Table of Content

20 January 2014, Volume 34 Issue 1

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Articles

The Essence of Trust and Its Culture

ZHAI Xuewei

2014, 34(1):  1-26. 

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With more attention to the study of trust, interpreting trust in different disciplines and sciences is becoming increasingly complex, so is the controversy about it. One of the most concerned issues is the tendency of researchers to divide trust into two kinds: special trust and universal trust. The advantage of such a division is for classification so that institutions and relations, and cultures and cultural differences can be conducted empirically. However, this paper contends otherwise. The author returns to common sense and cultural backgrounds to discuss trust, suggesting that trust can be divided into trust without or with constraint mechanisms based on its expressed characteristics. Such classification can reveal cultural differences in the expression of trust which may lead to trust zone shifting in social practices. In the Chinese culture, trust is formed in the intermediate zone when suspiciousness rises in social interaction. According to the degree of suspiciousness, the trust zone can be further subdivided into ease relations, trust relations, and notrust relations. These features are evidenced in Confucian discourses and the characteristics of Chinese human relations. The author holds that this classification originates in the structural biases of trust relations coming from the assumptions of human nature and its social dependence in the Chinese and Western cultures: the former is biased toward the socialnetwork control and the latter towards institutional constraints. But in either way, the essence of trust is spacetime maintenance of the object upon whom one is dependent when social members are facing heightened social uncertainty and complexity. If this comparative research framework is used to reprocess previous studies on China’s social trust controversy and perplex, including particularism and universalism, more reasonable explanations could be found for many aspects.

On the Generation of Power of the Powerless：Taking a Social Movement in Hong Kong as a Case

XIA Xunxiang, CHEN Jianmin

2014, 34(1):  27-51. 

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By definition, power is relational, so studies of power should concern with the object of power, i.e., the powerless people. In practice, power is characterized as a process, meaning that it is a process in which power structure is keeping changing. So, these two properties make legitimacy an inherent demand of power. According to known research, we think that power is generative, i.e., to obtain power is a dynamic process in which power can be generative and accumulative. From the perspective of the powerless, the powerless can take effective actions to generate “power of the powerless”. Because of the appropriation of their buildings by the government, residents in Leetung Street have launched a social movement that has sustained the longest duration of protest, elicited the largest reaction, and demonstrated the strongest influence among social movement in recent Hong Kong history. As an organization of the powerless, H15 Concern Group has gathered and mobilized diverse action takers and networks to engage in civil, constructive protest. It has become a highly influential social organization, demonstrating that ordinary people can be a powerful force of production in city planning and renewing. In response, the government has also made some efforts and improvements in the administration and governance ideas. This movement has demonstrated that ordinary people are able to produce “power of the powerless”. The process of power’s generation and growth can, to some extent, change the original structure of power relationship in certain contexts and result in social changes. The analysis of the key elements of power generation and the demonstration of this process in Hong Kong reexplain the concept of power, and are helpful for us to understand and improve the public politics in the cities of mainland China.

From the Marginal to the Mainstream: Collective Action Frames and Cultural Context

XIA Ying

2014, 34(1):  52-74. 

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How do cultural contexts affect the formation and development of mobilizing frames in collective actions? Will a successful mobilizing frame have an impact on the cultural contexts? This paper tries to answer these questions. To understand the specific mechanisms of cultural contextual influences on the designation and adjustment of mobilizing frames, the “AntiXRL” movement in Hong Kong was selected in the paper as it had gone through significant frame changes. In the two stages of the movement, two mobilizing frames were used, each with different “resource” elements from its respective cultural contexts, which led to different mobilizing outcomes. The findings indicated that the frame changes originated from the social movement leaders’ strategic selection, reflecting the subtle relationships between the mobilizing frames and the macrocultural contexts in which the movement was embedded. More specifically, the mobilizing frame during the first stage utilized the marginal values of the cultural context but the outcome was not good. During the second stage, the leaders made strategic adjustments of the mobilizing frame, moving it closer to the mainstream values in the cultural context, which led to a breakthrough. When the mobilization became successful, the social movement leaders brought the marginal values back into the mobilizing frame. With the movement expanding, so did the marginal values and they even remained influential after the movement was over and restored the original cultural context. In addition, the competition between the mobilizing frame and other “countermovement” frames manifested the cultural contextual impact on the framing of the social movement.


The Logic of Emotion in Mass Disturbances：Based on an Analysis of the Case of DH Event and Its Extensions

CHEN Qi, WU Yi

2014, 34(1):  75-103. 

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 The emotional perspective is an important one to understand mass disturbances in present China. Taking the DH Event as a principal case and with this case extended to other mass disturbances, the current paper analyzes and extracts the general logic of emotion in current Chinese mass disturbances. The pervading discontent and the dissatisfaction with the moral construction among the masses caused by systemrelated obstacles in opinion expression have made emotion the most important mechanism determining the occurrence, development and evolution of mass disturbances. Emotion, as the basic logic supportive of mass disturbances, performs mainly in two ways: emotion release and emotion management, as the two sides of one coin, a mode characteristic of the emotional expression among the general public. The former aims at the peripheral and marginal part of power while the latter determines the process of mass disturbances as a routine factor. What should be emphasized especially is the performance of emotion as a part of emotion management. It is a core factor in understanding the peculiarity of expression of emotion in mass disturbances, and makes the emotion management in Chinese mass disturbances quite different from that in other social movements in the past. This is macroscopically due to the asymmetric statesociety relationship. If there is no change of this structure, it is unlikely for current mass disturbances to turn into social movements in the conventional sense. And they will only occur periodically in the complex interaction of modernity and tradition as a special kind of response to social conflicts during the transition in China as weaker groups.

Engaging in and Responding to Disputes by Chinese Urban Residents as a Function of Power

XIAO Yang, FAN Xiaoguang, LEI Ming

2014, 34(1):  104-119. 

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One important area in Sociology is civil disputes. With frequent social conflicts and a large number of civil disputes in current China, it is theoretically and practically meaningful to identify their mechanisms. Based on the existing research on civil disputes, this paper takes “power” as a core concept and proposes a theoretical framework of “power’s mandatory and transitive mechanisms” from the perspectives of status structure and network structure to analyze the impact of the power from the individual’s ego and the power from his/her social network on the involvement and responses in civil disputes. An analysis of the relevant variables in the Chinese General Social Survey 2006 (CGSS2006) showed the following results: Firstly, both individual’s ego power and social network power helped avoiding social disputes; and secondly, with either the ego power or the social network power, those with more power resources were the ones who were more likely to use formal channels to deal with disputes. This study has demonstrated that using power as a core concept in a theoretical perspective to decipher the involvement and responses in civil disputes is feasible. For urban residents, the process of engaging in the disputes and dealing with them is a process of power functioning in its full force.

The Impact Model of Rural Migrant Workers’ Desire to Defend Rights：A Questionnaire Survey in the Yangtze River Delta

ZHENG Weidong

2014, 34(1):  120-147. 

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Current research on the rights of rural migrant workers has failed to give due attention to their attitudes toward rights protection. Moreover, neither the quiet changes in the scale and structure of rural migrant workers nor the relations between current employerworker conflicts and laborers’ mass incidents have received indepth discussion. Based on the survey data gathered in the Yangtze River Delta, this paper summarizes the Impact Model of rural migrant workers’ desire to defend their rights on three dimensionscohort, work experience and work unit feature. Here are the findings: (1) Cohort was an important factor affecting the rural migrant workers’ desire to defend labor rights. The rightsdefending desire gradually got stronger from earlier cohorts (before 1969) to the 1990 cohort. (2) Legal awareness affected significantly the workers’ desire towards rights protection. (3) Variables related to work experience, such as frequency of changing jobs and successful experience of defending rights had no significant effects; the only exception was job position. (4) Contradictory to the finding of work unit feature being an insignificant factor in most studies, this study found it significant. (5) To some extent, the level of institutionalization of work unit management could explain how the unit feature worked, i.e., the more advanced the institutionalization of the unit management, the stronger desire to defend labor rights. An indepth analysis discovered that, in addition to the influences from the work unit and the state institutional contexts, rural migrant workers’ desire to defend rights was a function of three internal forces in integration, i.e., emotion, human capital and social experience. Among all, education, legal awareness and job position were important factors that affected migrant workers’ rightsdefending desire significantly. In accordance to the reality of China’s rapid economic and social development, rural migrant workers’ awareness of rights protection will continue to improve, and this may create pressure on the existing labor rights system.


Resource Governance at the Grassroots under Change and Performance Outcomes：An Analysis of the Illegal TaxEvasion Land in River Village in Southwestern Hubei Province

DI Jinhua, ZHONG Zhangbao

2014, 34(1):  148-174. 

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Based on the empirical data of River Village, southwestern Hubei province and with a focus on the appearance and development of the illegal taxevasion farmland in River Village, this paper reports a study on how a village governed resources and dealt with changes. The authors analyzed the distribution and use of such important resources under governance like illegal farmland within the village, explained the formation, distribution, and the influence of such illegal farmland in interaction with the changes in farmers’ views of fairness on village governance, and discussed the internal governance logic at the village level. Illegal taxevasion farmland was a result from multiple factors including the space for rural social practices due to bureaucracy, the resources available to farmers’ selfexistential development, and the need of the village cadres for dispute mediation and resolution among the relationships within the village. The presence and distribution of the illegal taxevasion farmland manifested the protection of the grassroots government of the villagers as well as its exchanges with them when the state power is limited there, and at the same time, the ethical principles in grassroots governance. The township government pretended to be blind to the existence of the illegal taxevasion farmland in village, thus giving some autonomy to the village cadres for action using the land as a governing means in the absence of other types of valueadded governance means. Illegal land could be continuously reproduced and distributed in this process. In the governing practice of making the illegal land become a common collectively owned by the village representatives, its profits were shared by all community members. The property ownership of this type of resources strengthened the community identity and the status of the community, as well. When the ownership of illegal farmland was privatized, it benefitted the individual farmers more but eroded the shared value in the community.


Family Background, Educational Expectation and College Degree Attainment: An Empirical Study Based on Shanghai Survey

WANG Fuqin, SHI Yiwen

2014, 34(1):  175-195. 

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The classical BlauDuncan status attainment model found that the advantage of family background was reproduced through children’s education but it did not give much detail to the intermediate mechanisms in the intergenerational transmission. Previous domestic studies considered school tracking, cultural capitals and social capitals being the mechanisms to explain the intergenerational transmission. The present study, according to the viewpoints of Wisconsin Educational Attainment Model, brought in college degree expectation/aspiration as the mediating variable between family background and children’s college education attainment. The analysis of the data from “Shanghai Residents Family Life Status Survey” (N=1181) in year 2010 found that those who had strong expectations for a college degree when they were young got significantly more opportunities to enter college, and furthermore, that the development of individuals’ expectations for higher education was related to their family backgrounds and parents’ expectations. Educational expectation played a role in intergenerational advantage status transmission as an intermediate mechanism that mediated the impact of family backgrounds on educational attainment. This mechanism was expressed during the process of children receiving education. The higher the socioeconomic status, the stronger expectations the parents would have for their children to get into college. This was particularly true of the parents who had received higher education themselves. They were able to provide their children with abundant and useful information about college life and learning, to engage more in their children’s learning, and to create more supportive conditions. All these advantages helped children maintain and realize their expectation of a college degree. Driven by the educational expectation for college, the individuals worked harder in the learning process in order to achieve the ambition of higher education, which led to increased likelihood to be admitted to college, and eventually, to the realization of the intergenerational transmission.


Research on Survey Quality: Evaluation of the Representativeness of Survey Responses

REN Liying, QIU Zeqi, DING Hua, YAN Jie

2014, 34(1):  196-214. 

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As nonresponses in surveys have increasingly become more common in recent years, the representativeness of survey responses has called attention from survey researchers. Response rate is commonly used as an indicator of survey quality. However, theoretically and empirically there is not necessarily a direct link between response rates and nonresponse biases. So how to get alternative indicators of response representativeness has become a focus in research.After reviewing multiple measures of assessing response representativeness, we consider that Rindicator is the most promising compared with others. Regarding its construction, Rindicator is guided by sound theories, based on rich sampleframe data and paradata, and can be obtained by relatively simple algorithm. Regarding its application, Rindicator can be used for comparing different surveys with the same target population, different waves of a panel survey, or times of measurement in different stages of the same survey.This article introduces the definition of the concept of Rindicator, its computation, composition and limitations. Rindicator was applied to the evaluation of the representativeness of the survey responses in the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), 2010. We divided the whole fieldwork process into three stages and computed the Rindicator, Maximal Absolute Bias, and partial Rindicators for each stage. The analysis of these indicators led to a discovery that the samples were over or underrepresented in the areas with variations in community attributes, economic development, population density, nonagricultural population ratio, and support from community commissions. Moreover, the seriousness of these problems changed as the survey went on.