Flip-Flop: A Journey Through Globalisation's Backroads

by Caroline Knowles

This book follows the global trail of one of the world’s most unremarkable and ubiquitous objects – flip-flops. Through this unique lens, Caroline Knowles takes a ground level view of the lives and places of globalisation’s back roads, providing new insights that challenge contemporary accounts of globalisation.

Rather than orderly product chains, the book shows that globalisation along the flip-flop trail is a tangle of unstable, shifting, ad hoc and contingent connections. This book displays both the instabilities of the ‘chains’ and the complexities, personal topographies and skills with which people navigate these global uncertainties.

Flip-Flop provides new ways of thinking about globalisation from the vantage point of the shifting landscape crossed by a seemingly ordinary and everyday commodity.

Genres: Anthropology

232 pages, Paperback

First published May 20, 2014

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

The flip-flop, in Australia the thong, in New Zealand the jandal, in China the slipper, is one of those ubiquitous items – cheap, disposable and replaceable; it is just the thing for that unexpectedly hot context. And yet its very ubiquity makes it hard to observe as its’ taken for granted state means it becomes close to invisible – yet we can see it nearly everywhere, which just goes to reinforce its suitability for an exploration of the global condition. In asking a seeming simple question – how is a flip flop made, and what happens to it after that, Caroline Knowles has opened up a complex tale of global supply chains, manufacturing, sales, disposal and labour migration, of ambition, poverty, dependency, labour force security in some parts of the supply chain and insecurity in others. In doing so she has given us a superb analysis of that condition often simplistically referred to as ‘globalisation’ and shown the potential of material cultural analysis.

She starts her story in Kuwait, in the oil fields of a small Gulf state that could, quite possibly, be any of them – Qatar, the UAE or elsewhere – before moving on to Korea where the oil is transformed into plastic. From there she moves us to coastal China where the plastic balls shipped from Korea are transformed into plastic sheets that become the base of the flip-flop, waiting for the thong element to be added. The bags of flip-flops then make their way across the globe to the Horn of Africa and into a market in Addis Ababa, finally being disposed of in the city’s rubbish dump. This excellent narrative is topped and tailed by two explicitly theoretical chapters exploring the relation of this discussion to globalisation theory (these chapters are important, but I suspect the book would work well for readers who passed them by).

Knowles is careful to do two things in this discussion. The first is to set aside the all-too-common metaphor of ‘global flows’, with its implications of smooth movement, in favour of the idea of journeys, with their tendency to be interrupted, side-tracked and redirected. At each point along her journey tracking the flip-flop from desert oil well to Ethiopian rubbish dump she builds an image of the journeys of workers that circle around the node in the life story of the rubber footwear. This model of a the flip-flop circling the globe while each of the nodal points of its manufacture and consumption acts as the hub of another set of mobilities and circulations means we meet the South Asian oil workers and Anglo and Arabic site managers in the Kuwaiti desert, as well as have their working and domestic lives traced and tracked to their city house or occasional journey home to see their kinfolks. Elsewhere we meet (internal) migrants from rural China, stamping out flip-flop soles from plastic sheets, or Korean factory in their company housing. We are introduced to the local gender, racial and ethnic politics, the demands they make on social dynamics, the expectations workers and bosses share (or not) and the social support mechanisms that develop around workplace, origin and family networks.

By the time we make it to Ethiopia, the dynamic has become more complex as the narrative shifts its emphasis from production to distribution and consumption. We meet the flip-flop smugglers who carry them across the Somali-Ethiopian border to avoid taxes and tariffs, the market stall owners who retail, the poor who buy and the rubbish pickers who might (rarely) find them worth trying to resell. In these cases, Knowles once again takes us into these peoples’ ambitions, dreams and efforts taken to make their lives a little more bearable. We also find ourselves in the world of academic management, with a fabulous discussion of her University’s limits on what she could do in the field, limits based in their concerns about safety and insurance (a concern that resonated for me as chair of my university’s research ethics committee, where one of our concerns is researcher well-being in the field: these are at times difficult balances to strike and her case the limitation was on entry to Somalia) – it is a telling and informative section.

Telling a story of globalisation through an exploration of the supply chain of a disposable and ubiquitous product is an inspired move, in part because (as she notes) a very large proportion of us have owned and still own flip-flops; there is a visceral recognition of the product – as rubbing blisters on our feet on early summer, protecting those same feet from the hot, hot sand, providing a layer between a damaged or swollen bandaged foot and ground or their myriad other uses. There is another way in which the choice of the flip-flop is inspired – its reliance on petrochemical industries, an off shoot of our oil obsession and reliance, and therefore as a way to take a peek into one of the major forces shaping, framing and driving globalization.

On top of all this, Knowles has a fabulous narratorial voice – she packs a sophisticated set of concepts into what seems like the simple story of cheap plastic footwear items, but she also carries a narrative with ease. The human and humane in the book keeps the global story and the personal level providing moments of recognition and insight that I only wish more of us in academia could provide.

This is an outstanding discussion of the global, of supply chains, of human stories inside the politics of global manufacturing. It is also a superb piece of material cultural analysis that deserves a very wide academic and general audience; it is one of the best things I have read in years.

[Jake · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book was engaging and well written. The final chapter was interesting and added to a broader theoretical knowledge of globalisation.

Knowles sets out to trace the journey of Oil to Plastic to flip flop to rubbish. She seeks to do micro-ethnographic research at each stage of the process to understand the way in which the economy of flip flops work. There is something interesting in this approach to research but I was left throughout feeling as though there was little broader understanding of the realities of the people, and the conversations were often fragmentary. This is the nature of a lot of ethnographic research but the book felt more like a travelogue written by a journalist most of the time.

[Dennis Malmin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I never thought I would read a book about the material process and construction of the flip-flop. This was in the curriculum for my material culture class in University.

The book is essentially an ethnographical journey where Knowles herself has traversed through the process of extracting oil, to the transportation and chemical refinement of said oil into plastic products.

I recommend this book if you're interested in globalised supply chains, how different people and cultures interact within this market. The book exposes how these "stable" supply lines are complex, interconnected and dependent on each other to provide goods and services. Giving a competent analysis on globalisation in the areas of culture, economics and labour.

[Regan Strehl · Rating 4 out of 5]

This opened my mind up to the many hidden systems that exist in the world, and to the culture that exists outside of America. I thought I had done a fairly decent job at educating myself of the world outside of this country, but I was shocked at how very wrong I was. While I found the descriptions of chemicals and machinery dull, the relationships and lives of the people responsible for them was truly fascinating. Even though I read this for college, I would definitely recommend it to others outside of the course.