Suchergebnisse

The governorships of Jesse Ventura of Minnesota and Arnold Schwarzenegger of California provide two natural experiments for testing the institutionally induced stability hypothesis. Both men rose to their governorships through unique career and electoral paths that would reduce the stabilizing effects of partisan commitments and electoral competition, which would tend to increase their impact on public policy. Nonetheless, our evidence suggests that despite their unique backgrounds and paths to office neither governor had a statistically significant impact on their state's expenditures or deficits.

This article explores the progressive potential of commercial industry-oriented channels (IoCs), an emerging form of media produced by and addressed to workers of specific industries, on China's digital platforms. Juxtaposing textual analysis with worker-audience interviews and participant observation, I found that despite the collusion of state surveillance and platform governance, IoCs prove instrumental in fostering resistive labour subjects and collectives among ordinary workers. This is due to IoCs' genre convention and discourses, but more importantly, to worker-audience's bitter and precarious structure of feeling that mediates their collective reception processes. The findings complicate our understanding of the potential of media/cultural production for labour resistance, highlighting the role of worker-audience in the circuit of progressive labour culture and the potential of commercial media in fostering radical class subjects. Drawing on the analysis, I further advance a model of worker media as double articulation, to open up more hermeneutic and action space for cultural labour activism.

Recent studies on precarity among gig workers has turned away from labour process factors to explore the role of the wider social, cultural and institutional environment. Existing western-centred studies in this aspect argue that platforms reproduce racialised and gendered hierarchies to leverage control over vulnerable populations. This study extends this literature by focusing on the migration factor in a non-western context. Using the case of Didi, drawing on ethnographic and interview data, it is argued that migrant drivers' high tolerance for platform precarity should be understood as an imposed position, for they are actually trapped in the platform by China's state-led, tech-driven economic restructuring project, through a new mode of migrant labour differentiation comprising three factors – changes in the labour market, hegemonic gender norms and the reformed hukou system. It thus enriches our understanding of worker precarity in the gig economy by highlighting the impact of migration and the state.

AbstractThe three films discussed here are all adapted works based on real‐life incidents that have happened in China pertaining to child trafficking, drug smuggling, and kidnapping. Although the films depict the roads traveled and lives lived by the particular characters, more importantly, they enable the audience to realize that characters cannot be viewed in terms of black and white. Rather, characters should be viewed as "gray." Specifically, all characters are portrayed as both selfless and profit driven. They are forced to confront hidden pain caused by the trials and tribulations of life. That pain is coupled with a sense of helplessness and a need to face life's changes brought about by the failure of the government's social management system. Being under constant pressure, the dregs of society pursue their own selfish interests, thereby infringing on the interests of others. When criminals are at their worst, the audience is looking for their goodness amidst the opposing forces of legality and sentimentality, egoism and altruism. Audiences are hoping for some form of redemption in characters who are wrestling with responsibility and obligation. This not only gives the characters a sense of inclusiveness, but it also gives viewers comfort regarding our shared humanity. At the same time, the upsurge of public opinion triggered by these realistic films has accelerated government reform and enhancement of the social system. Thus, socially oriented movies in China have had large social value and practical significance.

AbstractJános Kornai's pioneering scholarship examined the mechanisms of the socialist system. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kornai's main focus was on the transition process in former socialist countries in central Eastern Europe. This paper builds on Kornai's work on the socialist system by analyzing horizontal bargaining within every political branch in contemporary China. I argue that this horizontal bargaining within the party is enhanced by the vertical bargaining. Incorporating Kornai's work on socialism, the "party chief and mayor" template extends the bargaining model from one key figure and one group in the "king and council" template to two key figures and their respective confidants. In addition, it incorporates institutional constraints into the graphical model. It also defines a "collective decision probability function," which shows how the party chief and mayor model reaches "checks and balances" that limit the policy space, regardless of whether the policy is exogenous or endogenous.