Abstract
This paper looks at the question of whether new industrial countries (NICs) in East Asia are following the path of social transformation as claimed by post-industrialism and/or globalization theorists. I compare three approaches of social transformation (neo-Marxist, post-industrial, and globalization) and examine their various hypotheses in terms of social momentum, class structure, class mobility, gender and class inequality, and class politics. Using a neo-Marxist schema to analyze sampled datasets from the 1992-2007 Taiwan Social Change Surveys, I found (a) a stable percentage of unskilled workers, declining percentage of self-employed, and an increasing percentage of experts; (b) educational credentials have become the major source of class mobility; (c) labor market gender segmentation has been reshaped and wage discrimination has decreased slightly; and (d) income inequality between capitalists and unskilled workers is still significant; the inequality between professional and unskilled workers is increasing. According to this analysis, social change in NICs such as Taiwan has primarily followed the post-industrial transformation of developed economies during the past two decades.