The mediation of matchmaking: a comparative study of gender and generational preference in online dating websites and offline blind date markets in Chengdu

Online dating has modernized traditional partner search methods, allowing individuals to seek a partner that aligns with their preferences for attributes such as age, height, location, or education. Yet traditional forms of partner selection still exist, with continued parental involvement in the matching process. In this paper, we exploit different matchmaking methods with varying degrees of youth autonomy versus parental involvement. We use a unique dataset collected in Chengdu, China, where profiles from the blind date market (n = 158) capture parental preferences and profiles from an online dating website (n = 500) capture individual preferences. Regarding gender, we find that men generally display a desire for women younger, shorter, and less educated than themselves, while women desire older and taller men of the same education as themselves. With regards to parental influences, we find parents specify a narrower range of accepted partner attributes. Further, we find an interaction effect between gender and generational influences: the preferences of parents advertising their daughters on the blind date market show a greater discrepancy in attribute preferences to the online daters than parents advertising their sons.

Rethinking the defining contextualization of in-work poverty: the challenge of individualism and globalization

Growing empirical evidence reveals the dramatic expansion in the risk of in-work poverty on a global scale over the last half-century. The current article reviews research on in-work poverty, illustrates how in-work poverty developed from a regional phenomenon into a global issue, and considers recent studies that have reexamined the concept of “in-work poverty” from the original “male family head” to further call on respecting the individual perspective and gender dimension. On the one hand, few studies have provided evidence on the gendered trends in in-work poverty; women’s situation in in-work poverty has not been particularly researched, and the gender dimension is often invisible. On the other hand, the existing literature does not consider this poverty issue much in developing countries, even though this does not mean that in-work poverty in developed countries is only a “side effect.” Hence, an international comparative setting with the gender dimension is needed, and more research is required to explore this construct within the context of the developing world.

A study of the labor process from a technology transformation perspective: the case of internet virtual teams

This article presents an empirical study of the labor process of internet virtual teams. It argues that organizations with a “horizontally virtual and vertically real” structure face a dilemma in the virtual team labor process. While a culture of engineers, which embodies equality, liberty, and cooperation, is the cultural basis of the virtual team, management is bureaucratic, emphasizing individual interests and hierarchical features. The coexistence of the two leads to cooperation and division of labor in virtual teams. Essentially, this is a compromising institutional arrangement adopted by corporations to triangulate technology culture and managerial control to obtain surplus value. Based on the preceding discussion, this paper ends by proposing a new theoretical framework for studying the labor process under the technological conditions of the internet.

The self-centered philanthropist: family involvement and corporate social responsibility in private enterprises

Although corporate social responsibility (CSR) has attracted increasing attention in recent years, systematic studies on the CSR of Chinese enterprises are absent from academic publications. This study examines the effects of family involvement in the CSR of private enterprises. Using private enterprise data in China, the article reveals that, on the one hand, family involvement will improve CSR investment toward community stakeholders; on the other hand, family involvement has a negative effect on the CSR of contractual stakeholders. With the influence of “chaxu geju,” the author argues that Chinese families tend to shift between different logics of behavior when faced with people with whom they have different types of relationships and incorporate this behavioral mode into company practices when they engage themselves in management and business affairs.

“Self as enterprise”: overmarketization and the self-management of R&D engineers

This article analyzes the self-enterprising mechanism of research & development (R&D) engineers based on a case study of labor control in a high-tech company. The concept of “self as enterprise” refers to the form of labor control by allowing workers to self-manage according to the market principle. It is neither a form of normative control built upon accepting and internalizing market-oriented values nor responsible autonomy aiming to enhance workers' organizational commitment. R&D engineers' reproduction of current living standards depends heavily on performance-based salaries, which forces them to pragmatically comply with market rules. When both the reproduction of labor and the labor market have been overmarketized, R&D engineers are at high risk of downgrading their living standards and facing double job insecurity. Therefore, they must manage their work and life in an enterprising way to maximize labor value and prevent it from being devalued.

Attention to social stratification in the public discourse: An empirical study based on big data of books (1949–2008)

Using the Chinese corpus of Google Books Ngram in line with other macro-level socioeconomic data, this paper examines and analyzes the trend of change in public discourse about social structure in China from 1949 to 2008, as well as the mechanism that influences this trend. We find that since the reform and opening-up, the official discourse on “class,” as constructed by the official ideology, has gradually declined, while the importance of a “stratum” discourse oriented toward the mass population has increased. Using principal component analysis, we generate an index for public attention on social strata and run it through a Granger causality test along with time-series data such as macro-level economic and political indicators. The results show that since the reform and opening-up, public attention to stratum has been influenced by the general trend of the economy, income disparity, and level of political participation. Income disparity influences public attention on stratum-related topics more than macro-level economic indicators do. Official intervention on public opinions does not affect public attention on the stratum, but the former is affected by the latter.

Technology upgrading and labor degrading? A sociological study of three robotized factories

In recent years, the technology-driven industrial upgrading in China has resulted in human labor being replaced with robots. This article explores the impact of "intelligent manufacturing" on workers from the following two perspectives: labor relations and the labor process. The authors argue that workers on the shopfloor are experiencing some forms of labor degradation due to robotization, i.e., more flexible labor relations, deskilling, and strengthened technical control. Such a corporation-led and machine-centered industrial upgrading is driven by state policy, capital, and the labor market.

Cadre parents and their entrepreneur children? The dual-track intergenerational reproduction of elites in China: 1978–2010

This article documents and conceptualizes a mode of reproduction of elites in a society in transition from state domination to market orientation. By focusing on China’ marketization, we explore how parents’ advantageous backgrounds have influenced the chance of their children’s attainment of certain elite positions (administrative, technocratic, or market) and whether these patterns have varied across three periods (1978–1992, 1993–2002, and 2003–2010). Using data obtained from the 2011 China Social Survey, we find that although parents’ advantageous status has a persistent effect on children’s status attainment, the reproduction of the state elite and market elite still follows two separate tracks: the children of cadres do not show significant advantage in the process of becoming entrepreneurs and managerial elites, and the children of entrepreneurial and managerial elites are less likely to join cadres. We also find that the effects of the reproduction model are still enhanced and shaped by state power in different periods. These findings demonstrate the important interplay between family background and contextual inequality and give a deeper understanding of the different trajectories of elites in contemporary China.

Childhood health and social class reproduction in China

In previous studies on social stratification and mobility in China, education is considered as the core mediatory factor in social reproduction and mobility. This paper, however, investigates how childhood health affects social stratification. Using data from Urbanization and Labor Migrant National Survey (2012), this study examines the effects of nutrition, hygiene, and health before age 14 on adult socioeconomic status attainment, including education, the international socioeconomic indexes of first job and current job, and family income per head. The structural equation model results show that the nutrition intake (whether one experienced starvation and the frequency of fish and meat intake) and hygiene (indicated by the source of drinking water and the toilet type) have significant effect on adult socioeconomic status attainment. However, the effects change at different life course stages. Moreover, childhood health (indicated by adult height) has significant impact on adult socioeconomic status attainment, but no significant impact on the international socioeconomic indexes of first job and current job. We conclude that investment in childhood health is an important mechanism affecting social class reproduction and mobility. Therefore, health intervention for children from poor and disadvantaged families are necessary. It will benefit children’s education and encourage upward mobility.

Social prediction: a new research paradigm based on machine learning

Sociology is a science concerned with both the interpretive understanding of social action and the corresponding causal explanation, process, and result. A causal explanation should be the foundation of prediction. For many years, due to data and computing power constraints, quantitative research in social science has primarily focused on statistical tests to analyze correlations and causality, leaving predictions largely ignored. By sorting out the historical context of "social prediction," this article redefines this concept by introducing why and how machine learning can help prediction in a scientific way. Furthermore, this article summarizes the academic value and governance value of social prediction and suggests that it is a potential breakthrough in the contemporary social research paradigm. We believe that through machine learning, we can witness the advent of an era of a paradigm shift from correlation and causality to social prediction. This shift will provide a rare opportunity for sociology in China to become the international frontier of computational social sciences and accelerate the construction of philosophy and social science with Chinese characteristics.