Throughout China the formation of guanxi, or social connections, involves friends, families, colleagues, and acquaintances in complex networks of social support and sentimental attachment. Focusing on this process in one rural north China village, Fengjia, Andrew Kipnis shows what guanxi production reveals about the evolution of village political economy, kinship and gender, and local patterns of subjectivity in Dengist China. His work offers a detailed description of the communicative actions--such as gift giving, being a host or guest, participating in weddings or funerals--that produce, manage, and deny guanxi in a specific time and place. Kipnis also offers a rare comparative analysis of how these practices relate to the varied and variable phenomenon of guanxi throughout China and as it has changed over time. Producing Guanxi combines the theory of Pierre Bourdieu and the insights of symbolic anthropology to contest past portrayals of guanxi as either a function of Chinese political economics or an unchanging Confucian social structure. In this analysis guanxi emerges as a purposeful human effort that makes use of past cultural logics while generating new ones. By exploring the role of sentiment in the creation of self, Kipnis critiques recent theories of subjectivity for their narrow focus on language and discourse, and contributes to the anthropological discussion of comparative selfhood. Navigating a path between mainstream social science and abstract social theory, Kipnis presents a more nuanced examination of guanxi than has previously been available and contributes generally to our understanding of relationships and human action.

This volume assesses the evolving role of guanxi (social networks) in China's transforming society.

This book provides the first detailed analysis of a distinctive element of Chinese foreign policy, waishi, the external policies intended to influence and control both foreigners themselves as well as Chinese citizens' contact with and perception of outsiders. The term also comprises China's external relations both official state-to-state and unofficial or 'people-to-people' diplomacy. Anne-Marie Brady argues that by encompassing all matters related to foreigners and foreign things, not merely diplomacy, waishi has proven to be one of the most effective tools in the CCP's repertoire for building and then sustaining its hold on power. The author's groundbreaking research is based on a previously unexplored genre of classified waishi materials, extensive interviews with waishi officials and foreign participants of the system, as well as extensive archival research."

To make a place is to create a location where its creators can feel they belong. Processes of place-making are still very much ongoing today. Geographers, sociologists, political scientists and philosophers of advanced capitalism have said that place is a localisation of the global. However, the creation of a place is not legible from such grand perspectives. It is also much more creative than can be predicted by translating large-scale processes into local cultures. Anthropologists have been sensitive to the intimate, tragic and lyrical senses of local place. But their theorising has been too much bound up with cosmology and insufficiently with the intermediate scales of state and local state. In this book, Stephan Feuchtwang and his contributors offer a set of historical, anthropological and scale-mediated studies from China - a country that includes a subcontinental variety of cultures and landscapes. In the twentieth century it experienced collapse in civil war and was then reasserted as a particularly strong state. Now it is managing the fastest growing capitalist economy in the world. These intriguing Chinese studies contribute to the anthropology of place and space, providing an historical perspective on processes of change and of accommodation to disruption. The stories they tell are fascinating in their own right, but in addition, the result is a critical reformulation of previous theories of place that geographers, philosophers, historians, and anthropologists will find of great interest.

Adopting a cross-cultural perspective, this book utilizes data collected from several large-scale surveys to assess the neighborhood social control system in a changing urban China. It conceptualizes this system through different types of neighborhood social control at private, parochial, semi-public, public, and market levels. The book highlights the importance of cross-cultural studies of neighborhood effects, and discusses several major issues in such studies along with prospects for future research.

Years ago, the author had a startling realization. Theologians and pastors have long taught on the glory of God and its central importance in the Bible. However, because he was living in East Asia, it also dawned on the author that this sort of talk about God's glory, praising Him, and magnifying His name was simply another way of talking about honor and shame. When the author looked at most theology and ministry-related books, he found that honor and shame seemed to be treated differently. Anthropologists talked about honor-shame, but theologians largely focused more on legal metaphors. The author could see both themes in Scripture but couldn't find help as to how to bring them together. This study was developed in order to address this gap and bring those themes together. Sign up for the WCIU Press newsletter to be notified about new books from this author and more! http: //eepurl.com/rB15L

The Chinese triangle of mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan constitutes one of the most dynamic regions in the world economy. Since the late 1970s, these three societies have experienced increasing economic integration; however, studies aimed at analyzing and explaining this integration have often overlooked the very important role social institutions have played in the shaping of this process. To fill this gap, this book adopts a systematic institutional approach designed to examine the different patterns of institutions in the three countries and to discuss how such social institutions as the economy, gender, social networks, and the Chinese diaspora have exerted a profound impact on all three societies. The chapters, taken together, argue that different patterns of institutional configuration have led to divergent paths of development, and that this divergence will have significant implications on the prospects for Chinese national reunification in the twenty-first century. The Introductory chapter provides a historical discussion on the origins and the transformation of the Chinese triangle during the second half of the twentieth century. The remainder of the volume is broken into four topics considered crucial for understanding the transformation of the Chinese triangle: economic transformation, gender, social networks, and the Chinese diaspora. As globalization impacts the Chinese triangle, studies that consider the issues from the perspective of social institutions will be increasingly important to understanding the area as it develops in the world economy.

With the increasing globalisation of business, Asia has much to teach and to learn in the areas of management theory, research and education. The relevance and impact of Asian business practices are scrutinized in this volume which presents chapters written by international scholars on issues such as strategic management, organisational behavior, the performance of multinationals, foreign investments and human resource management. Advances in these areas within an Asian context can make a global contribution to the research on management theory.This volume consists of the principal contributions from the inaugural conference of the Asia Academy of Management and will be of interest to business practitioners, academics and students interested in Asian management.

Women are now leading companies and other enterprises in significant numbers—in developing countries as well as the Western world. This set examines the specific ways in which entrepreneurial women create success and considers how the growing prevalence of female entrepreneurs will change the world. This two-volume work provides balanced and thorough coverage of women entrepreneurs in multicultural and international contexts as well as in the Western world. Entrepreneurial Women: New Management and Leadership Models explores how women everywhere are empowering themselves socially and economically through entrepreneurship and business ownership. The contributors consider how discrimination against women in the workplace can contribute to the inspiration to become business owners in the first place and document the experiences of African American women entrepreneurs as well as women in distinct settings such as China, Africa, rural Jamaica, and Silicon Valley. The work draws on empirical studies, data sets, case studies, and descriptions of career trajectories to portray the realities of women entrepreneurs today. Readers will understand the distinctive challenges and opportunities involved with the entrepreneurship process for women-owned businesses, grasp how women have overcome their disadvantages in getting funding and accessing capital, and learn about the unique management and leadership style of women entrepreneurs.

In this reader media experts discuss the prospects and problems of program exchange between German and Chinese Broadcasters. They explain that program exchange is not the cockaigne one could assume with regard to the non-rivalry of media content and the huge Chinese TV market (more than 300 million TV households and an estimated 180,000 hours of weekly broadcast time across all TV platforms), but that many economic peculiarities of the media that only can be read in the footnotes of economic text books are highly relevant in practice. To trade TV programs with China thus requires a solid knowledge about the TV business in general, but also about the Chinese media order and the Chinese society, and the Chinese way of business.