Table of Content

01 January 2019, Volume 5 Issue 1

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Network fields, cultural identities and labor rights communities: Big data analytics with topic model and community detection

Ronggui Huang

2019, 5(1):  3-28.  doi:10.1177/2057150X18820500

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The Weibo platform is a social space for interaction and expression. This requires scholars to examine, in a simultaneous fashion, communication patterns and the communicated content among Weibo users. Based on theories of 'network and culture' and relational sociology, this article contends that network fields and the communicated cultural meanings are mutually constituted. A latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic model and social network analysis techniques were used to examine 51,288 Weibo posts published by users concerned for workers revealing the relationship between community structures and communities' focal topics. Specifically, the result of LDA topic modeling shows that the focal topics regarding labor issues could be categorized into four groups: workers' culture (art and entertainment) and welfare; predicaments and problems; strikes (rights defending actions) and labor organizations; and institutions and labor rights. Analysis of interaction patterns among users resulted in the identification of five major online communities which, based on the primary communicated topics within communities, were labeled as the Labor Homeland Community; Labor Culture Community; Labor Rights Protection Community; Labor Interest Concerned Community; and Labor Institution Concerned Community. The results also showed two new trends in relation to labor issues: first, workers' culture and their integration into urban life have garnered increasing online attention with the growth of new generation workers; and second, the Weibo platform provides an interaction channel for labor researchers and labor non-governmental organizations, and such interaction facilitates the latter to critically reflect the current conditions or plights of workers from an institutional/structural perspective. This article concludes with a discussion about the significance of utilizing big data analytics to study online culture and social mentality.

State control and doctors' abuse of clinical autonomy: An empirical analysis of doctors' clinical practice in Chinese public hospitals

Zelin Yao

2019, 5(1):  29-56.  doi:10.1177/2057150X18819999

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Medical doctors enjoy a high degree of professional autonomy because they own and apply professional knowledge in helping patients. Therefore, laymen are unable to evaluate doctors' clinical practices. For this reason, how to exert effective social control over doctors' work has been a significant question in the sociology of professions. Based on fieldwork in Beijing, government statistics, and others' research findings, this paper analyzes the working conditions and clinical practices of Chinese urban doctors. I find that medical professionals are still dependent upon public hospitals that continue dominating the healthcare delivery system, and thus they lack corporate autonomy and are incapable of negotiating working arrangements, payment for their services and their incomes with the state. This condition generates a distortion in doctors' labor value. However, also because of the domination of the healthcare delivery system, public hospitals and their doctors have gained 'dual dominance' over both patients and pharmaceutical enterprises, by which doctors transform their rights of prescription into economic benefits. This informal income, including hongbao (red envelopes containing money) and kickbacks, compensates for doctors' relatively low formal incomes resulting from the state's control. However, doctors abuse clinical autonomy constantly and pervasively, by which they transform their monopolies of medical expertise into economic benefits. This also means that the regulation and supervision of health administration is unsuccessful, as is the profession's self-regulation. Hence, this paper suggests that if the medical profession can effectively participate in health policy-making, medical professionals be given the right of free practice, and non-public medical institutions given the same status and policy treatments as public hospitals, these problems in the current healthcare system will be relieved or solved.

Have party premiums disappeared in post-2000 China? The influence of negative ability bias from position conditioning

Ling Zhu and Tony Tam

2019, 5(1):  57-79.  doi:10.1177/2057150X18817245

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Communist Party membership is often associated with higher incomes in socialist regimes because it is an important credential for obtaining state-sector jobs and cadre positions. During the first two decades of marketization in China, the income returns to Communist Party membership (the party premium) clearly persisted. However, recent studies have documented an insignificant party premium in post-2000 China. Considering the persistent role of the state in resource allocation, this phenomenon is puzzling and lacks clear interpretation. Drawing on the knowledge of collider conditioning, we hypothesize that this phenomenon stems from a negative ability bias generated by conditioning on endogenous job positions. Using the China General Social Survey 2008, we re-examine the post-2000 party premiums. The results support this hypothesis and demonstrate that this negative ability bias overwhelms the usual positive ability bias and any residual party premiums. Party premiums persist after 2000 and are reflected in positions where the negative ability bias is less influential.

Constructing the idea of organization: Thought self-checks and the organizational review of cadres (1952-1960)

Jing Zhang

2019, 5(1):  80-98.  doi:10.1177/2057150X18803581

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This paper explores the history of state power construction, focusing on the period of regime change and how the state constructed a new governance structure, according to the ideological examinations, work reports, year-end summaries, and organization and examination reports of some cadres in the 1950s. The focus of the article is an attempt to understand how the state constructed a new governance structure during this period of regime change. This paper shows the state used its unique organizational power to carry out a series of administrative activities for cadres and groups: cadres took turns laboring, carrying out self-thinking clean-ups, and organizing the group to exchange learning activities and to implement and systematically organize the trial and handling procedures, the trial of the cadres of the ideological performance of the classification, the formation of written records, and the establishment of a new assessment approach to cadre behavior to institutionalize the organization of personnel work. These processes laid the foundations for the initial institutionalization of the cadre selection and management system, followed by the development of principles that have been consolidated and refined. The obvious effect of this process was that the new behavior requirements and employment standards became widely practiced by urban cadres, the new standards were used to shape the cadres' own concerns and work ethics, and the cadres and new organizations were gradually constructed. These activities not only established organizational governance authority, but have also had a far-reaching influence on the behavior of cadres and their overall characteristics in terms of expression.

Genesis and undertaker of 'quantification of social class': On the technocrats in the early stage of the Chinese Communist Party's land revolution

Qingyan Meng

2019, 5(1):  99-138.  doi:10.1177/2057150X18811798

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The Land Survey Movement (chatian yundong) led by the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 1933 incorporated, for the first time, quantified measurements into land reform. This became an established practice in the newly liberated areas after 1946 as well as in the nationwide land reform after the 1949 Liberation. The existing research on land reform has paid little attention to this important quantification method used to define rural social classes. Even those who did pay attention were mostly interested in the policy side of the practice. This study focuses on the architect of this quantification method—Wang Guanlan. Through historical archives, memoirs, and journal articles and documents, Wang's personal background, his education, and his involvement in the communist revolution are thoroughly examined to reach an accurate understanding of the person and the practice he was responsible for. In so doing, we gain some insights into the 'technocrats' in the CPC during that period and their pragmatism, the way in which the CPC turned a theoretical and ideological concept of 'class' into an applicable measurement to define rural classes, and the limitations associated with such a practice.