Building brokers: how contractors and middling
migrants manage Singapore’s developmental
contradictions

Poh, YH

Oxford Thesis Collection

Thesis

Building brokers: how contractors and middling migrants manage Singapore’s developmental contradictions

Abstract:: This dissertation examines how Singapore’s postcolonial developmental state has produced a multi-layered mediation system that enables state-directed capitalism to function through managed contradictions rather than bureaucratic resolution. Through multi-sited ethnography within Singapore’s construction industry, archival research, and policy analysis, this study reveals how three structuring forces – global capitalism, Singapore’s developmental state apparatus, and racialized citizenship – intersect to create essential intermediary positions that hold together logics the state requires but cannot officially reconcile.

The research identifies two distinct intermediary figures: citizen-contractors who mediate between state development goals and market operations; and “middling migrants”, former migrant workers who mediate between contractors and current migrant labour. Rather than viewing intermediaries as marginal facilitators, the dissertation demonstrates how Singapore’s development model fundamentally depends on these figures’ capacity to navigate between incompatible systems – formal regulations and informal practices, state planning and market flexibility, modernization imperatives and traditional relationships – without fundamentally resolving the tensions between them.

This research contributes to anthropological literature on intermediaries by showing how they function not merely as brokers or fixers but as constitutive elements of state-capitalist assemblages, revealing how political-economic systems manage inherent contradictions by distributing mediating labour across differentiated social positions.

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APA Style

Poh, Y. H. (2025). Building brokers: how contractors and middling migrants manage Singapore’s developmental contradictions [PhD thesis]. University of Oxford.

MLA Style

Poh, YH. Building Brokers: How Contractors and Middling Migrants Manage Singapore’s Developmental Contradictions. 2025. University of Oxford, PhD thesis.

Chicago Style

Poh, YH. 2025. “Building Brokers: How Contractors and Middling Migrants Manage Singapore’s Developmental Contradictions.” PhD thesis, University of Oxford.
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