Journal ArticleDOI
Technology of Self, Technology of Power. Volunteering as Encounter in Guangzhou, China
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In this paper, the authors explore the growing popularity of volunteering in China and delineate several factors that play into the phenomenon, including students' desire to break out of strict routines, to engage in meaningful activities, to meet people, and to contribute to China's development.Abstract:
In this article, I explore the growing popularity of volunteering in China. I delineate several factors that play into the phenomenon, including students' desire to break out of strict routines, to engage in meaningful activities, to meet people, and to contribute to China's development. Linking these issues to the socio-political, economic, and ideological transformations in China, I show that we cannot meaningfully distinguish between altruistic and self-interested motivations to volunteer. For the students volunteering is a means to transform themselves into modern, entrepreneurial, and responsible selves, necessary to meet the challenges of urban life in China today. Yet, volunteering, encouraged and framed by the government, is also a ‘technology of power’, a means to nurture self-reliant and socially responsible individuals. I show that volunteerism is not simply the reflection of a new ‘governmentality’ but an encounter in which the very relationship between state and society is constantly negotiated.read more
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Journal ArticleDOI
Anthropology, China, and the Chinese Century
TL;DR: In this article, the new realities of life in China have fundamentally reshaped the anthropology of modern China, with the disappearance of the planned economy, a whole range of structures, networks, organizations, and practices has emerged at the interface of state and society.
Book ChapterDOI
Volunteering: A Complex Social Phenomenon
TL;DR: In this article, the authors define volunteering and examine its relationship to similar constructs such as civil society, social movements, social capital, cooperation, and reciprocity within social networks, citizen participation, service, solidarity, self-help, and mutual assistance.
Journal ArticleDOI
Learning the knacks of actually existing capitalism: Young Beijing migrants and the problem of value:
TL;DR: The authors argue that state conceptions of ideal citizenship are in fact felt to be of little relevance to the experiences and developmental aspirations of young Beijing migrants and argue that their struggle to develop is better understood in relation to a materialist logic of sale of labour, imprinting upon them that their wages equal their worth.
Journal ArticleDOI
Elegant and Militarized: Ceremonial Volunteers and the Making of New Women Citizens in China
TL;DR: Li et al. as mentioned in this paper argue that the role of a female volunteer represents a new state effort to engineer a model woman citizen by combining the Confucian discourse on etiquette, the communist party-state discourse on militarization and strong womanhood, and the communist sport tradition of body training.
References
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Book
Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault
TL;DR: Martin et al. as mentioned in this paper present a transcript of a faculty seminar on "Technologies of the self," originally presented at the University of Vermont in the fall of 1982, where Foucault's project on the self was the logical conclusion to his historical inquiry over twenty-five years into insanity, deviancy, criminality and sexuality.
Journal ArticleDOI
Volunteer work and well-being.
Peggy A. Thoits,Lyndi N. Hewitt +1 more
TL;DR: Using two waves of panel data from Americans' Changing Lives (House 1995), the relationships between volunteer work in the community and six aspects of personal well-being are examined: happiness, life satisfaction, self-esteem, sense of control over life, physical health, and depression.
Journal ArticleDOI
Who cares? Toward an integrated theory of volunteer work
John Wilson,Marc A. Musick +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors construct an integrated theory of formal and informal volunteer work based on the premises that volunteer work is productive work that requires human capital, collective behavior that requires social capital, and ethically guided work that require cultural capital.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Gift, the Indian Gift and the 'Indian Gift'
TL;DR: In this article, a critique critique of " l'Essai sur le Don " de M. Mauss, a lumiere of l'ideologie de l'echange maori et hindouiste
Journal ArticleDOI
Negotiating the State: The Development of Social Organizations in China
TL;DR: A notable feature of the reform programme sponsored by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been the expansion of social organizations as discussed by the authors, which has created an increased organizational sphere and social space in which to operate and to represent social interests, and to convey those interests into the policy-making process.