Abstract:

This study employs the "symbolic boundaries" theory from cultural sociology as its framework. Based on interviews with 20 florists holding bachelor's degrees, it explores how educated youth leverage cultural enchantment to elevate the status of skilled occupations. The research focuses on two core issues: empirically, how highly educated youth transform their professional image through specific practices; and theoretically how skilled professions achieve status elevation with the aid of cultural enchantment. The term "cultural enchantment" as defined in this study does not refer to a profession gaining elevated status due to changes in its intrinsic cultural attributes. Instead, it denotes a scenario where enchantment occurs under new evaluative dimensions created by the reconstruction of symbolic boundaries. The driving mechanism does not stem from the cultural accumulation of the profession itself but arises from updates in the social classification system. The study argues that, distinct from the power determinism and social closure theories associated with traditional professional status, skilled professions characterized by non-standardization—due to the diversity of their operational skills and product evaluation criteria—provide space for innovating evaluation models through the reconstruction of symbolic boundaries, thereby achieving professional status enhancement via cultural enchantment. Specifically, florists reshape the value evaluation system of skilled labor through the reconstruction of symbolic boundaries in three dimensions: the transformation of products into artworks (from floral material transactions to aesthetic creations), the elitization of identity (from flower arrangers to florists), and the theatricalization of scenarios (from shelf-style transactions to professional displays). Ultimately, this enables florists to break away from the traditional trajectory of the blue-collar class and achieve professional status transformation. By revealing the mechanism through which cultural enchantment drives the elevation of professional status, this study offers a new pathway to address the structural employment dilemma caused by the mismatch between youth employment aspirations and existing job supply, and to establish a more diverse professional evaluation model.

Key words: skilled occupations, neo-craft, symbolic boundary, cultural enchantment, occupational status