Public discourse on Asian parenting tends to fixate on ethnic culture as a static value set, disguising the fluidity and diversity of Chinese parenting. Such stereotypes also fail to account for the challenges of raising children in a rapidly modernizing world, full of globalizing values. In Raising Global Families Pei-Chia Lan examines how ethnic Chinese parents in Taiwan and the United States negotiate cultural differences and class inequality to raise children in the contexts of globalization and immigration. She draws on a uniquely comparative, multi-sited research model with four groups of parents: middle-class and working-class parents in Taiwan, and middle-class and working-class Chinese immigrants in the Boston area. Despite sharing a similar ethnic cultural background, these parents develop class-specific, context-sensitive strategies for arranging their children's education, care, and discipline, and coping with uncertainties provoked by their changing surroundings. Lan's cross-Pacific comparison demonstrates that class inequality permeates the fabric of family life, even as it takes shape in different ways across national contexts.

Recasting labor studies in a long-term and global framework, this 2003 book draws on a major database on world labor unrest to show how local labor movements have been related to world-scale political, economic and social processes since the late-nineteenth century. Through an in-depth empirical analysis of select global industries it demonstrates how the main locations of labor unrest have shifted from country to country together with shifts in the geographical location of production. It shows how the main sites of labor unrest have shifted over time together with the rise/decline of new leading sectors of capitalist development, and demonstrates that labor movements have been deeply embedded (as both cause and effect) in world political dynamics. The book concludes by exploring the likely forms that emergent labor movements will take in the twenty-first century.