Guanxi, How China Works
Guanxi, How China Works

Author: Yanjie Bian

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2019-03-04

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 1509500421

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How do social relations, or guanxi, matter in China today and how can this distinctive form of personal connection be better understood? In Guanxi: How China Works, Yanjie Bian analyzes the forms, dynamics, and impacts of guanxi relations in reform-era China, and shows them to be a crucial part of the puzzle of how Chinese society operates. Rich in original studies and insightful analyses, this concise book offers a critical synthesis of guanxi research, including its empirical controversies and theoretical debates. Bian skillfully illustrates the growing importance of guanxi in diverse areas such as personal network building, employment and labor markets, informal business relationships, and the broader political sphere, highlighting guanxi’s central value in China's contemporary social structure. A definitive statement on the topic from a top authority on the sociology of guanxi, this book is an excellent classroom introduction for courses on China, a useful reference for guanxi researchers, and ideal reading for anyone interested in Chinese culture and society.

Social Connections in China
Social Connections in China

Author: Thomas Gold

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2002-09-05

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9780521530316

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This volume assesses the evolving role of guanxi (social networks) in China's transforming society.

The Theory of Guanxi and Chinese Society
The Theory of Guanxi and Chinese Society

Author: Jack Barbalet

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 0198808739

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The concept of guanxi is used extensively in Chinese society. Loosely understood as 'connections' or 'networks', it refers to long-term mutually reinforcing exchanges between individuals based on affective and normative commitments. This book comprehensively examines the nature and background of this extremely significant and distinct feature of Chinese social, political, economic, and business relations. It takes account of the major theoretical frameworks that relate to the long-term connections that are developed to pursue instrumental advantage in a society marked by relatively weak legal and regulatory institutions. The book locates such theorizing in the major features of the rapidly evolving Chinese market society. Yet it also pays attention to the historical origins and cultural sources of a highly particularistic approach to the acquisition of social and material resources -- an approach which relies on obligatory relations of favour exchange between persons who self-consciously and strategically select their associates and goals. This sociological treatment of guanxi challenges many dominant conventions and introduces a novel research approach which captures the pertinent psychological dispositions, cultural expressions, and institutional frameworks that underpin the phenomenon.

Guanxi in Contemporary Chinese Business
Guanxi in Contemporary Chinese Business

Author: Jane Nolan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-12-30

Total Pages: 126

ISBN-13: 1000296407

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Does guanxi still matter in 21st century Chinese business and management? Is it really still a culturally distinct form of social interaction, impenetrable by outsiders? Or does it simply resemble the countless other elite networks embedded in business and political spheres across the globe? This book answers these questions through a combination of new empirical insight and nuanced conceptual development. Research examples include investigations of multinational enterprise corporate performance, governance structures in Chinese private firms, organisational justice in Chinese banks, entrepreneurial learning and knowledge acquisition, and the gendered and sexualized nature of guanxi in the workplace. In terms of firm performance, there is still much to be gained by MNE and Chinese firms through cultivating guanxi in different domains, including the political sphere at both the local and national level. However, in terms of employee performance, there is evidence that some younger employees have a strong desire to move towards more merit-based systems and resent being judged on guanxi connections. Similarly, some women may find themselves shut out when attempting to navigate conventional guanxi relationships based on Confucian paternalism. In brief, these practices may also exclude a large pool of emerging talent. This book clearly shows that guanxi is a complex concept that holds a persistent power in Chinese societies. To understand it fully we must acknowledge the dynamic nature of both its dark and light sides. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of the Asia Pacific Business Review.

Guanxi, Social Capital and School Choice in China
Guanxi, Social Capital and School Choice in China

Author: Ji Ruan

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-11-01

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 3319407546

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This book focuses on the use of guanxi (Chinese personal connections) in everyday urban life: in particular, how and why people develop different types of social capital in their guanxi networks and the role of guanxi in school choice. Guanxi takes on a special significance in Chinese societies, and is widely-discussed and intensely-studied phenomenon today. In recent years in China, the phenomenon of parents using guanxi to acquire school places for their children has been frequently reported by the media, against the background of the Chinese Communist Party’s crackdown on corruption. From a sociological perspective, this book reveals how and why parents manage to do so. Ritual capital refers to an individual's ability to use ritual to benefit and gain resources from guanxi.

Producing Guanxi
Producing Guanxi

Author: Andrew B. Kipnis

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 9780822318736

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Throughout China the formation of guanxi, or social connections, involves friends, families, colleagues, and acquaintances in complex networks of social support and sentimental attachment. Focusing on this process in one rural north China village, Fengjia, Andrew Kipnis shows what guanxi production reveals about the evolution of village political economy, kinship and gender, and local patterns of subjectivity in Dengist China. His work offers a detailed description of the communicative actions--such as gift giving, being a host or guest, participating in weddings or funerals--that produce, manage, and deny guanxi in a specific time and place. Kipnis also offers a rare comparative analysis of how these practices relate to the varied and variable phenomenon of guanxi throughout China and as it has changed over time. Producing Guanxi combines the theory of Pierre Bourdieu and the insights of symbolic anthropology to contest past portrayals of guanxi as either a function of Chinese political economics or an unchanging Confucian social structure. In this analysis guanxi emerges as a purposeful human effort that makes use of past cultural logics while generating new ones. By exploring the role of sentiment in the creation of self, Kipnis critiques recent theories of subjectivity for their narrow focus on language and discourse, and contributes to the anthropological discussion of comparative selfhood. Navigating a path between mainstream social science and abstract social theory, Kipnis presents a more nuanced examination of guanxi than has previously been available and contributes generally to our understanding of relationships and human action.

A Relational Theory of World Politics
A Relational Theory of World Politics

Author: Yaqing Qin

Publisher:

Published: 2018-04-05

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 1107183146

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A reinterpretation of world politics drawing on Chinese cultural and philosophical traditions to argue for a focus on relations amongst actors, rather than on the actors individually.

Guanxi and Business Strategy
Guanxi and Business Strategy

Author: Eike A. Langenberg

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2007-06-10

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 3790819565

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This book examines a topic of paramount importance to those doing business with China: the impact of personal relationships (guanxi) on business affairs. It shows that the commercial utilization of guanxi with suppliers, customers, competitors and authorities yields significant sustainable competitive advantages. Coverage also assesses guanxi-based business strategies in terms of compliance with legal and ethical standards.

Gifts, Favors, and Banquets
Gifts, Favors, and Banquets

Author: Mayfair Mei-Hui Yang

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2016-12-01

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 1501713043

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An elaborate and pervasive set of practices, called guanxi, underlies everyday social relationships in contemporary China. Obtaining and changing job assignments, buying certain foods and consumer items, getting into good hospitals, buying train tickets, obtaining housing, even doing business—all such tasks call for the skillful and strategic giving of gifts and cultivating of obligation, indebtedness, and reciprocity. Mayfair Mei-hui Yang's close scrutiny of this phenomenon serves as a window to view facets of a much broader and more complex cultural, historical, and political formation. Using rich and varied ethnographic examples of guanxi stemming from her fieldwork in China in the 1980s and 1990s, the author shows how this "gift economy" operates in the larger context of the socialist state redistributive economy.

Confucianism and the Chinese Self
Confucianism and the Chinese Self

Author: Jack Barbalet

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-10-05

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 9811062897

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Setting the context for the upheavals and transformations of contemporary China, this text provides a re-assessment of Max Weber’s celebrated sociology of China. Returning to the sources drawn on by Weber in The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism, it offers an informed account of the Chinese institutions discussed and a concise discussion of Weber’s writings on ‘the rise of modern capitalism’. Notably it subjects Weber’s argument to critical scrutiny, arguing that he drew upon sources which infused the central European imagination of the time, constructing a sense of China in Europe, whilst European writers were constructing a particular image of imperial China and its Confucian framework. Re-examining Weber’s discussion of the role of the individual in Confucian thought and the subordination, in China, of the interests of the individual to those of the political community and the ancestral clan, this book offers a cutting edge contribution to the continuing debate on Weber’s RoC in East Asia today, against the background of the rise of modern capitalism in the “little dragons” of Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea, and the “big dragons” of Japan and the People’s Republic of China.