Articles

Technology upgrading and labor degrading? A sociological study of three robotized factories

In recent years, the technology-driven industrial upgrading in China has resulted in human labor being replaced with robots. This article explores the impact of "intelligent manufacturing" on workers from the ...

Authors: Yi Xu and Xin Ye

Cadre parents and their entrepreneur children? The dual-track intergenerational reproduction of elites in China: 1978–2010

This article documents and conceptualizes a mode of reproduction of elites in a society in transition from state domination to market orientation. By focusing on China’ marketization, we explore how parents’ a...

Authors: Peng Lu and Xiaoguang Fan

Childhood health and social class reproduction in China

In previous studies on social stratification and mobility in China, education is considered as the core mediatory factor in social reproduction and mobility. This paper, however, investigates how childhood hea...

Authors: Yanbi Hong and Jingming Liu

Social prediction: a new research paradigm based on machine learning

Sociology is a science concerned with both the interpretive understanding of social action and the corresponding causal explanation, process, and result. A causal explanation should be the foundation of predic...

Authors: Yunsong Chen, Xiaogang Wu, Anning Hu, Guangye He and Guodong Ju

Does preschool attendance affect the urban-rural cognition gap among middle school students? Evidence from China Education Panel Survey

Cognitive abilities have a great impact on individuals’ socioeconomic status. Among the factors that affect cognitive ability, early childhood development and preschool education are vital. However, evidence o...

Authors: Lei Zheng, Qiuyi Weng and Xin Gong

Institutional inertia, local leadership turnover, and changes in the structure of fiscal expenditure

Taking the perspective of local party and government leadership change and using L-kurtosis to analyze provincial panel data in China from 1996 to 2018, this article identifies the structural change pattern of...

Authors: Dongmin Yao, Yongyi Zhu and Kai Yu

The reproduction of working class? Social mobility and the stratification of parenting practice in urban Chinese families

Parenting practice, an embodied cultural capital, is class based. The findings of this study showed that in urban Chinese families, the middle class was inclined to adopt the practice of concerted cultivation ...

Authors: Felicia F. Tian and Yongchao Jing

Introduction: On Post-Western Sociology

Authors: Laurence Roulleau-Berger

The fabric of Post-Western sociology: ecologies of knowledge beyond the “East” and the “West”

For several centuries, the history of the West has merged with the history of the world. The global economy of knowledge is structured around epistemic inequalities, hegemonies, and dominations. A clear divisi...

Authors: Laurence Roulleau-Berger

Two epochal turns of inequality, their significance, and their dynamics

At the end of the twentieth century, two historical turns of economic inequality happened. Among the developed countries of the Global North, the secular trend of decreasing intra-national inequality turned in...

Authors: Göran Therborn

Sociology of ritual and narrative as post-Western sociology: from the perspective of Confucianism and Nativism in the Edo period of Japan

Modern sciences were introduced to Japan from Western countries during the Meiji period. In other words, this was the process of translating Western academic languages into Japanese academic languages. The tra...

Authors: Yoshiyuki Yama

Discipline and distinction in the age of the Internet: a sociological study of the fitness practice

This article examines popular fitness sports and home fitness software in China. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s theory of discipline, Norbert Elias’ study on civilization, and Jean Baudrillard’s study on the con...

Authors: Jun Tang and Zilong Xie

Introduction to thematic series “new sociological perspectives on inequality”

Authors: Mike Savage and Chunling Li

Post-Western sociologies: what and why?

“Post-Western sociologies” mainly refer to some sociological systems constructed by non-Western and Western sociologists, after the so-called “Western sociologies” have been spread to the non-Western world. It...

Authors: Lizhong Xie

Rewealthization in twenty-first century Western countries: the defining trend of the socioeconomic squeeze of the middle class

The wealth-to-income ratio (WIR) in many Western countries, particularly in Europe and North America, increased by a factor of two in the last three decades. This represents a defining empirical trend: a rewe...

Authors: Louis Chauvel, Eyal Bar Haim, Anne Hartung and Emily Murphy

Back to the past: gains and losses in Brazilian society

During the first 15 years of the twenty-first century, Brazil’s economic growth and public policies were in the center of the debate on the growing “new middle class.” This new middle class is defined by peopl...

Authors: Celi Scalon, André Junqueira Caetano, Hugo Chaves and Luana Costa

The nationalist-indigenous and colonial modernity: an assessment of two sociologists in India

This paper analyzes the work of two Indian sociologists who defined the contours of sociology in India in the immediate post-independence decades, M. N. Srinivas and A. R. Desai. It argues that their scholarsh...

Authors: Sujata Patel

History matters: the long-term impact of historical immigrant size on current xenophobia in Japan

Many studies have addressed how current immigrant size affects the strength of xenophobia from the perspectives of intergroup contact and ethnic competition theories. Can native residents’ current xenophobia b...

Authors: Shun Gong and Senhu Wang

Is guanxi unfair? Market reform and the public attitude toward guanxi in urban China

Guanxi is a fundamental, but controversial, feature of Chinese society. This article examines public attitudes about the fairness of guanxi and how Chinese market reform is affecting these attitudes. The reciproc...

Authors: Felicia F. Tian

The politics of the excluded: abjection and reconciliation amongst the British precariat

In this paper, we use a powerful empirical resource to address what the popular politics of disadvantage might entail in contemporary Britain. We take advantage of the unusually rich qualitative data from the ...

Authors: Mike Savage and Cynthia Meersohn Schmidt

Intergenerational effects on individual charitable donation: an innovative study on philanthropy in China

The family, which is the basic unit of Chinese society, serves as the micro foundation of individual charitable behavior. This study examines the intergenerational effects on individual charitable donations in...

Authors: Yongjiao Yang, Yuting Shi and Dong Zhang

Moral diversification and moral agency: contesting business ethics among Chinese e-commerce traders

Scholarship on morality in contemporary Chinese society is divided. Some studies concur with the public discourse that a moral crisis is occurring. Others argue that there has been a continuity or revival of m...

Authors: Linliang Qian

Doing Post-Western sociology in Central and Eastern Europe before and after the Great Change: some epistemological questions

Analyzing the sociology in Central and Eastern Europe before and after the Great Change in 1989, the article aims to present the main epistemological questions that Post-Western sociology raises for the discip...

Authors: Svetla Koleva

Social origin and educational attainment in China: a historical analysis of 70 birth cohorts

The impact of social origin on educational attainment is conditioned on the social context in which people live. In recent decades, with changes in the Chinese society, how has the impact of social origin on e...

Authors: Changchun Fang and Xiaotian Feng

Children of the reform and opening-up: China’s new generation and new era of development

China’s new generation, born during the 1980s and 1990s, is a social cohort that has grown up in the era of reform and opening-up. They are simultaneously influenced by and play a critical role in a series of ...

Authors: Chunling Li

A new approach to social inequality: inequality of income and wealth in South Korea

This paper attempts to provide a new approach to social inequality, focusing on income and wealth inequality and the relationship between income inequality and wealth inequality. With an analysis of the data l...

Authors: Kwang-Yeong Shin

Housing wealth inequality in urban China: the transition from welfare allocation to market differentiation

The differentiation of housing assets is an important embodiment of wealth inequality and is also an important dimension of social stratification. The housing distribution in China has experienced a transition...

Authors: Chunling Li and Yiming Fan

Endurance, identity, and temporality: the ethnic labor market and labor process of Chinese migrant workers in France

Workers in France enjoy strong legal protections of their rights, and they have developed organizational support through unions. However, Chinese immigrant workers suffer from adverse working conditions and ex...

Authors: Juan Du

Occupational status, working conditions, and health: evidence from the 2012 China Labor Force Dynamics Survey

This study investigates the relationship between occupational status and health inequality in the working population by analyzing data from the 2012 China Labor Force Dynamics Survey. The results show that ind...

Authors: Yaqiang Qi, Tongxin Liang and Hua Ye

Another way of “amusing ourselves to death”? Experience, ideological fantasy, and labor control in variety entertainment production

Compared with traditional industries, new changes have taken place in the labor process and manufacturing consent in cultural and creative industries. In entertainment labor, managers transform high-intensity ...

Authors: Wenjuan Jia and Kaiou Zhong

Gender role attitudes and male-female income differences in China

By investigating deep-rooted cultural norms, this paper explores whether and how traditional gender role attitudes impact income gaps between men and women and identifies causal effects via instrumental variab...

Authors: Shisong Qing

Early life adversity and health inequality: a dual interaction model

This article examines the impact of early life adversity on health inequality from a life course perspective. We develop a dual interaction model that considers how both the frequency as well as the duration o...

Authors: Zhilei Shi and Cary Wu

Socio-economic inequalities in modern Russia and their perception by the population

This paper focuses on the objective situation regarding inequalities and their subjective perception by the population in Russia in recent years. It is shown that socio-economic inequalities are currently perc...

Authors: Svetlana Mareeva

“Mixed” subjective class identity: a new interpretation of Chinese class identity

This article investigates factors influencing the subjective class identity of Chinese people and the bias of this identity using data from the Chinese General Social Survey in 2010 and 2013. In contrast with ...

Authors: Qi Xu

Why workers’ turnover is so high: managed flexibility and the intermediary chain of China’s migrant labor market

Looking at how the global factories organize and control their labor forces sustainably and effectively, a considerable number of studies have focused on the politics of production but have seldom discussed th...

Authors: Zixi Liu and Jianghuafeng Zhu

School of golden touch? A study of school effectiveness in improving student academic performance

This paper explores whether different schools exhibit varying levels of effectiveness in improving student academic performance and, if so, which factors might affect school effectiveness. Using data from the ...

Authors: Guihua Xie and Yangyang Zhang

Cultural reproduction or cultural mobility? Unequal education achievement among Chinese college students

This article investigates the influence of family class background on college students’ education achievement by using the Beijing College Students Panel Survey. Statistical analyses show that elite class offs...

Authors: Bin Zhu

Investigating the longitudinal interrelationship between housework time and market earnings: disentangling between-person from within-person effects

The work-to-family hypothesis and the family-to-work hypothesis provide alternate explanations for the housework-earnings relationship. This study examines these competing theoretical perspectives and explores...

Authors: Meng Sha Luo and Ernest Chui

Class structure and income inequality in transitional China

Integrating Kornai’s concept of coordination mechanism and Weber’s types of domination, the author argues that, based on the different property rights embedded within the state power structure, bureaucratic an...

Authors: Xin Liu

Market disputes and government intervention: an explanatory framework of risk transformation

This article examines the government intervention in market governance, that is, why a local government that claims to be a rule maker or market regulator would intervene deeply in transaction disputes between...

Authors: Jinglin Xiang

Duration matters: peer effects on academic achievement with random assignment in the Chinese context

This paper goes beyond the most popular perspective of family social capital among existing research and examines the effect of peer social capital on adolescent academic achievement. Using the official data f...

Authors: Cheng Cheng

Educating the new Chinese middle-class youth: the role of quality education on ideas of class and status

This article attempts to answer the questions: “Why is quality education so important for the new Chinese middle class and what implications does quality education have on ideas of status and social standing?”...

Authors: Arianna Ponzini

Status constraint and lifestyle transition: a latent class analysis of health-related lifestyles among different social strata in China

The present study uses data from the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) to develop a multidimensional measure for the healthiness of Chinese citizens’ lifestyles. A latent class analysis reveals variety in C...

Authors: Fuqin Wang

Inequality of healthy life expectancy for the Chinese elderly and its trend

In this study, we use long-term follow-up survey data to explore the inequality of the healthy life expectancy among the elderly and the trends of such expectancy among different birth cohorts and at different...

Authors: Kaishan Jiao

Why technology adoption succeeds or fails: an exploration from the perspective of intra-organizational legitimacy

This paper constructs an intra-organizational legitimacy analysis framework to reveal the conditional mechanisms of technology adoption at the organization level. A retrospective look on a 9-year application p...

Authors: Min Ren

Correction to: Precarious work and labor market segmentation: a comparative study on mainland China and Hong Kong

In the original publication of this article (Li 2019), there is an error in the last paragraph of the “Precarious work and labor market segmentation” section.

Authors: Jun Li

Consequences of social mobility on social relationships: a case study of successful rural migrants in Beijing

The impact of social mobility on social relationships is a neglected area of mobility studies in China. Drawing on intensive interviews with 30 migrant families in Beijing, this research aims to investigate th...

Authors: Na Liu

Organizational imprinting and the welfare practice of Chinese state-owned enterprises

Drawing on a survey of randomly selected firms from 12 representative Chinese cities, we analyze the differences between Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and non-SOEs in their organizational welfare prac...

Authors: Yi Han and Enying Zheng

Precarious work and labor market segmentation: a comparative study on mainland China and Hong Kong

The world-wide growth of precarious work has created a new type of labor market segmentation and calls for cross-society comparison study. Mainland China and Hong Kong facilitate such a comparison, since the t...

Authors: Jun Li

Loneliness in the elderly in Mexico, challenges to the public policies

The National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (CONEVAL 2018) reports that 7.8% of the population in Mexico is 65 years old or older. Approximately 41.1% of this population lives in pover...

Authors: María Montero-López Lena, Diego Luna-Bazaldúa and Laura Ann Shneidman