Technology of Self, Technology of Power. Volunteering as Encounter in Guangzhou, China
TL;DR: 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.
Citations
More filters
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore theories, discourses, and experiences of globalization, drawing on perspectives from history, anthropology, cultural and literary studies, geography, political economy, and sociology.
Abstract: COURSE DESCRIPTION In popular and scholarly discourse, the term \"globalization\" is widely used to put a name to the shape of the contemporary world. In the realms of advertising, a variety of media, policymaking, politics, academia, and everyday talk, \"globalization\" references the sense that we now live in a deeply and everincreasingly interconnected, mobile, and speeded-up world that is unprecedented, fueled by technological innovations and geopolitical and economic transformations. Drawing on perspectives from history, anthropology, cultural and literary studies, geography, political economy, and sociology, this course will explore theories, discourses, and experiences of globalization.
311 citations
TL;DR: Tang et al. as discussed by the authors explored the nature and origins of mass opinion in urban China through survey research conducted between 1987 and 2000, and examined a wide range of theories and explanations, such as regime legitimacy, the influence of the media on opinion, social capital theory, political participation, and the role of intellectuals.
Abstract: Public Opinion and Political Change in China. By Wenfang Tang. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. 237p. $55.00 cloth, $21.95 paper.In this comprehensive book, Wenfang Tang explores the nature and origins of mass opinion in urban China through survey research conducted between 1987 and 2000. The general theme is how some local democratic practices can develop within the People's Republic of China (PRC). However, rather than presenting a single theory or model, Tang examines a series of case studies on public opinion. He draws on a rich data set that consists of 11 large-scale urban surveys conducted by Chinese government and academic institutions, including his own 1999 six-city survey. With this data he examines a wide range of theories and explanations, such as regime legitimacy (Chapter 3), the influence of the media on opinion (Chapter 4), social capital theory (Chapter 5), political participation (Chapters 6 and 7), and the role of intellectuals (Chapter 8). Thus, this book has a broad appeal to those interested in political development as well as contemporary China.
79 citations
TL;DR: The authors proposes an alternate perspective that considers new and older forms of public sociality in relation to their cultural formation, where the flourishing of solidarity initiatives in contemporary crisis-ridden Greece is not considered a paradox, but rather the expression of the reconfiguration of the social and its potent political content.
Abstract: Narratives of volunteerism and civil society that emerged in Greece in the beginning of the twenty-first century echoed the modernization and Europeanization visions of Greek society that were proliferating in that era. Public discourses as well as state and EU policies endorsed a model of sociality that included volunteerism and was associated with the production of the new European and Greek citizen. Forms of public sociality, such as voluntary associations, thus constituted laboratories that produced subjects. The reformation of sociality and the invention of volunteerism were embedded in various civilizing projects. At the same time, a certain “lack of volunteerism” was broadly attributed to a general understanding of Greek particularity. This article proposes an alternate perspective that considers new and older forms of public sociality in relation to their cultural formation, where the flourishing of solidarity initiatives in contemporary crisis-ridden Greece is not considered a paradox, but rather the expression of the reconfiguration of the social and its potent political content.
40 citations
TL;DR: To deconstruct volunteering, the article utilizes the Latourian notions of “hybridization” and “purification” as simultaneous and entangled mechanisms, and critically review the literature on “volunteering” to problematize the fundamental properties of the “pure” perception of ‘Volunteering,’ their hybridization and eventual purification.
Abstract: The scholarly exploration of “volunteering” has mainly focused on identifying its antecedents or consequences, in order to facilitate the management and promotion of volunteering. In this dominant stream of research, the phenomenon of volunteering thus remains a “black box”—a taken-for-granted and fixed reality. The article sets out to open the black box of “volunteering” by not accepting it as a fixed, unproblematic object, but by exploring volunteering as a constructed phenomenon whose boundaries are managed and utilized by a variety of actors. To deconstruct volunteering, the article utilizes the Latourian notions of “hybridization” and “purification” as simultaneous and entangled mechanisms. We critically review the literature on “volunteering” and problematize the fundamental properties of the “pure” perception of “volunteering,” their hybridization and eventual purification. The article concludes by highlighting how the constant tension between hybridization and purification mechanisms is in fact what makes volunteering proliferate as a phenomenon that has an increasing public significance in contemporary society.
29 citations
Cites background from "Technology of Self, Technology of P..."
...…“volunteering” as resulting from a determination by an autonomous subject, whose calculated interests and motivations can be delineated and researched, while tending to neglect the ways in which individuals navigate between different and sometimes contradictory motivations (e.g., Fleischer, 2011)....
[...]
TL;DR: In this paper, the angst of deeply committed volunteers in China, engaging with anthropological debates on ethics under conditions of moral breakdown, is explored, under market socialism, sacrificial v...
Abstract: This article explores the angst of deeply committed volunteers in China, engaging with anthropological debates on ethics under conditions of “moral breakdown.” Under market socialism, sacrificial v...
28 citations
Cites background from "Technology of Self, Technology of P..."
...At least since the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, volunteerism has caught scholars’ attention (e.g., Fleischer 2011, 2013, 2018; Hustinx, Handy, and Cnaan 2012; Rolandsen 2008, 2010)....
[...]
...Fleischer (2011), on the other hand, proposes amore nuanced approach, examining the tensions between volunteering in China as a “technology of power” deployed by the state and as a “technology of the self” by means of which student volunteers “refashion their identity into functional subjects in…...
[...]
References
More filters
Book•
17 Feb 2004
TL;DR: Only Hope as discussed by the authors is a collection of stories about teenagers' stories about the next few months of their lives and their future, including "The Next Few Months Will Determine Your Future": Eight Teenagers' Stories 2. Great Expectations: Singletons as the Vanguard of Modernization 3. Heavy is the Head of the "Little Emperor": Pressure, discipline, and competition in the Stratification System 4. "Beat Me Now and I'll Beat You When You're Old": Love, Filial Duty,s and Parental Investment in an Aging Population 5. "Sp
Abstract: Table of Contents for Only Hope List of Tables Acknowledgements Introduction 1. "The Next Few Months Will Determine Your Future": Eight Teenagers' Stories 2. Great Expectations: Singletons as the Vanguard of Modernization 3. Heavy is the Head of the "Little Emperor": Pressure, Discipline, and Competition in the Stratification System 4. "Beat Me Now and I'll Beat You When You're Old": Love, Filial Duty,s and Parental Investment in an Aging Population 5. "Spoiled": First World Youth in the Third World Conclusion: Making a Road to the First World Appendix: biographical Details of People Quoted or Mentioned in this Book Notes Works Cited Index
420 citations
"Technology of Self, Technology of P..." refers background in this paper
...In her study of single children in Dalian, China, Fong (2004) vividly shows the interplay between social, political, and economic factors that lead to intensifying pressure on Chinese students today....
[...]
...(Fong 2004:1)....
[...]
Book•
01 Jan 2007
TL;DR: The authors argue that the creation of such "desiring subjects" is at the core of China's contingent, piece-by-piece reconfiguration of its relationship to a post-socialist world.
Abstract: Through window displays, newspapers, soap operas, gay bars, and other public culture venues, Chinese citizens are negotiating what it means to be cosmopolitan citizens of the world, with appropriate needs, aspirations, and longings. Lisa Rofel argues that the creation of such “desiring subjects” is at the core of China’s contingent, piece-by-piece reconfiguration of its relationship to a post-socialist world. In a study at once ethnographic, historical, and theoretical, she contends that neoliberal subjectivities are created through the production of various desires—material, sexual, and affective—and that it is largely through their engagements with public culture that people in China are imagining and practicing appropriate desires for the post-Mao era.
Drawing on her research over the past two decades among urban residents and rural migrants in Hangzhou and Beijing, Rofel analyzes the meanings that individuals attach to various public cultural phenomena and what their interpretations say about their understandings of post-socialist China and their roles within it. She locates the first broad-based public debate about post-Mao social changes in the passionate dialogues about the popular 1991 television soap opera Yearnings . She describes how the emergence of gay identities and practices in China reveals connections to a transnational network of lesbians and gay men at the same time that it brings urban/rural and class divisions to the fore. The 1999–2001 negotiations over China’s entry into the World Trade Organization; a controversial women’s museum; the ways that young single women portray their longings in relation to the privations they imagine their mothers experienced; adjudications of the limits of self-interest in court cases related to homoerotic desire, intellectual property, and consumer fraud—Rofel reveals all of these as sites where desiring subjects come into being.
413 citations
TL;DR: A hot afternoon in July 1999 in the northern city of Tianjin, a dozen or so young rural women are gathered inside a small waiting room of the municipal Family Service Company, waiting for urban families to employ them as domestics as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: On a hot afternoon in July 1999 in the northern city of Tianjin, a dozen or so young rural women are gathered inside a small waiting room of the municipal Family Service Company. Sitting on a narrow wooden staircase or standing with their bodies leaning against each other, they are waiting for urban families to employ them as domestics. Outside, in the courtyard, more women seek refuge in the shade as they too wait to be called. The room occupied by the waiting women connects to an air-conditioned office through a sliding glass door, which remains closed to keep out both the heat and the women waiting outside. Through its glass panes, however, the office staff inside keep an eye on the women whom the manager privately refers to as "smelly hicks" (lao ta'er). Following the staircase up to the third floor, one can find the office of the general manager. Here the new wooden floor is smooth and gleaming. An air conditioner works quietly in one corner of the room, the abundant coolness in the office testifying to its power. On the wall facing the manager hang several red silk banners awarded for good performance by the municipal government and the city branch of the All China Women's Federation under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. The office is very quiet. This Family Service Company, the largest among two hundred or so in the city of Tianjin, is officially attached to the Women's Federation although it is financially responsible for its own profits and losses.' However, in view of its
338 citations
"Technology of Self, Technology of P..." refers background in this paper
...…have allegedly triggered a dramatic rise of individualization and materialism resulting in a moral vacuum and a lack of solidarity (Wang 2002; Yan 2003b; Zhuo 2001); and where intense competition and the onechild policy produce ‘little emperors’, i.e. spoiled and egotistic youngsters…...
[...]
...It is often used in the negative, in terms of lack, and tightly connected to the idea of ‘development’ (Yan 2003a: 494–496)....
[...]
...Yan (2003b), in turn, suggests that the violent experiences under Maoism and the disruptions that have been caused by the reforms have given rise to an ultrautilitarian individualism....
[...]
...As Yan (2003a) points out, suzhi is not actually a very precise concept....
[...]
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore theories, discourses, and experiences of globalization, drawing on perspectives from history, anthropology, cultural and literary studies, geography, political economy, and sociology.
Abstract: COURSE DESCRIPTION In popular and scholarly discourse, the term \"globalization\" is widely used to put a name to the shape of the contemporary world. In the realms of advertising, a variety of media, policymaking, politics, academia, and everyday talk, \"globalization\" references the sense that we now live in a deeply and everincreasingly interconnected, mobile, and speeded-up world that is unprecedented, fueled by technological innovations and geopolitical and economic transformations. Drawing on perspectives from history, anthropology, cultural and literary studies, geography, political economy, and sociology, this course will explore theories, discourses, and experiences of globalization.
311 citations
Journal Article•
280 citations