{"title":"Two tales of platform regimes in China's food-delivery platform economy.","authors":"Haitao Wei, Luyang Zhang, Peipei Deng, Guohui Li","doi":"10.1186/s40711-022-00170-5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1186/s40711-022-00170-5","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article brings the often-overlooked concept of the labor regime back to the study of China's food-delivery platform workers. Two tales of platform regimes emerge: individualized platform despotism and bureaucratized platform despotism, which apply to crowdsourcing couriers and dedicated delivery couriers, respectively. This study compares these two types of platform regimes in terms of their institutional foundation and labor organization. Despite different institutional arrangements and labor organization, both types of food-delivery couriers belong to a despotic platform regime revealing workers' subordination to the platform. In conclusion, it discusses the implications and limitations of this study.</p>","PeriodicalId":52168,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Sociology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9340696/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"40688065","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"<i>Guanxi</i> in an age of digitalization: toward assortation and value homophily in new tie-formation.","authors":"Anson Au","doi":"10.1186/s40711-022-00165-2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1186/s40711-022-00165-2","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>How do people form personal ties? A consensus holds in sociological and social network scholarship that in-person networks are dominated by status homophily and that <i>guanxi</i> networks rely extensively on balance. This article argues that social networking sites (SNSs) reconceptualize the character of homophily and tie-formation altogether in <i>guanxi</i> networks. Drawing on 50 semi-structured interviews with Hong Kong youth from 2017 to 2020, this article examines how the technical capabilities of SNSs and principles of <i>guanxi</i> culture come together to erode status boundaries, create access to larger networks, and cause spillovers of information and tie strength. As a result, the basis of tie-formation in <i>guanxi</i> networks on SNSs shifts from balance to assortation and status homophily to value homophily. In this transformed calculus of tie-formation, two typologies of values rise to the fore: substantive values that reflect opinions and interests, as well as structural values that reflect networkability.</p>","PeriodicalId":52168,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Sociology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9286725/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"40618991","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The fabric of Post-Western sociology: ecologies of knowledge beyond the \"East\" and the \"West\".","authors":"Laurence Roulleau-Berger","doi":"10.1186/s40711-021-00144-z","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1186/s40711-021-00144-z","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>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 division of scientific practices has developed among academic \"peripheries,\" \"semi-peripheries,\" and \"core.\" The question of epistemic injustice, which includes the indigenization of knowledge, was posed very early in the twentieth century in China, Japan, and Korea without being linked to coloniality, which was the case in Indian sociology. Based on the production of an epistemology shared with Chinese sociologists, we proposed a Post-Western sociology to enable a dialogue-on a level footing-addressing common concepts. This sociology also addresses concepts situated in European and Asian theories that consider the modes of creating continuities and discontinuities as well as the conjunctions and disjunctions between the knowledge spaces situated in different social contexts. We aim to fill the gaps between these social contexts. We will describe an ecology of knowledge in the <i>Western</i>-<i>West</i>, <i>the non</i>-<i>Western</i>-<i>West</i>, <i>the semi</i>-<i>Western West</i>, <i>the Western East</i>, <i>the Eastern East</i>, and <i>the re</i>-<i>Easternized East</i> situated on an epistemological continuum. While Chinese sociology has constantly oscillated between indigenization and universalism, and while epistemic autonomies are diverse, Chinese sociologists agree that Western sociologies should not be considered hostile to Chinese sociology. We will offer a definition of Post-Western sociology and demonstrate how it can be theoretically and methodologically applied. We will then identify some transnational theories, theoretical discontinuities and continuities, and common knowledge situated in Western and non-Western contexts.</p>","PeriodicalId":52168,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Sociology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1186/s40711-021-00144-z","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"40587969","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Louis Chauvel, Eyal Bar Haim, Anne Hartung, Emily Murphy
{"title":"Rewealthization in twenty-first century Western countries: the defining trend of the socioeconomic squeeze of the middle class.","authors":"Louis Chauvel, Eyal Bar Haim, Anne Hartung, Emily Murphy","doi":"10.1186/s40711-020-00135-6","DOIUrl":"10.1186/s40711-020-00135-6","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>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 rewealthization (from the French <i>repatrimonialisation)</i>-or the comeback of (inherited) wealth primacy since the mid-1990s. For the sociology of social stratification, \"occupational classes\" based on jobs worked must now be understood within a context of wealth-based domination. This paper first illustrates important empirical features of an era of rising WIR. We then outline the theory of rewealthization as a major factor of class transformations in relation to regimes stabilized in the post-WWII industrial area. Compared to the period where wealth became secondary to education and earnings for middle-class lifestyles, rewealthization steepens society's vertical structure; the \"olive-shaped\" Western society is replaced by a new one where wealth \"abundance\" at the top masks social reproduction and frustrations below.</p><p><strong>Supplementary information: </strong>The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s40711-020-00135-6.</p>","PeriodicalId":52168,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Sociology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7797273/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"40587972","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction to thematic series \"new sociological perspectives on inequality\".","authors":"Mike Savage, Chunling Li","doi":"10.1186/s40711-021-00145-y","DOIUrl":"10.1186/s40711-021-00145-y","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52168,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Sociology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7886843/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"40587971","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Two epochal turns of inequality, their significance, and their dynamics.","authors":"Göran Therborn","doi":"10.1186/s40711-021-00143-0","DOIUrl":"10.1186/s40711-021-00143-0","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>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 into its opposite. At about the same time, the long period of global inequality began to bend down, among households as well as among nations, a turn less noticed but more significant than the reduction of extreme poverty in the South. The foundation of the former turn was the beginning of de-industrialization in the North, and the coming of a post-industrial society, very different from the one predicted. The paper analyzes the trigger of the turn and the central dynamics of the new inequality in the rich North, financialization, and the digital revolution. It then tries to answer two questions about the global turn: Was the decline of global inequality causally connected to the increase of Northern intra-national inequality? Will there be a development of industrial societies in the South? The answer to both is no. What lies ahead is more likely a global convergence of intra-national unequalization, albeit with both different and similar dynamics, as the decline of extreme poverty in the South is leading to inequality increases comparable to those of the North. Post-industrialism has no egalitarian dialectic like that of industrial capitalism, but the dynamics of the twenty-first century inequality are likely to be confronted not only with popular protest movements but also with an emergent scholarly and intellectual Egalitarian Enlightenment.</p>","PeriodicalId":52168,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Chinese Sociology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1186/s40711-021-00143-0","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"40587970","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}