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Through an intensive ethnographic fieldwork, this project explores rural Chinese children's understandings and experiences of peer friendships at school. When talking about 'friend' and 'friendship', children tended to brag that they were friends with many peers, but at the same time to particularly highlight a very small number of peers as the most intimate friends, in other words, their 'best friends'. Inspired by Finch's concept of 'display', this article explores how these Chinese children used different approaches to highlight their intimate friends' particularity in intimate friendship displays at school. This article, first, unpacks three commonly used approaches in these children's displays of intimate friendships: 1) building up an exclusionary 'intimate friends only' policy; 2) imparting to certain objects, actions and language sentimental and specific meanings as 'tokens' of their friendship; and 3) giving 'priority' to intimate friends. Second, it discusses the importance of audiences and cooperation between actors in intimate friendship displays.

AbstractFriendship, an important type of interpersonal relationship, has been studied in various disciplines. When studying friendship, sociologists highlight the importance of placing friendships in context to build up a connection between friendship, a type of interpersonal relationship between individuals, and the surrounding social and cultural environment. In sociological studies of friendship, children's friendships in the Chinese context have not been explored thoroughly. To contribute to closing this gap, this article places children's peer friendships in a rural Chinese primary boarding school context and focuses on exploring Chinese Confucian–collectivist sociocultural values that emerged in these children's daily practices of peer friendships.

The regional townships of New Zealand are losing young people. The township of Paraparaumu, located along the Kapiti Coast, is no exception. As a sprawling, low-density suburban settlement with its town center being Coastlands Shopping Center - the local mall - there are few job opportunities available. As a result, many early career adults choose to settle elsewhere. Tasked with creating more opportunities, the Kapiti Coast District Council plans to build a new commercial district. To make space for it, this will be done by paving over a large expanse of wetland adjacent to the mall. The premise of this thesis is that generating opportunities do not have to be large scale. In more dense urban areas where space is limited, many productive activities occur within the fine grain of a city. Wetlands are also recognized as a critical natural infrastructure and a valuable social amenity. Thus, instead of building large commercial facilities that have to occupy the wetland, the design in this thesis proposes a facility made up of a finer grain and infills the glut of car park spaces in front of Coastlands Mall. The parking spaces displaced will be relocated into a parking tower adjacent to the site. The building type of the Bazaar was looked at in this thesis as a model, for it is fine-grained and also ingrained with its urban context. The spatial network of the Bazaar democratizes access. The spatial network of the Bazaar democratizes access, which is a direct contrast to the singular and hierarchical nature of the mall. The design adopts these ideas and expresses them through a network of modules on a tartan grid plan transforming the design into a rhythmic series of spaces that express compression and expansion, allowing it to be an interlinked network of interior and exterior spaces. The grid is a powerful tool for organizing expanses of space though it is only useful in an architectural sense when accompanied by a fine-grained variation. Though the repetitive grid is suitable in plan, as a 3d form it quickly dissolves into monotony when repeated across a field. Similarly, the site itself is inherently charged with spatial hierarchy. Thus, localized adjustments of the roof and exterior details were made to break the monotony and rest the spatial hierarchy. This thesis explores how fine grain activity can be integrated into a large-grained context through the use of an additive, modular network set on a grid. Though the research findings produced on expression of this in the design outcome, the idea of a dense, fine-grained modular network is applicable in any context that has large inactive open space to be filled.

Based on lengthy ethnographic fieldwork in Southwest China, this article unpacks how precarity and migration have deeply shaped young migrant workers' understanding and experiences of friendship. The precarious work and living conditions compel young migrants to put more emphasis on the instrumental aspects of friendship, in which they deeply value friends' help and practical support, which also intertwine closely with the emotional aspects of friendship. High mobility does not mean that migrants are not able to form and maintain 'meaningful' social relationships; rather, it is friends' support and help which sustain migrants' precarious and highly mobile ways of living. This article also discusses the burdens and risks that are associated with such friendship practices, and how, despite these 'dark sides of friendship', young migrant workers still largely rely on their friends to survive and keep going in the city.

Young people's heterosexual romantic relationships is often a popular topic in youth studies and sexuality education. However, the importance of class and educational stratification and the institutional influence is rarely mentioned. Through this article, considering the differentiated expectation of young people in different high school categories and the discussion about sexuality education, young people are understanding and experiencing heterosexual romantic relationships beyond their individual level. Drawing on the fieldwork with 28 student participants and 7 schoolteachers in total at an academic high school and a vocational high school in Tianjin, China, this article unearths young people's considerations, decisions, and doubts concerning their experiences of heterosexual romantic relationships. It argues that young people's perceptions and experiences of heterosexual romantic relationships are highly diverse and complex. It calls for the awareness of intersectional factors, such as social class and gender, in the process of understanding such diversity and complexity.

PurposeLive streaming commerce enhances shopping experience and reduces uncertainty. However, with increasingly fierce competitions, it has become a challenging task for live streaming commerce platforms to retain existing customers. The purpose of this study to explore factors affecting customers' stickiness intention toward live streaming commerce platforms.Design/methodology/approachA research model was developed by modifying e-commerce system success model (ES success model) based on the context of live streaming commerce and meanwhile integrating serendipity and flow into the model. Using the data collected from 380 customers who have live streaming shopping experience, the established model was empirically assessed by partial least squares based structural equation model.FindingsThe results show that vividness, real-time interaction and diagnosticity are antecedents of perceived value and customer satisfaction toward a live streaming commerce platform which in turn influence customers' stickiness intention. Besides, as new factors introducing into the ES success model, serendipity and flow are two important motivators of satisfaction and stickiness.Originality/valueThis study establishes a well-organized framework to understand the mechanism regarding why customers stick with a live streaming commerce platform. It provides a socio-technical approach to analyze how the stickiness intention can be influenced.