Description
Book SynopsisThis book shows how department stores and marketplaces in China have become important sites where Chinese people understand, and perform, unequal social relations.
Trade Review"Hanser provides a vivid account of the everyday implications of Post-Mao era economic reforms and how boundaries of class and gender are both articulated and made permeable. Her concise and careful use of social theory makes it a useful introduction to practices of class and gender distinction." --
Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific"Hanser presents a detailed, refreshing ethnographic account of three radically different retail settings and practices, skillfully tracing the shifting symbolic boundaries of class, gender, and service in urban China." -- Li Zhang * University of California, Davis *
"A pure pleasure to read, Hanser's ethnography probes the little-known world of retail clerks in post-socialist China. An important, contemporary contribution to the eternal questions about inequality and stratification that remain at the core of sociological research, this book will be an ethnographic classic." -- Deborah Davis * Yale University *
Table of Contents2. Revolution and Reform: The Business of Retail in Modern China, 25 3. Service Work with Socialist Characteristics, 54 4. Distinction Work and the Gendered Production of Class, 86 5. The Underground and the Counter Strategies of Distinction, 120 6. Post-Socialist Distinction Work, 154 7. Conclusion, 186
