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Table of Content

    20 September 2012, Volume 32 Issue 5
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    Articles
    A Cross Generational Comparison of the Social Cohesion of Migrant Workers in China
    LI Peilin | TIAN Feng
    2012, 32(5):  1-24. 
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    Although China’s urbanization has reached more than 50 percent, this rapid process is still incapable of measuring up with industrialization, leading to a prominent problem of hundreds of millions of migrant workers unable to integrate or merge themselves into the urban society. Based on the data of the Chinese Social Survey conducted by the Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 2011 (CSS,CASS2011), this paper describes the social cohesion of the old and new generations of migrant workers on the economic, social, psychological, and identity dimensions, and analyzes the impact of human capital, social capital, and policy systems on their social cohesion. This study has found that, although there is no fundamental difference in the status of social cohesion across migrant generations, human capital, which affects social cohesion, is more significantly reflected in the migrant workers’ job skills than years of education; policy systems have also an important impact on social cohesion; migrant workers’ social cohesion does not necessarily follow the economicsocialpsychologicalidentity sequence; and the cohesion at the economic level does not guarantee the cohesion at the other levels.

    Class Analysis in Contemporary Sociology: Theoretical Perspectives and Analytical Paradigms
    LI Lulu | CHEN Jianwei | QIN Guangqiang
    2012, 32(5):  25-46. 
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    This paper systematically reviews the literature of class analysis in contemporary sociology and reveals the core of the class analytical perspective and pluralistic analysis paradigms. Firstly, the core of the class analytical perspective is the structural position defined by social relations and it provides systemic structural interpretation of social inequality and the related social phenomena. The essential difference between the class and nonclass perspectives can be summarized as “relational view” vs. “gradational view,” or “categorical models of class” vs. “gradational models of stratification.” Secondly, class analysis contains pluralistic paradigms including 1) macrolevel research objects (accounting for largescale social changes and social transformations) vs. microlevel research objects (accounting for the effects of class on individual attitudes, behaviors and life opportunities); 2) “structureconsciousnessaction” in analytical thinking (class as “collective actor”) vs. “structuresituationchoice”(class as “omnibus signal of life conditions”); and 3) differences in the theoretical origin, research object and analytical thinking leading to three different logics of explanation as follows, “the logic of exploitation and interest formation,” “the logic of situation or logic of rational action” and “the logic of structuration.” Class analysis would be an important conceptual tool to analyze China in transformation. Its pluralistic paradigms and logics of explanation can not only reveal the extent and form of class conflicts in modern China, but also explain the effect of class position on life conditions and social opportunity distribution, and more importantly, it can provide theoretical knowledge and information about the mechanisms for the causal relationship between the class structure and social outcomes.

    The Making of Society and Collective Representation
    CHEN Tao
    2012, 32(5):  47-79. 
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    This paper analyzes Durkheim’s concepts of society and collective representation in order to get an insight of the selfjustification dilemma of modern society. Though Durkheim studied the primitive religion in The Elementary Form of Religious Life, he concerned more about the dilemma of modern society, especially excessive individualism. On one hand, Durkheim inherited the social contract tradition, emphasizing society being a creation of the individuals. Durkheim’s society could be traced back to social theology, different from Milband’s thought that society was created and given by the God. The author argues that Durkheim’s society, a human aritificum, depends more on the individuals. Firstly, the moral force of society grounds in the inner heart of the individuals. Secondly, society depends on individuals’ periodic participation to reproduce it. On the other hand, Durkheim didn’t agree with what the social contract tradition contended, i.e., society generates merely from individuals’ convention. He wanted to argue for society’s primacy and priority. In order to resolve this tension, he introduced the theory of collective representation. Collective representations come from the interaction of the individuals when they participate in the assembly or collective effervescence, and they are so like the production from the reaction of chemical reaction that can’t be reduced to the contracts or conventions among the individuals. So they are the production of the society itself, which are prior to the individuals. Through the totemic forms or symbolic signs, they not only express the individuals’ emotion or affection of the society, but also become the intermediaries of the periodical reproduction of the society. In other words, collective representations not only represent the relationship between the individual and the society, but also create that relationship.Further, the theory of collective representation concerned with Durkheim’s reinterpretation of the French Revolution. He opposed other scholars’ interpretation of the French Revolution as a production of individuals’ free will and reinterpreted it as a periodic reproduction of the society by itself. The sacredness of the collective representation neither depends on the God who is above society, nor grounds on each individual’s will. On the contrary, it is social and results from the periodic reproduction of society.But the author doesn’t think that the theory of collective representation can adequately account for the heritage of the Revolution. Collective effervescences and representations can’t provide a stable and sufficient moral foundation for society to replace the foundation of individualism for modern thought. The sacredness of society has to depend on individuals’ periodic participation, reproduction, and maintenance. However, without defining the essence of happiness and goodness, this artificial sacredness is nothing but an empty form that may be filled with various dogmas and opinions to induce individuals into dangerous worship instead of providing society with a stable foundation. This just reflects the problem of the selfjustification of modern society.

    Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism: Emile Durkheim’s Public Thoughts Dilemma
    HE Jian
    2012, 32(5):  80-101. 
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    In the early modern period, religion and nationalism provided the dominant modes of individual and collective identity. But their status as the basis for political identification and citizenship has been undermined in the globalization era. It is therefore necessary to fully understand Durkheim’s patriotism and cosmopolitanism in his social theory during the competing processes between nationalism and globalization. There are two fundamental subjects in Emile Durkheim’s social thoughts, i.e., “how society is possible” and “how sociology is possible.” These two subjects have been embodied in Durkheim’s lifelong academic pursuit, namely, “to treat the facts of moral life according to the methods of the positive science.” The issues of patriotism and cosmopolitanism arises naturally from the substantial problems such as “individuals and society,” “human nature and social conditions,” etc. A holistic approach to these issues can reveal the social fact of the sacredness of human nature in modern society around which Durkheim found out the foundation of modern social solidarity through dealing with the methodology and the essential issues. Following Durkheim’s social thoughts, it is found that the true outlet for the contradiction between patriotism and cosmopolitanism lies in the intrafocus, not expansionism. It is not entirely a problem of international laws, but is largely the problem of the corporation and the civil state. In other words, it is the problem of professional ethics and civil morals. Obviously, this theoretical tension reflects the genuine purpose of Durkheim’s sociological epistemology, and also, it is closely related to the identity problem of the modern person.

    The Possibility of Friendship: A Mechanism of SelfIdentity and SocialSolidarity
    LUO Chaoming
    2012, 32(5):  102-129. 
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    The traditional supportive mechanisms of selfidentity and socialsolidarity have already lost their immanent charm under the force of modernization. In the context of modernity, the crisis of selfidentity and socialsolidarity has already been an urgent ontological security problem. Exploring the phenomenological construction and the sociological structure of friendship may help us with understanding, on one hand, the selflove basis of friendship, the selfevaluative value and meaning system,and the selfknowledge and selfassurance of intersubjective constructions of friendshipall being the realistic prerequisite for social actors’ obtainment of their selfidentity when they reach consistency with the self; on the other hand, the communion, the alterego intentional attitude, the actional selfdiscipline and moral selfconsciousness between friendsbeing an effective mechanism for social actors’ attainment of their socialsolidarity when they achieve consistency with the Other. However, the intensified rationality of instrumentation, the domination of the capital logic and the selfalienation of human behavior itself have degraded friendship building to a personal business in the private realm. The author holds that modern friendship needs to restore its important mechanism for selfidentity and socialsolidarity to set human mind onto its second voyage to free itself and to promote political and collective efforts to better the ethics in the sociality quality of friendship.

    Income Inequality and Individual Health: An Empirical Analysis of the 2005 Chinese General Social Survey
    ZHOU Bin | QI Yaqiang
    2012, 32(5):  130-150. 
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    Health is not only one of the ultimate goals of human development, but also a key element of human capital. Health plays significant roles in determining individual’s life quality and facilitating social development. With the general improvement of people’s living standards in the past several decades in China, health issues have attracted more and more attention from social researchers and policy makers. Although China has sustained rapid economic growth in recent years, the problem of social inequality has aggravated and the income gap between the rich and the poor has widened substantially. To date, empirical investigation of the impact of income inequality on health in China is still very limited. In contrast, more and more studies in other countries since the 1970’s have suggested that income inequality is negatively associated with population health at the aggregate level. Two competing hypotheses have been proposed to explain the relationship between income inequality and population health. One is the absolute income hypothesis, which claims that the aggregate relationship between income inequality and population health is an instance of ecological fallacy and that it simply reflects the nonlinear effect of individual income on health; the other is the income inequality hypothesis, which insists that income inequality have a genuine, detrimental effect on individual health, proposing psychosocial and neomaterialist mechanisms for the harm of income inequality to individual health. In this study, drawing data from the 2005 Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS2005) and countylevel social statistics, we examined the relationships between individual income, county income inequality and individual health in China, and systematically tested the absolute income hypothesis and the income inequality hypothesis empirically. Although the results showed the existence of marginally diminishing returns in the effects of income on health, the urbantorural income ratio at the county level was still negatively associated with individual selfrated general health even after controlling for the concave effect of the absolute income on health. This finding empirically supported the income inequality hypothesis, evidencing that income inequality did pollute individual health independently. We further explored the potential mechanisms through which income inequality affected individual health, and tested the explanatory power of the social psychological mechanism and the neomaterialist mechanism, respectively. The results gave some support to the former in partially accounting for the negative association of income inequality to individual health but not for the latter.

    Efficiency Logic or Power Logic： Corporate Politics and CEO Dismissal in China
    YANG Dian
    2012, 32(5):  151-178. 
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     Based on the panel data of 676 Chinese publiclytraded companies in the period of 1997-2007 and the qualitative data of the indepth interviews of CEOs, Chairpersons of boards of trustees, independent trustees, fund managers and government officials, this paper analyzes the factors and mechanisms that influence the decisions of dismissing CEOs in China. At the theoretical level, the new institutional perspective on corporate governance and its method are adopted. With CEO dismissal being viewed as a socialpolitical process, the respective roles of the board of trustees (the chairperson and independent trustees), the controlling shareholders, the capital market, and the state in the corporate politics of dismissing CEOs are analyzed in depth. A CEO dismissal pattern that is remarkably different from the predictions of the agency theory and the Western experience has been found in the Chinese context: Having the two separate positions of CEO and chairperson of the board of trustees does not significantly affect the impact of its CEO dismissal on a firm’s performance. Even worse, appointing independent trustees on the board has led to unintended negative outcomes—instead of reinforcing, this has actually weakened the role of the board of trustees in monitoring and disciplining the CEO’s executive functions. Further analysis has nevertheless shown that the controlling shareholders have been quite effective in monitoring and disciplining the Chinese CEOs, and that the capital market has also significantly enhanced the sensitivity of CEO dismissals on the performance of their firms, raising the probability of underachieved CEOs to be dismissed when firm performance suffers. These findings suggest that CEO dismissal is not only an economic process subject to the efficiency logic but also a socialpolitical process subject to the power logic. The author argues that the prevalence of the power logic over the efficiency logic in organizations might be the fundamental reason for the impedance of the reform of corporate governance and other organizational and institutional changes in China, making the reform and new system remaining at the superficial level only.

    The Primitive Resistance in Group Events: A Resistant Case Against the Environment in Village Hai, Eastern Zhejiang Province
    LI Chenlu | ZHAO Xudong
    2012, 32(5):  179-193. 
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     As the resistance of farmers becomes increasingly complex, the research on the organization and politics of farmers’ protests for their rights goes more in depth. To be realistic, this approach is necessary. However, as resistance is a process, the form prior to a complex protest is usually primitive, simple, and selfgenerated. This primitive resistance is defined as “resistance in the early stage which lacks careful planning or organization and is spontaneously initiated by farmers with their own volition.” Being “primitive” is relative to being “complex,” it has its own unique fighting ethics. This resistance form has its roots in the farmers’ experiential cognition and is out of their instinct for selfdefense. It is recognized as an effective way to solve problems, focusing more on their own “reason” rather than “legitimacy.”This paper takes a protest in Village Hai, Eastern Zhejiang province, as an example to describe the sea villagers’ initial stage of their protest against the environment during which the farmers spontaneously used resisting forms such as road blocking, verbal abuse, smashing, and worship as their own way to protect themselves. These forms of resistance were somewhat effective in that they had sent the chemical factory warnings, expressed their demands, and showed their own way of thinking and acting. As a behavioral expression, the villagers protected themselves by the most direct way, effective even not so organized. If handled improperly, the event might have evolved into an intense mass struggle, becoming a factor of social unrest. As a psychological expression, the villagers’ primitive resistance was backed up by the value system naturally formed in the village society by the villagers who had avoided disasters and reconstructed their action knowledge with their past experiences. Utilization of the primitive resistance included protest, maintenance, and rethinking.

    Dispersive Containment: A Comparative Case Study of Labor Politics in China
    CHENG Xiuying
    2012, 32(5):  194-218. 
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     Why have the radical labor unrests in China been gradually pacified by the state instead of getting sustained and expanded? This paper tries to answer this question by comparing two groups of workersstate workers vs. temporary workers with a focus on the concrete processes and mechanisms of these workers’ struggles to explore how they varied different struggle strategies including street protests, collective petitions, and court arbitrations to interact with the state agents. The study discovered that the two types of workers had obtained different symbolic rewards instead of material concessions. Their major difference in the form to get satisfaction resulted from the state agents’ differentiated strategic responses to the different social positions and historical trajectories of the two types of workers. Unlike the classical “fragmentation” argument which attributes the working class’s inaction to its internal divisions, the argument in my paper about the “dispersive containment” focuses on the interaction between the differentiated workers and the local state agents, during which the workers lost their initial challenging momentum and gradually yielded to the state’s peaceful taming so that they didn’t get their class identity that could have been possible through their struggles.