made an even stronger case for the method of collaborative ethnography if it 

had contained a more explicit reflection on the authors' respective positions, possibly points of 

disagreement and the resulting analytic value of the method. After all, as the authors themselves 

argue for capitalist collaborations, it matters greatly who the collaborators are and what kind of 

(scholarly) histories they bring to the project. It is, however, clear that in this case it is only 

because of the authors' decades of dedication to their respective research contexts that they have 

been able to provide such a comprehensive understanding of the shifts in Italian-Chinese 

capitalist collaborations in the fashion industry. 

 

Dr. Gerda Kuiper is a research fellow at the Global South Studies Center, University of 

Cologne, and the author of Agro-industrial labour in Kenya. Cut flower farms and migrant 

workers' settlements. Her current research is on the trade in second-hand clothing in Tanzania. 

 
 
 
 

© 2020 Gerda Kuiper 
 


