Among the most dramatic changes to affect China in the 1990s is the upsurge in labour mobility and the emergence of a market-driven system of labour allocation, changes which profoundly affect the working environment and livelihoods of the Chinese people. Papers in this collection draw on a wide variety of data sources to analyse key elements of this transformation.
Street level discretion -- Three pathologies: the indifferent, the enforcer, and the caregiver -- A gymnastics of the self: coping with the everyday pressures of street-level work -- When the rules run out: informal taxonomies and peer-level accountability -- Impossible situations: on the breakdown of moral integrity at the frontlines of public service
Featuring a wide geographical scope, this collection of essays surveys enterprise and welfare reforms in all the remaining four Asian communist states: China, Vietnam, Laos and North Korea. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union they can no longer place major reliance upon assistance from other 'fraternal' states and have to devise their own strategies for survival. All have shown a trend towards greater reliance on market forces, though in different ways and to varying degrees. Enterprise management has to adapt to this. In some of them entrepreneurs have become politically and socially acceptable. They may even begin to set trends for social evolution. Yet since state entreprises used to be responsible for all welfare payments to employees and their families, management reforms cannot be separated from those of welfare arrangements. Reducing an enterprise's non-commerical obligations for the sake of greater market efficiency is bound to affect welfare provision. It also reopens the role of official trade unions. How these regimes cope with these conflicting pressures are vital factors in their long-term viability.
Changing Workplace Relations in the Chinese Economy attempts to deal with how China's economic reforms have undermined the 'iron rice-bowl' system which since the 1950s has provided both 'lifetime-employment' and 'cradle-to-the-grave' welfare for many workers, particularly those in state-owned enterprises. It starts by examining the background of these reforms and how they have changed workplace relations in the Chinese economy; it will also look at key themes relating to the role of trade unions and the management of human resources in both state-owned and joint-venture firms; finally, a number of illustrative case-studies involving industrial relations and human resource management are set out. A set of contributors, drawn from a wide range of disciplines and nationalities who are expert in these fields, have contributed chapters to the volume.
The Routledge Handbook of East Asian Gender Studies presents up-to-date theoretical and conceptual developments in key areas of the field, taking a multi-disciplinary and comparative approach. Featuring contributions by leading scholars of Gender Studies to provide a cutting-edge overview of the field, this handbook includes examples from China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong and covers the following themes: theorising gender relations; women’s and feminist movements; work, care and migration; family and intergenerational relationships; cultural representation; masculinity; and state, militarism and gender. This handbook is essential reading for scholars and students of Gender and Women’s Studies, as well as East Asian societies, social policy and culture.
What can Chinese economists learn from the Japanese economic boom and subsequent stagnation? This project aims to institutionally and empirically investigate the growth mechanism and determinants of sustainable development in China compared with Japanese experiences. This is the first challenge in conducting a comparative study on China and Japan’s economic growth and development. We aim to investigate the economic system transition and its influence on the Chinese and Japanese economy from macroeconomic and microeconomic perspectives. This book will interest economists, scholars of comparative politics, and scholars of China or Japan's economic development.
The book investigates the impact of the market-oriented economic reform in China on a unique aspect of the labor market outcomes — individuals' access to different employment sectors, that is, the state and collective sector, the private sector, and the sector of family contract farming in the 1990s. Using the longitudinal data of China Health and Nutrition Survey, the author finds that the access to different employment sectors is not equally distributed among Chinese workers during the market transition. And the hierarchy of employment sectors is reproduced through the procedure that assorts individual workers to different employment sectors. In addition to achieved characteristics such as human capital, ascribed characteristics such as family background and gender are important factors in understanding the procedure of social stratification in the reform era. The book will be of value to social scientists interested in the market transition of socialist societies in general and the social transformation of contemporary China in particular.
This book breaks new ground by systematically examining China's capitalist transformation through several comparative lenses. The great majority of research on China to date has consisted of single-country studies. This is the result of the methodological demands of studying China and a sense of the country's distinctiveness due to its grand size and long history. The moniker Middle Kingdom, a direct translation of the Chinese-language word for China, is one of the most prominent symbols of the country's supposed uniqueness. Composed of contributions from leading specialists on China's political economy, this volume demonstrates the benefits of systematically comparing China with other countries, including France, Russia, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, India, Brazil, and South Africa. Doing so puts the People's Republic in a light not available through other approaches, and it provides a chance to consider political theories by including an important case too often left out of studies.
This book is a multi-faceted, comprehensive and timely study of the millions of migrants in China, their experiences, and their impacts on the city and the countryside.
After three decades of spectacular economic growth in China, the problem is no longer how to achieve growth, but how to manage its consequences and how to sustain it. The most important consequence, at least as far as Chinese policy makers are concerned, is the rapidly growing inequality, between persons, between rural and urban areas, and between inland and coastal regions. At the same time, the institutions that have brought rapid growth so far are now under stress, and there is a need to reform and innovate on this front in order to sustain rapid growth, and to have growth with equity. The analytical literature has responded to the emerging policy problems by specifying and quantifying their magnitude, understanding their nature, and proposing policy approaches and solutions. Policy makers have also been looking to analysts for interaction and assistance. This volume brings together a collection of the best available analyses of China’s problems in governing rapid growth, focusing on equity and institutions. Contributions include perspectives from leading policy makers who were intimately involved in the reform process, and from leading academics in articles published in top peer reviewed journals.
