Post-Western Revolution in Sociology : From China to Europe [1 ed.] 9789004309982, 9789004309722

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Post-Western Revolution in Sociology

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/9789004309982_001

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Post-Western Social Sciences and Global Knowledge Series Editor Laurence Roulleau-Berger (CNRS/ENS de Lyon) Editorial Board T.N. Madan (University of Delhi) Xie Lizhong (Peking University) Nira Wickramasinghe (Leiden University) Han Sang-Jing (Seoul National University) Toshio Sugiman (Kyoto University) Svetla Koleva (Institute for the Study of Societies and Knowledge, Sofia)

VOLUME 1

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/psgk





Post-Western Revolution in Sociology From China to Europe By

Laurence Roulleau-Berger Translated by

Nigel Briggs

LEIDEN | BOSTON

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Cover illustration: Painting by Francis Berger. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Roulleau-Berger, Laurence, 1956- author. | Briggs, Nigel. Title: Post-Western revolution in sociology : from China to Europe / by    Laurence Roulleau-Berger ; translated by Nigel Briggs. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2016] | Series: Post-Western social    sciences and global knowledge ; volume 1 | Includes bibliographical    references and index. | Description based on print version record and CIP    data provided by publisher; resource not viewed. Identifiers: LCCN 2016000245 (print) | LCCN 2015045382 (ebook) | ISBN    9789004309982 (E-book) | ISBN 9789004309722 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Sociology--China. | Sociology--Europe. | China--Social    conditions. | Europe--Social conditions. Classification: LCC HM477.C55 (print) | LCC HM477.C55 R68 2016 (ebook) | DDC    301.095--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016000245

Want or need Open Access? Brill Open offers you the choice to make your research freely accessible online in exchange for a publication charge. Review your various options on brill.com/brill-open. Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2352-5827 isbn 978-90-04-30972-2 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-30998-2 (e-book) Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

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To Stéphane, Preden and Marjolaine

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Contents Contents

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Contents

Acknowledgments xi



Introduction 1 1 Post-Colonial Studies and Global Studies 3 2 The Decline of the Western Hegemony 5 3 The Invention of a Post-Western Sociology 6

PART 1 Post-Western Revolution in Sociology: From China to Europe 1

Epistemic Injustice and New Frontiers of Knowledge 13 1 Epistemic Injustice and Autonomy 13 2 What is Post-Western Sociology? 16 3 Scientific Hegemony and Chinese Sociology 19 4 Reinvention and Internal Frontiers in Chinese Sociology 22

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Traditions and Controversies 25 1 Epistemological Unpredictability and Scientific Pluralism in Chinese Sociology 25 2 Affiliations, Shifts and Hybridisations between China and Europe 27 3 Chinese Civilisation and Theoretical Variations Today 28 3.1 Chinese Civilisation and General Scope 29 3.2 Schools of Chinese Sociology Today 29 3.3 Constructivisms and Theoretical Variations 31 4 Traditions and Controversies in European Sociology since 1980 33

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Fabric of Knowledge and Research Fieldwork 37 1 Research Fieldwork and Methodological Theory 37 1.1 Regional Rationalisms and Fieldwork Sciences 37 1.2 Chinese Singularities 38 1.3 Creating Knowledge and Research Methods 40 2 Multi-situated Sociology and Overlapping Perspectives 43 2.1 Methodological Cosmopolitanism and Multi-situated Sociology 43 2.2 Entering Spaces 44

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2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6

Contexts of Meaning and Scopes in Fieldwork Experience 46 Ethnographies of Recognition and Moral Economies 48 Politics of Intimacy and Narrative Pact 50 Translation and Publication 53

PART 2 Sociological Questions in Europe and in China 4

Urban Boundaries, Segregation and Intermediate Spaces 57 1 Social Stratification and Urban Hierarchies in the Chinese City 57 1.1 Urban Society and the New Middle-Classes 58 1.2 Segregation and the Rural Population 59 1.3 New Underclass and Urban Poverty 60 2 Social Division of Space in the European City 61 3 Migration and Ethnic Boundaries in Cities 63 4 “Foreigners” and “Hobos” in Cities 65 5 Circulations and Marketplaces in Chinese and International Cities 68 6 Civil Society and Intermediate Spaces 70

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Uncertainty and Economic Institutions 73 1 Uncertainty and economic transformations 73 2 Markets and Economic Institutions 78 3 Professional Relationships and Regimes of Employment 81 4 Youth Confronted with the “Risk Society” 86 5 The Relationship to Work and Generational Effects 88

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Migrations, Inequalities and Individuation 93 1 Migration Policies and Panoptical Measures 93 2 New Inequalities and Plurality of Migration Routes 95 2.1 Mono-migrations and Linear Routes 96 2.2 Pluri-migrations and Spatial Capital 96 3 Gender, Economic Activities and Migrations. 97 4 Migration and Urban Integration 99 5 Migration, Employment and Flexibility 101 6 Social Capital and Migratory Circulations 103 7 Migratory Experiences and Bifurcations 106 8 Migration, Local and Global Stratification 109

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State, Social Conflict and Collective Action 111 1 State and Citizenship 111 2 Bio-political Apparatuses and Self-government 114 3 Social Conflicts and Mobilisations in China 116 4 New Social Protests in China 119 5 Collective Action, Violences and Riots in Europe 121 6 Social Conflict and Care Policies 126

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Ecological Risks and Environmental Sociology in Europe and China 130 1 Social-ecological Change, Inequalities and Environmental Injustice 131 2 Risks, Multi-governance and Bio-political Order 134 3 Geographies of Care and Communities of Destiny 136 4 Conciliation, Negotiation and Disputes 137 5 Regimes of Action, Capabilities and Re-socialisation 139

Part 3 Continuities and Discontinuities of Theoretical Knowledge 9

Continuities of Knowledge and Common Concepts 143 1 Structural Processes, Dominations and Resistances 143 2 Social Stratification and Inequalities 149 3 Mobility and Contemporary Societies 154 4 Social Networks and Social Capital 156 5 Autonomy and Subjectivity 159 6 Frontiers of We and Me 162

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Discontinuities of Knowledge and Singular Concepts 166 1 Public Space and Pluralisation of Norms 166 2 Subjectivation and the Struggle for Recognition 169 3 Society and Intermediate Spaces in Europe 173 4 Diffused Religiousness in China 176 Conclusion 181



Bibliography 187 Index 222

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Contents

Acknowledgments Acknowledgments

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Acknowledgments This book is the result of a very successful and quite long cooperation with my Chinese colleagues started in 2006. I would like to thank warmly Li Peilin, Professor at the Institute of Sociology and Vice-President of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (Beijing), we have long enjoyed rich and excellent scientific exchanges. The Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) and the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon signed an agreement to jointly establish an International Associated Laboratory (LIA) “Post-Western Sociologies and Fieldwork in France and in China” in 2013. Professor Li Peilin and I are in charge of this laboratory for China and France respectively. Many thanks are given to my colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Professors: He Rong, Yang Yiyin, Li Chunling, Luo Hongguang and Liu Zhengai; at the Department of Sociology, Beijing University: Professors Xie ­Lizhong, Liu Shiding, Qu Jingdong, Qiu Zeqi, Liu Neng, Tong Xin and Sun Feiyu, associated Professor; at the School of Sociology and Political Sciences, Shanghai University: Professors Li Youmei, Zhang Wenhong and Liu Yuzhao; at the Departement of Sociology, Tsinghua University  : Professors Guo Yuhua and Shen Yuan : and at the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Nanjing University: Professors Zhou Xiaohong and Fan Ke. I also would like to thank warmly Senior Translator Nigel Briggs, ENS de Lyon, for his very rigourous and excellent translation in English.

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Acknowledgments

Introduction Introduction

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Introduction In today’s world, the social sciences have become internationalised and have been rejuvenated in other societies such as China, India, Brazil... Within a movement towards the circulation and globalisation of knowledge, new centres and new peripheries form and new hierarchies appear – more or less discretely – producing competition and rivalry in the development of “new” knowledge. Centres of gravity in human science knowledge have been displaced towards Asia – South, East, Central and Pacific Asia – where, in regional forums, intellectuals from China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and India continually discuss the modes of producing epistemic autonomies in a context of nonWestern hegemony. These exchanges are widely ignored in the Western world where numerous intellectuals still believe in the reign of the universalisation of the Western approach to science (Kuhn, 2013). Indeed, the early construction of dominances and hierarchies between Western, Eastern and Far-Eastern contexts has produced instances of ignorance and occultation of entire bodies of knowledge. Western sociologists have not a good access to the narratives of distant societies such as China, Korea and Japan and have continually found refuge in ethnocentric positions. However, if India, Taiwan and Japan have been engaged in partial Wester­ nisation processes for several decades and Korea for a little less, the thirty years of Maoism closed the gates to China with the result that Chinese intellectuals could not participate in the development of sociology, a forbidden field from 1949 to 1979. This blank page in history produced a double invisibilisation affecting not only the knowledge produced in that period but also that produced before 1949. On a continental scale, Chinese sociologists have recreated and instilled new life into a social science which had become a dead or inert science. The rebirth of sociological thinking in China represents a fundamental moment in the history of global thought. Western worlds have ignored the sciences of Chinese society which, nevertheless, constitute practices as ancient as those of Western society. In these Western worlds, there has been a sort of epistemological, ideological, ethical and political indecency consisting in not seeking to break the dissymmetry between Chinese and European knowledge. Although the Chinese language might represent a barrier, the boundaries of bodies of knowledge perceived, experienced and recognised as more legitimate than others have been fixed, in the main, by Orientalists. Therefore, in this work, we start from Chinese thought to return to European thought in the field of sociology and, above all, open a new conceptual horizon around doing Post-Western Sociology together involving both Chinese and European sociologists. (Roulleau-Berger, Li Peilin, 2012) © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/9789004309982_002

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Introduction

This book is the fruit of ten years of exchanges, discussions, comparisons and debates – focusing on sociologies, their de-Westernisation and internationalisation – with Chinese colleagues from the Institute of Sociology of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (Beijing) and the sociology departments of the Universities of Peking, Tsinghua (Beijing), Shanghai and Nanjin. It is rooted in an epistemological approach to the sociology in which the diversity of knowledge is organised in conceptual spaces linked to paradigms and programmes which in turn are linked to ethnocentred knowledge processes. As important as the phenomena and issues of the domination and overlapping of non-Western theories by Western theories might be, the issue of the blurring of boundaries is of greater importance, particularly the blurring of the boundaries between Western and non-Western sociologies. This blurring contains non-declared competition and struggles for the recognition of ignored or forgotten scientific cultures. The construction of a de-centred perspective enables us to gain access to: a plurality of social worlds; a diversity of narratives told by societies about themselves; and the analysis of modes of legitimisation and/or disqualification of narratives. This approach enables the undoing of intellectual dissymmetries constructed by ethnocentrisms from determined places and temporalities. However, we must make it clear that, in writing this book, we make no claim to exhaustively cover the whole body of Chinese and European sociological research. Moreover, entire areas of Chinese and European sociologies will remain untouched insofar as we have not sought to describe the state of sociologies in context but rather to work upon the intervals and gaps between them in order to reveal a Post Western Space in which the sociologies come into contact, meet, exchange and understand or fail to understand each other. From the Chinese experience we are opening a Post-Western Space of knowl­edge which means co-production and co-construction of common knowl­­edge. This is a “global change” in sociology which imposes theoretical and methodological detours, displacements, reversals and conversions. After Post-Colonial Studies, we have witnessed the emergence of what we call a Post-Western Sociology in the context of globalisation and circulation of ideas, concepts and paradigms in which some scholars are producing epistemic autonomy (Roulleau-Berger, 2011; Roulleau-Berger, 2014e). Post-Western Sociology is first and foremost rhizomatous in that it is constructed from connections between points located in knowledge spaces governed by very different regimes of signs and the non-correspondence of different types of situated knowledge. We will stop to conceive relationships as being between entities, worlds, pre-constituted cultures, or in terms of a clear and contrasted heterogeneity between these elements. An unmaking of pairs in order to work

Introduction

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on the variations of degree and intensity, the continuities and discontinuities of sociological knowledge. 1

Post-Colonial Studies and Global Studies

Easternism had meant the implementation of processes for collecting, capturing and orienting gestures, discourses and points of view (Agamben, 2007). This capture process has been particularly selective rendering active knowledge invisible and apprehending “inert” knowledge such as that linked to ancient philosophies to incorporate and imprison it in sub-categories. During this period of the internationalisation of knowledge, the criticism of Eurocentrism – already initiated by Edward Saïd, Immanuel Wallerstein, Dipesh Chakabarty, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Syed Farid Alatas amongst others – has gained momentum. A consensus has formed around the idea of the crisis of Western civilisation. In an article which appeared recently in the French journal Socio, a central figure of Indian human and social sciences, Rajeev Bhargava (2013), quotes Sri Aurobindo (1997: 39): Nothing is our own, nothing native to our intelligence, all is derived. As little have we understood the new knowledge; we have only understood what the Europeans want us to think about themselves and their modern civilisation. Bhargava challenges the situation in which, in various parts of the world, the analytical categories are derived from the Western experience and argues in favour of putting an end to “the epistemic injustice of the colonialism of this very small group of societies that we call the West”. We have entered a period of graduated de-Westernisation of knowledge and co-production of relationships between situated knowledge. We are at the centre of a global turning-point – distinct from those before and their ephemeral nature – a turning-point in the history of the social sciences (Dufoix, 2013). In Asia, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian and other intellectuals have mobilised to “fight” for the recognition of scientific productions rendered invisible by the effects of domination and consequently not perceived as being as equally valid as European productions. Over the last twenty years the crux of the matter has become the issue of the international recognition of “decolonialised” knowledge (Bancel, Bernault, Blanchard, Boubeker, Mbembe, Vergès, 2010). Intellectuals have been confronted with epistemic discrimination (Grosfoguel, 2010) and methodological eurocentrism focused on the

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Introduction

Western model. These intellectuals, particularly sociologists, have reacted against this Eurocentric fundamentalism which considers that the only epistemology capable of producing critical thought is the Western tradition and thus consigns them to “suburbs of knowledge”. Knowledge produced outside the Western world has been and still partially is considered as coming from “suburbs of knowledge”, places of lesser legitimacy. The issue of the de-colonialisation of knowledge is therefore raised in sociology. Another issue is the idea of the on-going de-colonialisation reconfiguration process within ethnoscapes (Appaduraï, 1996) which have taken shape out of assemblages of knowledge originating with sociologists from China, Japan, Taiwan and Korea. These ethnoscapes may have limited contact with European scientific spaces and are defined according to scientific conventions and norms which are distantiated from forms of colonial domination of knowledge. According to Stéphane Dufoix and Alain Caillé (2013), the leading lights of Global Studies – apart from Ulrick Beck – such as Arjun Appaduraï (1996), Saskia Sassen (2007), Immanuel Wallerstein (2004) and Zygmunt Baumann (2000) are quoted by European sociologists whereas Kenneth Pomeranz (2010), Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000), Ulf Hannnerz (2010) and John Urry (2000) are mentioned to a lesser extent while other authors such as Patrick Manning or Peggy Levitt are rarely referred to in European social sciences. Moreover, Global Studies trends such as Global History are considered as always promoting European thought and providing a profoundly European critique of Eurocentrism (Bertrand, 2013). Although the discourse on the global issue might signal a major transformation in the history of the social sciences, we will join Michaël Kuhn in positing the hypothesis of a scientific revolution in the social sciences. This scientific revolution imposes detours, displacements, reversals, conversions and even epistemic vertigo. More specifically, in sociology, within the perspective of critical science, we propose the manufacture of knowledge inherited from both Western and Eastern traditions – situated and universal, local and global. Western sociology, like Western anthropology, has resisted the post-colonial theoretical movement initially championed by researchers in history, philosophy and literature (Saillant, Kilani, Bideau, 2011). Few Western sociologists work on de-centring and look at what is on the other side of the boundaries of knowledge. The publication of Orientalism by Edward Saïd was a landmark in the history of post-colonial thinking. The works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, particularly “Can the Subaltern Speak?” also had a decisive impact on the international social sciences scene. However, these works have only recently begun to be discussed and used in European sociology. Post-colonial theory has been based on the slow de-construction of an “us and them” through the opening of a universal space.

Introduction

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This volume is positioned within reflexivity in sociology in which the diversity of knowledge is organised in conceptual spaces, linked to paradigms, and programs linked to ethno-centred knowledge processes. If we go beyond the issue of the phenomena of domination and the overlapping of non-Western theories – particularly those elaborated in China thousands of years ago – and Western theories in the social sciences, then the focus is more upon the issue of the blurring of the boundaries between Western and Eastern sociologies, a blurring which contains undeclared competition and struggles for the recognition of ignored or forgotten scientific cultures. This volume is a contribution to the sociological debate which takes as its starting point the putting into perspective of Western sociological knowledge in the light of non-hegemonic knowledge and proposes a co-production of new narrative frameworks opening out onto a non-uniform plurality of accounts while also revealing the singularities of the co-present societies. 2

The Decline of the Western Hegemony

Michaël Kuhn (2012), uses the UNESCO World Science Report (2010) to support the hypothesis of the marginalisation of Eurocentrism and the weakening of European traditions in science. Although scientific thought has been constructed as an element of Western societies, although it has appeared incapable of explaining phenomena produced in other societies, this phase in global sociological reasoning has challenged the conditions for creating universalising and tautological accounts in Western social sciences. Behind Kuhn’s critique one can perceive a diversity of Westernisms – some more Eurocentric; others more Americanocentric – either merging or in tension. As there is a diversity of Westernisms there is also a plurality of Easternisms situated in different epistemic spaces and constructed and ordered into hierarchies according to differentiated political, historical and civilisational processes. The ambition of Post-Western Sociology is to tear down or weaken the hierarchies between Westernisms and Easternisms (Koleva, 2002). Although the social sciences and particularly sociology may have been almost monopolised by certain Western countries, for the most part they were born in Europe. Today, however, the Western world has lost its hegemony over the production of their paradigms (Wieviorka, 2007) which are organised around two master narratives: the superiority of Western civilisation (through progress and reason) and the belief in the continuous growth of capitalism. Thus, for Sujata Patel (2013), the binary oppositions constructed between the West and the East have created hierarchies positing a universality for “I” and particularities for the Other. These binary oppositions within a colonial or

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Introduction

neo-colonial perspective have produced dangerous amalgams, collapsing, for example, India and Hinduism into each other. Paradoxically, voices of infralocal sociological traditions contribute to an international sociology because they produce networks between colonial societies and non-colonial societies. After de-constructing the de-provincialisation of European universalism, various theories have been advanced: Arif Dirlik (2007) proposed the theory of global modernity, Ulrick Beck (2006) the theory of cosmopolitanism, Michaël Burawoy (2005) the theory of public sociology. However, for Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande (2010), following in the footsteps of Samuel N. Eisenstadt (2002), we are experiencing a “cosmopolitan turn” opening a conceptual space to the possibility of a variety of different and autonomous interlinked modernities between the First and the Second Modernities. Global entanglement (Randeria, Eckert, 2009) and interconnectedness are the conditions required to understand the assemblages and dis-assemblages between Western and non-Western societies. But in this perspective we have to take into account new forms of methodological nationalism from non-Western societies which have emerged out of a narrative based on resistance against Western hegemonies. Here we propose a theory of Post-Western Sociology which apprehends the sociological knowledge produced by these cosmopolitan modernities and ­creates exchanges between them within a dynamic relationship of equivalence. This approach highlights the shared concepts, concepts situated in Western and non-Western – in this instance Chinese – spaces and global concepts. The target is therefore the forging of conceptual tools for the recognition of the forms and types of cosmopolitan modernity and above all the connections, interactions and exchanges between them as well as societal discon­tinuities within different Western and non-Western modernities. The concept of cosmopolitisation allows the articulation of the theory of reflexive modernisation – opening out upon the existence of multiple modernities – and the theory of multiple modernities – opening out upon the possibility of discontinuous social change. Westernisms form graduated, plastic and moving hierarchies which rapidly become elusive. It is therefore vital to undo both Westernisms and Easternisms in order to reveal transnational spaces which bring into the light of day a tissue of knowledge which is still partially concealed even – in some cases – invisible. 3

The Invention of a Post-Western Sociology

Post-Western Sociology does not only mean encouraging a multiplicity of nonWestern narrative voices but also, and above all, identifying the theories they contain and seeing how these can assist us in re-visiting and re-examining

Introduction

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Western theories. Post-Western Sociology proceeds from de-centrings and the renewing of universalisms originating in different Eastern and Western spaces. Post-Western Sociology is above all relational, dialogue-based and multi-situated. Contrary to global sociology and similarly to connected history (Bertrand, 2013), Post-Western Sociology refuses term for term structural comparisons and favours intersecting viewpoints concerning registers of understanding, agreement and disagreement as well as the scientific practices of the co-present actors. This positioning goes beyond Post-Colonial Studies which could be understood as reinforcing hegemonic positions by means of a strong assertion of critical postures visible in the work of certain intellectuals from the Anglo-Saxon academic world. In Post-Western Sociology a strong awareness of hege­monisms serves to reveal transnational knowledge spaces in which the diversity of situated knowledge and shared or joint knowledge is rendered visible. In this volume, we will adopt a perspective allowing the conception of zones of encounter, overlapping, tension, conflict and fertilisation as well as “epistemological blanks” between European and Asian social sciences; while being fully aware that it would appear less relevant to conceptualise the plurality of “provinces of knowledge” than the modes of formation of continuities and discontinuities, the combinations and disjunctions between the places of situated knowledge in various parts of the world. Post-Western Sociology can also be defined as a global critical sociology. Sociology has often asserted its ability to produce situated critical science. On a global scale, the thinking of Pierre Bourdieu has been the strongest expression of a French critical science. The centres producing critical sociology have remained mostly local and have slowly moved to the South where invisibilised critical science has been produced by intellectuals facing political, economic and intellectual hegemonies linked to globalised capitalism... For its part, Western sociology has remained very Western while expressing a desire to expand intellectual horizons. The vast majority of sociologists from the West are massively ignorant of the productions of sociologists from the South, whether from China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, India, the Middle East or African countries... What is sociology today? Is it limited to only those countries which saw its birth and development such as France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom... the United States? Or does it result from controlled assemblages and syncretisms between sociologies from both the West and the East? In this work, we have opted for the second proposition. However, in order to progress towards a global critical sociology we must open knowledge spaces which have not all been rendered visible in academic spaces. Being fully aware of a strong lack of symmetry in the visibility of knowledge produced in Europe and in China, we shall open a space for active

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Introduction

dialogue between western and non-western sociologies to show that contemporary sociology can only be the result of intellectual dynamics between the various centres of the West and the East. Starting with China and returning to Europe constitutes a stage in the conception of a global-centric sociology. This approach converges with that of anthropologists who have challenged their “central” position and begun a dialogue between Western and nonWest­ern anthropologies so as to progress towards a non-hegemonic global anthropology ( Saillant, Kilani, Bideau, 2011). There are numerous avenues leading to emancipation from Westernisms:

• Awareness and use of non-hegemonic theories while keeping in mind the fact that they cannot become hegemonic • The production of a renovated Westernism integrating fragments of • •

non-hegemonic thinking while retaining epistemic frameworks derived from hegemonic frameworks The construction of genuine planes of epistemological equivalence between hegemonic and non-hegemonic thinking The co-production of hybrid thinking by means of a strong emancipation from the processes of epistemic colonialisation

Post-Western Sociology is elaborated from the connections between field practices and the intersecting exploration of what individuals in different situations do, say and think. It utilises not the differences but the intervals between the perspectives, practices and concepts of Chinese and European sociologies to extricate itself from mutual indifference ( Jullien, 2007). Here, the principle of term to term structural comparisons of institutions, organisations and social, political and economic systems is rejected. This approach requires the invention of multi-situated narrative formats accounting for an epistemological plurality within which researchers work at erasing the boundaries constructed by different types of Westernism. This is the starting point of the construction process of Post-Western Sociology and as such it precedes the conception of theoretical and methodological combinations and assemblages. International sociology and global sociology do not imply this erasing of epistemological boundaries: this is precisely where the distinction between Post-Western Sociology, international sociology and global sociology lies. This work is organised in three parts. In the first part we will raise the issue of the production of epistemic autonomies when faced with epistemic injustices and then propose a definition of Post-Western Sociology. Then we will introduce a presentation of the post-1979

Introduction

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work of re-inventing sociology in China which is widely ignored in Western social sciences and reveals situations of epistemic injustice (Bhargava, 2013). Secondly, putting the interval between Western and non-Western sociologies to good use, we identify the traditions and scientific controversies between Chinese and European sociologies, focusing more particularly on French sociology which appears to have had a more dominant status in the history of Western hegemonies. We will demonstrate how the “shared” gives rise to a diversity of differentiated constructivisms in both contexts. We conclude the first part with a presentation of a methodological position which is liberated from methodological nationalism as well as being multisituated and supported by an ethnography of recognition announcing field practices: means of producing sociological knowledge in coherence with “PostWesternism” – a situation in which the fabric of knowledge is born out of reciprocal capabilities to work upon the variations of the interval between Western and non-Western sociologies. The second part of the work portrays shared common research objects studied by Chinese and European sociologists; these are contextualised and differently situated in the two contexts while enabling the interval between European and Chinese sociologies to be maximally exploited. They will be dealt with using the following thematics:

• Urban hierarchies and internal boundaries • Uncertainty and economic institutions • Migrations, inequalities and individuation • State, social conflict and collective action • Ecological risks and the sociology of environment in Europe and China We will deal with these research issues through the identification of specific spaces and shared spaces formed by situated intellectual traditions. Moreover, entire areas will be left untouched in both Chinese and European sociologies insofar as we have employed the intervals between them and have in no way sought to establish a panoramic overview of the sociologies in context. For example, although, since 1979, Chinese rural sociology has mobilised the majority of Chinese sociologists in the study of the evolutions of the economic status of peasants, the development of the rural economy, the social differentiation process of the peasant class and its modes of living, this has no equivalent in Western European sociology in which the rural issue has been decreasingly studied over the last thirty years. Conversely, research in the so­ciology of art and culture in France represents a veritable sociological tradi-

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Introduction

tion which has barely emerged in China. These dissymmetries in sociological knowledge reveal the distances and specificities of sociologies in context. In the third and final part of this work we will employ the intervals and proximities between European and Chinese sociologies to co-produce a PostWestern space; we will examine those forms of knowledge that appear to be specific, those that seem to be the product of re-appropriation, re-interpretation, borrowing and hybridisation and those that seem to have been produced in areas of non-translatability: that is, in spaces in which research practices and sociological knowledge in Europe and China do or do not correspond with each other. Consequently, in this part, we deal with the continuities and discontinuities of sociological knowledge, the singular and common concepts between major theoretical issues in European and Chinese sociologies. As illustrations of continuities of knowledge and common concepts we have selected:

• structural processes, dominations and resistances • social stratification and inequalities • mobility and contemporary societies • Social networks and social capital • Autonomy and subjectivity • Frontiers of “we” and “me” As illustrations of discontinuities of knowledge and singular concepts we will deal with:

• Public space and pluralisation of norms • Subjectivation and the struggle for recognition • Society and intermediate spaces in Europe • Diffracted religiousness in China The production of critical global social science via the invention of PostWestern Sociology means releasing into the wide world the debate about minority expression and the voice of subaltern groups contained in “cultural studies” and integrating it in the broader field of the social sciences. It also means leaving behind Post-Colonial Studies with its proposal to re-visit the perception of the Other since we propose bringing multiple Others to dialogue, exchange and work together. The crux and whole point of this work reside in understanding how orders of knowledge and recognition are positioned in relationships of equivalence and combined in relationships of exchange, tension and fertilisation in the production of a Post-Western space.

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Introduction

Part 1 Post-Western Revolution in Sociology: From China to Europe

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Introduction

Introduction to Part 1

Using the face-to-face confrontation of new tendencies in European sociology and Chinese sociology (Roulleau-Berger, Li Peilin, 2012) and the symmetries and dissymmetries between different sociological fields, we will investigate the ways in which dialogues, exchanges, connections and disjunctions are formed between seats of sociological knowledge located in Europe and in China. Consequently, we will open a transnational intermediate space that is both local and global to draw conjunctive and disjunctive theoretical spaces where the Post-Western Sociology can emerge and be developed. Our aim will be to capture cultural variations in interpretative flexibility and their effects on the implementation of theoretical methodologies. We will examine how research practices and sociological knowledge are constructed by analyzing the different forms of field experience in sociology to analyze the process of elaboration of sociological knowledge.

Epistemic Injustice and New Frontiers of Knowledge

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Chapter 1

Epistemic Injustice and New Frontiers of Knowledge 1

Epistemic Injustice and Autonomy

How is the hierarchy between Western and Chinese sociologies as constructed by colonialism, to be broken down? How to break hierarchies constructed by scientific hegemony? Anthropologists such as Chakrabarty (2000) proposed in Subaltern Studies (Bhabha, 2007) the “provincialisation of Europe”; then PostColonial Studies were focused on the idea of taking over the broader narratives and paradigms. It seems to us less pertinent now to address the plurality of “provinces of knowledge” than to confront the new centralities. Instead of conceiving the plurality of provinces of knowledge, continuities between European and Chinese sociology have to be taken into account so that transnational knowledge may emerge in social sciences, free from all forms of Orientalism. Sociological thinking, like all thinking in the social sciences, is linked to the evolution of the Western society from which it emerged (Kilani, 2009). While the growing pluralisation of contemporary societies calls into question the very idea of society as a narrative linked to the narrative of modernity, particularly European modernity, Western thought has continued to perceive itself as the universal mediator for all other histories (Chinese, Indian, Arab, African, Brazilian, etc.) (Laplantine, 2007). Various forms of academic colonialism have marked the development of sociological thinking. The most pressing task, however, is to investigate the ways in which continuities and discontinuities, connections and disjunctions are formed between seats of knowledge located at different places in the world and potentially capable of bringing to light a transnational intermediate space that is both local and global. Over the past twenty years, it has become evident that one of the challenges facing sociology has been how to grant due recognition at the international level to the knowledge produced as a consequence of dewesternization (Roulleau-Berger, 2011). Rajev Bhargava (2013) considers that an epistemic injustice is a form of cultural injustice which occurs when the concepts and categories which a people include and use to understand its universe are replaced or affected by the concepts and categories of the colonisers. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/9789004309982_003

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When the epistemic framework of a group changes under the pressure of another group it is under epistemic constraint and is the victim of injustice which, according to Bhargava, may take on three forms:

• The imposition of a change affecting the content of the epistemic frameworks • The alteration of fundamental epistemic frameworks • The damaging or loss of the capacity of individuals to maintain or develop their own epistemic frameworks

Epistemic injustice is constructed by specific discourse, acts and practices and processes of capture, misappropriation and occultation of knowledge. Inter­ national circulations enable the understanding of how globalisations impart form upon political and economic institutions, Nation-States as well as the collective and individual social practices of intellectuals. Reciprocally, these circulation also enable the understanding of how they are redefined within global frameworks. Panoptic processes partially configure but also generate or block intel­ lec­tual paths and itineraries. They define differentiated accessibilities to aca­­demic spaces and produce subjects and dispersed multi-localised powers. They result from combinations of activities and spaces which are constructed from circulations, regimes of knowledge, modes of visibility and small or large coordination networks with fewer of more ramifications between intellectual categories. These knowledge processes concern hierarchies and rankings which assign places and roles within a division of scientific labour. Epistemic injustice also means epistemic autonomy. Epistemic autonomy signifies the passage from a colonial frame of norms and conventions of knowledge to another epistemic frame of indigenous norms and conventions. It requires a re-appropriation of a relationship to the world that makes sense for those formerly colonised. That passage from one epistemic frame to another supposes a very vigorous epistemological and political work for the intellectuals of the colonised countries confronted with Western categories of thought still perceived as “universal” and emerging from very situated practices, that is to say, Western (Barghava, 2013). These categories of thought are being increasingly declared as limited and unfit to societal contexts, especially Asian ones. Most Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Indian sociologists consider that the imposition of Western epistemic frameworks has prevented them from accessing their own systems of meaning and interpretation and from understanding their own societies (Nishihara, 2010). An epistemic autonomy is asserted today, one which has been constructed differently according to societal contexts (Xie Lizhong, 2009, 2012 a, b).

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In China, the assertion of an epistemic autonomy among sociologists means the re-establishment of continuities with epistemic frameworks which had been constructed before 1949, then forgotten and which are completely unknown in the West. Today, epistemic autonomy means re-establishing continuities with epistemic frames built before 1949 and forgotten. It means creating one’s own epistemic autonomy by taking inspiration from philosophical legacies linked to Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. It also means, however, the creation of specific paradigms freed from Western presuppositions. Today, certain Chinese intellectuals think that their categories are still over-derived from Western theories. For example Li Peilin (2015) proposed the concept of “Eastern modernisation” to demonstrate that modernisation is fundamental for Eastern societies such as China or India, but does not mean “a temporal suspension” and is a concept to define the unicity of Chinese experience. For instance, the Tianxianism perspective appears as a universal non hegemonic perspective inspired from ancient Chinese philosophy in which the world belongs to everyone in harmony with nature and culture. It is an attempt to conciliate a universalism and what could relate to East-Asian cultures. In South-Korea, where the fast economic and social transformations can be compared with the Chinese situation, demand for an epistemic autonomy partly goes through processes of testing and reformulating Western theories, like those of Ulrich Beck’s first and second modernity. Han Sang Jin and Young Hee shim (2010) argue for a methodological cosmopolitanism “from the bottom” based on what they call an active dialogue instead of a passive one, taking into consideration the genealogical characteristics of Asian history and culture in order to define the plural Asian modernities. Kwang-Yeong Shin (2013) also talks of the double indigenisation of social sciences and symmetrical comparison so as to open a new path to non-hegemonic knowledge; on the one hand, double indigenisation means considering Western theories as indigenous and evaluating them consequently, as rooted in the Western-world history; on the other hand, it means reestablishing the institutional symmetries and resisting forms of domination in disciplinary fields. In Japan, according to Kazuhisa Nishihara (2010), sociologists, after having suffered from the influence of American positivism, then that of Parsons and Marx, have turned towards phenomenological approaches all the while integrating authors like Habermas, Bourdieu and Giddens to state today their fitting into a transnational and global sociological space. Shujiro Yasawa (2013) shows how a reflexive sociology organised around the production of a transcendental subject is developing: Yasusuke Murakami (1996) has distinguished a transcendental approach focused on a post-reflexive self disjointed from the world of life and from a hermeneutic approach in which the pre-reflexive self

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appears as embedded in the world of life. Japanese sociologists produce a form of epistemic autonomy by proposing a sociology of the transcendental subject which flirts with the idea of paving the way for a cosmopolitan humanity (Lee Sung-Tae, 2016). In India, social sciences were born under British colonial rule. Sociology emerged in 1919, at Mumbai University. During the time of post-independence, sociology produced a replica of the uses of anthropological theories and those of the struggle against the production of the discourse of the colonial State on the Indian society, or “Sinhalese”, as a non-modern society (Madan, 2011); in that colonial narrative, India and Hinduism, already present in the 19th century, were assimilated. It recategorised the different religious communities in five major majoritarian and minoritarian religious traditions. In the history of the construction of sociology, methodological nationalism constituted in India a political and intellectual resource for distancing oneself from dominant and colonial knowledge and putting forward an alternative voice. That form of methodological nationalism had an influence in widening, rather than in diminishing, international sociology. Nowadays, a significant number of Indian intellectuals defend the idea of deconstructing the provincialism of European universalisms by recognising a genealogy of knowledge which is simultaneously European and linked to colonial history (Patel, 2013). Since the 1980’s, new theories have been created in India, especially in the field of subaltern studies, post-colonial studies and gender studies, alongside an awareness that there would be no consensus yet about knowing what is to be designated as indigenous or not (Uberoi, Nandini, Deshpande, 2013). 2

What is Post-Western Sociology?

Western sociology gravitates according to its own modalities around central devices of knowledge in which “issues”, in the sense of Karl Popper, and “enigmas”, in the sense of Thomas Kuhn, occur. They refer to the cognitive situation that triggers a research: a “dissonance” between a phenomena and its explicative frame. Post-Western Sociology means working towards displacement and the construction of planes of epistemic equivalence between the conjunctive and disjunctive boundaries of knowledge to struggle against any form of “epistemic injustice” Thus new centres of knowledge production are born out of: 1) the refusal to imitate Western epistemic frameworks; 2) a concern to control hybridisations of Western and non-Western knowledge based on the dynamics of the deterritorialisation and re-territorialisation of non indigenous knowledge; 3) the

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recognition and validation of places of conjunction and disjunction between Western and non-Western knowledge; and 4) the existence of “epistemic white zones”, that is, zones in which the epistemic frameworks constructed in different societal contexts cannot come into contact. If, in the 1960’s, the “Post-Colonial” discourse expressed struggles for the recognition of non-Western human and social sciences within the international space, here we are talking of a “Post-Western” era which comes after the “Post-Colonial” and recognises the end of the hegemony of the principal intellectual traditions of the West in order to apprehend the plurality of hegemonies of different intellectual traditions between which relationships of exchange, conflict, competition, accommodation and indifference are developed. Before precisely stating what we mean by “Post-Western” it is worth devoting a few words to Post-Colonialism. Post-Colonial Studies continue to produce a binary vision of the world experienced whereas Post-Westernism can produce a plural and dynamic vision of the world experienced. Talking of Post-Western Sociology means producing a space for thinking which is based upon European, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Brazilian… sociologies and which has them exchange and influence each other. Whereas Post-Colonialism has been widely criticised for its ambivalence in the way it blurs the distinction between the colonised and the coloniser, its universalising displacements and its “depoliticising implications” (Shohat, 1992), Post-Westernism relies on “vernacular cosmopolitanisms” (Bhabha, 2007) and intellectual, moral and political resources which produce new knowledge. We define Post-Western Sociology first and foremost as rhizomatous in that it is constructed from connections between points located in knowledge spaces governed by very different regimes of signs and the non-correspondence of different types of situated knowledge. The knowledge produced in each context is conceived for its intrinsic value, but the eye is focused on lines of segmentation, stratification, escape or de-territorialisation (Deleuze, 1980). Post-Western Sociology is constructed from similarities and differences which cannot be conceived according to a binary mode. It relies on different knowledge processes:

• “Knowledge niches” which appear to be specifically European or Asian and do not signify a transferability of knowledge • Intermediary epistemological processes which encourage the partial •

transfer of sociological knowledge from Europe to Asia and from Asia to Europe Transnational epistemological spaces in which European knowledge and Asian knowledge are placed in equivalence

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Therefore Post-Western Sociology means allowing a rhizomatous, archipelagous or diasporic thought to spread against binary, static thoughts, against atavistic sociologies.The issue of untranslatability as a condition of translatability is then raised. Untranslatability does not mean the failure of the passage of one code to another, but rather an asymmetrical ontological relationships as a foundation for the production of knowledge (Borutti, 1999). We agree here with Affergan who considers the “untranslatability as a condition of translatability” or translation indetermination; indeed, we do not deal with transparent languages and worlds, but we have to take into account their mutual opacity linked to meaning disparities. We are confronted with the issue of knowing how to translate what we look at in different under-examined contexts, what we can translate and what we cannot, and why in that way rather than another. A positivist version of translation encouraging belief in a logic of term to term, segment to segment, item to item correspondence cannot be used here because we are more likely to restitute fragments of society through horizons of meaning. In this epistemic perspective, the sociologist is invited to inquire into the risks of excess and the lack of meaning that he may introduce through translation. As Thomas Kuhn has shown (1983), science is built around paradigms and perspectives which encounter a certain success at a precise moment, and then fade, dry up, or are even abandoned and then forgotten. This author mentioned the “aptitude to identify a default” as a heuristic attempt at epistemological clarification by making it a necessary condition for the production of scientific knowledge. Emancipating oneself from any form of Easternism passes through the identification of defaults in order to conceive scientific revolutions from a non-linear substitution processing by which a spent paradigm is replaced by a new paradigm. In contemporary Chinese, Japanese and Korean sociologies, the dynamic co-existence of different paradigms is not an issue. It requires the acknowledgment of blind-spots in Western theories, and the fact of looking at an object by inhabiting it and by seising all things according to the facet turned toward us (Merleau-Ponty, 1945). This Post-Western scientific revolution directly implies that sociologists work in contexts of uncertainty in which there can be no general and unified theory, nor any unequivocal connections between facts and theoretical propositions, nor an opportunity to found a universal knowledge about particular facts and to blend them into a coherent whole. Post-Western Sociology cannot be considered as a universal and organising gaze. Here, according to Roland Barthes, the researcher is invited to learn again how to “unstitch reality” from other cuttings, other syntaxes, to discover unheard-of positions of the subject in the enunciation, to displace his own topology. It is consequently

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less a question of adopting a comparative position than of delving into a work of epistemological reconfiguration so as to deconstruct reality on the basis of other cuttings, proceeding step by step, one small journey at a time, so as to escape from the contingency of the Western-inspired “normal science”, and to keep at arms’ length our conceptual habitus, and to work on gaps slipping from our mental, historical and psychological landmarks. 3

Scientific Hegemony and Chinese Sociology

Forms of scientific hegemony have marked the development of sociology, the invention of Orientalism (Saïd, 2003) meant apparatuses which capture and ­orient scientific knowledge. Dominations and hierarchies have been constructed between Eastern and Western contexts; this has resulted in large expanses of knowledge being ignored (Roulleau-Berger, 2011; Koleva, 2002). For example, the effects of cultural hegemony and political imperialism have prevented the recognition of knowledge produced in different places and at different times. In Europe most intellectuals ignore renowned pre-1949 Chinese sociology; Li Peilin and Qu Jingdong (2011) in A History of Sociology in China in the First Half of the Twentieth Century have demonstrated how Chinese Sociology flourished in a context of intellectual blooming comparable to that of the Spring and Autumn periods and to that of the warring States. Although the influence of Western sciences increased in the East, several ideological movements emerged in reaction to the violence of the foreigners’ invasions and the humiliations inflicted on Chinese people. This is a context of social reform in which intellectuals defend pragmatic positions. These authors note that, in his 1923 conference “A history of thought in China during the last three centuries”, Liang Qichao considers that Chinese thought, since the 16th century, has been a pragmatic one which has developed in reaction to six hundred years of Taoism; Li Peilin and Qu Jingdong have distinguished five currents of ideas: historical materialism, rural construction and the social survey campaign; the “Chinese School”; the “academic school” or “scholastic school”, and the study of social history. Li Peilin and Qu Jingdong distinguish different moments in the scientific history of Chinese sociology in the first half of the 20th century. The first marxist Chinese sociology used to rely both on historical materialism and scien­tific socialism: historical materialism is a kind of “new sociology”, a “modern so­­ ciology”, which distinguishes itself from traditional Western sociology. Then the social survey movement corresponds to an important movement hatched at the beginning of the 20th century. It simultaneously opposes the tradition

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of Confucian thought and the mimicking of the elder or even the fascination for the foreigners. Here to carry out surveys and fieldwork means living in the countryside with the peasants and developing scientific methods. Tao Menghe and Li Jinghan became leaders of that movement and carried out numerous social surveys on labour, unemployment, poverty and the elderly. Tao Menghe’s book, An analysis of the cost of living in Beijing, remains a major achievement of the beginnings of social surveys in China. In 1925, Li Jinghan published one of the first social survey models in China: A survey on the situation of Peking rickshaw pullers. This study is based on 1,300 interviews of pullers, 200 of rickshaw renters, and about a hundred rickshaw pullers’ families. Then, in 1934–35, the famous Chinese sociologist, Chen Da carried out a major survey of Southern China migrant communities. Alongside this movement, sociological fieldwork methods were introduced by foreign invited professors. But, more importantly, after completing his Ph.D. at the University of Columbia, Wu Wenzao returned to China in 1929 and created the Chinese School of Sociology in order to indigenise the discipline. He merged anthropology with so­ciology and made community surveys a focal point, especially in rural areas. In 1930, at the initiative of Sun Benwen, Wu Wenzao, Wu Jingchao, Li Jianghua, Chen Da, Ke Xiangfeng, Xu Shilian, and Yan Xinzhe, the Chinese Society of Sociology was created, then the Journal of Sociology, was founded with Sun Benwen as chief editor. This school of sociology was based on cultural sociol­ogy, Western social psychology, and the sociology that analyses issues of modern society. Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, Robert Redfield, figures of the Chicago school, came to China to teach during that period and some trends left their mark and influenced Chinese sociology of that time, especially concerning community studies, which led to many surveys. Other works can be designated classics of pre-1949 sociology, including Fei Xiaotong’s famous Peasant Life in China, which was reprinted eight times between 1940 and 1948. Finally, sociology and social history maintain a very close relationship. Historians try to link historical research and concerns for social issues, classical History of modern China and modern social sciences. If Chinese sociology was highly developed before 1949, it was then banned for twenty seven years, only to rise rapidly after it was reinstated. Sociology was removed from the universities when they were restructured in 1952. Moreover, social psychology, social anthropology and demography were no longer taught either from that moment on. In 1956, the 8th Central Committee of the Communist Party declared “let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend”. Interest arose in Soviet sociology, which had been banned for several years. A delegation was sent to the Third International Conference of Sociology in Holland in August 1956 during which the Auguste

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Comte centenary was celebrated. Major figures of Chinese sociology such as Chen Da, Wu Jingchao and Fei Xiaotong turned their gaze towards Western sociology and proposed a restoration of sociology based on a double break with the sociology of non-socialist China and the sociology of the West. To them, the point was to build a specific sociology from Marxism-Leninism and Maoism. But in June 1957, an anti-right campaign was launched and sociology was perceived as an attempt to reinstate the bourgeois class. In August 1957 sociology was banned again, and it remained so until 1978, although the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had already reinstated it. In 1978, calls for the restoration of sociology and the revoking of its status of “false science” grew in numbers. On March 18th 1979, the Chinese Sociology Research Association was created presided by Fei Xiaotong: Sociology was reinstated in China. On 30th March, Deng Xiaoping underlined the need to develop sociology and to train scholars. During spring 1980, the Institute of Sociology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences was created. It was headed by Fei Xiaotong and organised sociological research formations. According to Fei Xiaotong, Chinese sociology had to be rebuilt using the legacy of previous generations of Chinese sociologists and Western sociologists. In 1980, Shanghai University created the first sociology department in China. It was then followed by Nankai University, Beijing University, Zhongshan University… In twenty-two provincial cities (Hubei, Sichuan, Guangzhou, Harbin…), from 1979 to 1989, sociology institutes were created, while departments of sociology were created in eleven universities. The issue of opening Chinese sociology to Western sociology was raised from the moment of this restoration.Between 1979 and 1989, the years of “socialist modernisation”, great names of pre-1949 Chinese sociology reappeared: Fei Xiaotong, Luo Qing, Yuan Fang, Yan Xinzhe, Ke Xiangfeng, Li Jingshan, Dai Shiguang, Wu Wenzhao, Lin Yaohua… Over a period of ten years, they were to train a new generation of scholars. During those years, research fields remained built around the theory/practice relationship and around the specificity of social issues thought of as being specific to Chinese society. Consequently, the issue of the construction of a “Chinese style” sociology was raised, but this implied a good knowledge of Western sociology (Wu Duo, 1989). The re-invention of Chinese sociology in 1979 constituted a major event in the history of the humanities and social sciences. Prior to 1949, Chinese sociology had been a highly developed discipline; after that date, it was to be proscribed for 30 years only to re-emerge very rapidly and in force after it was brought in from the cold. Indeed, during the 1980s, Chinese sociology as a subject became a leading light in the intellectual world. The abundance of its academic output bears witness to a strong intellectual dynamic that produces

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work of genuine originality characterised by specificities linked to the history of Chinese thought and to the complexity of its societal context (Li Peilin, Ma Rong, Li Qiang, 2008). 4

Reinvention and Internal Frontiers in Chinese Sociology

To reinvent a discipline means re-founding and re-structuring it, drawing the boundaries of subfields. Chinese Sociology has been progressively re-structured and has effected divisions into research fields, mainly rural sociology, urban sociology, sociology of social classes, economic sociology, and political sociology. Before 1949 and since 1979 until the present, the rural issue has occupied a central position in sociology as a means of understanding Chinese society. In 1979, Lu Xueyi wrote: if one does not know about Chinese peasants, one does certainly not know about Chinese society. The rural issue appears to be built according to a specific mode because of the evolutions of the socialist regime which has produced major changes and mobilised sociologists in research into the post-reform evolutions of the economic status of peasants and propriety, the development of the rural economy versus industrialisation, the social differentiation process of the peasant class, the peasants’ way of life, the evolutions of peasants’ familial structure, poverty and social welfare in rural areas, and autonomy of regions. Moreover, from the 1920’s to the 1940’s, much urban sociology research resulted in major works which retain reference status today; examples include: Wu Jingchao’s Urban Sociology (1929), or Shi Guoheng’s Kun Factory Workers (1946). Later, surveys on small towns led by Fei Xiaotong and surveys on families and Chinese cities led by Lei Jieqiong, would mark Chinese sociology. Urban sociology really took off after 1984 focusing on themes of the social development of small towns and big cities, inequalities between cities and countryside, new forms of urban poverty, urban family structure, middle classes and urban communities’ ways of life, phenomenon of marginalisation and urban segregation of “inner migrants”. Nowadays, urban sociology is dominant in the field of sociology, communicating with the sociology of social classes and economic sociology. Indeed, since the implementation of economic reforms, the structure of Chinese society has changed radically and is characterised by increasingly

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tangible social stratification, producing new social inequalities, especially in China’s large cities. Two related yet contradictory phenomena co-occur: social polarisation and upward mobility, the latter tending to stagnate nowadays. Surveys are undertaken focusing on these paradoxical research perspectives in a sociology of social-classes that remains rather classical. There has been a real sociological debate between theoreticians who insist on social reproduction processes in a context of transition and those working on the different forms of social mobility which produce a multiplicity of inequalities between social groups. Indeed, the income-gap is widening between the different social classes. While a class of wealthy Chinese is taking shape and new political and cultural elites have appeared, there has been a decline in the positions of both peasants and workers. Sociologists have recognised the appearance of an “underclass” mainly made-up of poorly qualified migrants, the unemployed, youths, and other generations. In this context of economic uncertainty and rising inner- and inter-generational social inequalities, the sociology of work and economic sociology have undergone huge development with the great transformations linked to social transition. Studies of the Danwei developed first, followed by studies of its dismantling, the reducing of the size of State Companies, the growing weight of the private sector, the slow-down of the rural employment market and the increase in internal migrations. From 1978 onwards, labour markets were thought of in terms of their diversification and re-configuration from norms of strong production and rules of a globalised over-competition in a context of capitalism co-existing with the remnants of a planned-economy. Numerous surveys focused on the transformations of propriety regimes, the access to employment markets for migrants and inequalities of the labour market, the protection of workers’ rights, unemployments and social movements. The question of the relationship between State, market, and society has obviously assumed a central place in Chinese sociology. A substantial body of research was produced concerning the relationship between State and society in the Chinese countryside. Then, in a context of social and economic reforms, new issues about unemployment, poverty, and social welfare came to the fore. They triggered the construction of new public policies. Studies were then carried out around issues of governance, the redefinition of public space and citizenship, defining the silhouette of a sociology of public action. As in any society, for each era, some research objects are labelled as more “sensitive” than others. If, in France, the issues of urban violence, racism and poverty are considered today as objects of scientific and political controversy, in China, those linked to the violence undergone by migrant workers in

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labour markets, to ecological and sanitary risks, to propriety rights, to religious practices, to social movements, are represented as “sensitive” issues. In China during the 1980’s, sociology indeed became a flagship discipline in the intellectual field amongst social sciences. The abundance of scientific productions bears witness to the strong intellectual dynamic which has produced true originality and true specificities linked to the history of Chinese thought and to the complexity of the societal context. If at first the influences of Western sociologies played a role in the conditions of re-invention of Chinese sociology, the tendency may very well be reversing in the coming years in the field of international sociology because of the re-foundation of that discipline in a dynamic and vigorous society currently undergoing great transformations. Chinese sociology has indeed really taken its place in both the Chinese and international intellectual fields by building theories, positions and methods which are positioned both alongside and against Western thought. Chinese sociologists produce a thought of their own among a real diversity, all the while reinterpreting or even Sinicising Western theories. This book will present what appears to be most representative theoretical representations of Chinese academic sociology. Of course, we do not claim to exhaustively cover all of Chinese sociology, which is in essence plural, diversified, present as it is in the sciences academies, particularly in Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, and throughout the entire continent in Chinese Universities.

Traditions and Controversies

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Chapter 2

Traditions and Controversies Before we can draw the theoretical continuities and discontinuities between Chinese and European sociologies –especially French sociology since it appears to be an emblematic case – we first have to define traditions and controversies. In this chapter we will reconstruct the trajectories of some sociological knowledge in Western Europe and in China. In the course of this reconstruction, the question will arise of academic controversies that define the inclusive and exclusive areas of action, as well as those that are shared. Thus, on the basis of our analysis of trajectories of sociological knowledge and the discipline’s structuring modes through its division into sub-disciplines, we will identify and select loci of controversy in the production of sociological knowledge linked to theoretical methodology and will use controversy as an instrument to analyse the boundaries between the conceptual spaces and methods deployed. 1

Epistemological Unpredictability and Scientific Pluralism in Chinese Sociology

After a blank page lasting some thirty years, Chinese sociology has reconstituted itself since 1980 (Li Peilin, Ma Rong, Li Qiang, 2008; Roulleau-Berger, Guo Yuhua, Li Peilin, Liu Shiding, 2008; Merle, 2008; Li Peilin, Roulleau-Berger, 2012). This process has encouraged a sort of epistemological unpredictability which has produced a form of scientific pluralism. Seen from France, over a period of twenty years the Weberian point of view of the polytheism of values founded on the idea that we attempt to reconstruct reality from fragments has been widely adopted by Chinese sociologists. Indeed, there has been a strong presence of the idea that social reality is infinite, that our knowledge of reality cannot exhaust it, that no concept, no theory can suffice to account for the complexity, dynamics and diversity of the forms of social organisation. Chinese sociology has been built around an internal division which is not only made up of splits into fields or specific research areas but also viewpoints, different ways of looking at fragments of social reality and different ways of reconstructing them. Sun Liping (2008) wrote in his chapter:

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each paradigm gives a new side of reality to look at. Each paradigm and theoretical frame has its own analytical function (page 108)1. From all these Chinese sociological works in the academic field, the prominent idea is that of a scientific pluralism in which no unified, all-embracing theory is imposed, and in which there could be unequivocal correspondences between facts and theoretical propositions, and no sociology is thought of as superior to another. Chinese sociology seems to allow several norms of scientific legitimacy, and this in turn allows the production of a diversity and a cohabitation of viewpoints as long as a real dialectic between sociological practice and theory is carried-out. If, in France for example, symbolic-interactionism, ethnomethodology, the rational choice theory, the communicative act theory, the theoretician theory of historicity, genetic structuralism, have at various points denied each other any legitimacy (Berthelot, 2001), that does not seem to be the case in China, possibly because the genealogical histories of the traditions could not be built in a continuous way in the history of Chinese thought. Some Chinese sociologies may appear structuralist, others more comprehensive or interactionist, but the diversity of research standpoints in the scientific space seems legitimised as such in the academic space; they are not thought of as excluding one another but rather as likely to shed light on different aspects of a same social, economic, and political process. If, in the 1980’s in France, sociology presented itself as a succession and juxtaposition of competing partially secant (Passeron, 1991) paradigms, Chinese sociologists have not, until today, experienced anything equivalent. They explore theoretical universes born out of partial overlaps between different paradigms in order to produce approaches of their own, ready to identify a defect that they perceive as a heuristic attempt at an epistemological enlightenment (Kuhn, 1983). This scientific pluralism implies a sense of the complexity and globality of social phenomena, perceived in a dynamic perspective in which research postures are not fixed and defined within a stable conceptual space, but, rather, as always moving, prone to transformations with the sociological objects which always present visible and hidden facets and fall into the areas of interest of different categories of sociologists. And inside that scientific pluralism, the process of production of knowledge is born from a continuum between theory and practice. The researcher therefore builds an ecology of the 1 Sun Liping, 2008, Sociologies de la transition et nouvelles perspectives théoriques, in RoulleauBerger, L., Guo Yuhua, Li Peilin, Liu Shiding, La Nouvelle sociologie chinoise, Paris: Editions du CNRS, page 108.

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conditions of production of the activity, practice, scientific purpose, all elements that hold complex, multiple, dialectic, conflictual, or even contradictory relations with each other (Clarke, Fujimura,1992). But today, that scientific pluralism gives way to the time of scientific controversies in the field of Chinese sociology, animated by heated debates and discussions. 2

Affiliations, Shifts and Hybridisations between China and Europe

Chinese sociologists are familiar with the various schools of sociology in Western Europe and America; in their various studies they both distinguish them from each other and make connections between them, without withholding legitimacy from any one school. Indeed, considering that sociology as a discipline was born in the capitalist world, the sociology they produce truly has its roots in the Chinese civilisation of the past and the present, as well as in a series of affiliations, shifts of perspectives and hybridisations with regard to North American and European sociologists. In Chinese sociology, we have seen visible affiliations with American and European theories, particularly French ones. The first obvious affiliation was with Marxism, which was introduced into China as early as 1917; it still influences sociological debates in China but now coexists with other affiliations. It should also be remembered that the representatives of the Chicago School, Robert Park and Robert Redfield, came to teach sociology in China in 1931–1932 and in 1948 (Zhou Xiaohong, 2004). Other affiliations clearly emerged subsequently with pragmatism and interactionism in North America, as well as with the constructivism of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman, Max Weber’s rationalisation theory and comprehensive sociology, strategic analysis and actor theories, in particular the sociology of collective action and social movements developed by Alain Touraine, François Dubet and Michel Wieviorka. More recent affiliations have emerged with critical sociologies, notably Pierre Bourdieu’s genetic structuralism. Finally, Chinese sociologists have drawn extensively on the theories of Jürgen Habermas, Ulrick Beck and Anthony Giddens. The issue of the shifts of theory is a particularly complex one. To displace means to translate, thus relating to a work of de-contextualisation-re-contextualisation of concepts and notions which were built at a certain time in a certain context. During these displacements of fragments of theory, re-appropriations, reinterpretations, and borrowings occur, but we have seen previously how conceptual contact areas were born between North-American or European and Chinese sociologies, and how Western concepts may be turned into

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Chinese ones, how contact points are truly established. However, certain celebrated sociologists have made little impact on the Chinese sociological scene, including for example the German sociologists of the Frankfurt School. Representatives of methodological individualism or, more recently, the many European scholars who work on the contemporary individual do not appear in the bibliographies either. In Western European sociology, American scholars are widely cited, particularly the pragmatists and interactionists, who occupy an important position in France today, while the influences of constructivism remain very strong. On the European sociological scene, the works of Pierre Bourdieu, Alain Touraine, Edgar Morin, Jürgen Habermas, Ulrich Beck, Axel Honneth and Anthony Giddens occupy leading positions. However, they are followed by studies that seek to reconcile different sociological traditions. The sociologists of globalisation, such as Manuel Castells and Saskia Sassen, but also Richard Sennett and Mark Granovetter, exert considerable influence in Europe. However, Chinese scholars are seldom cited in the bibliographies of European sociologists. Whereas many European sociologists seem to be very ethnocentric and display little interest in other sociologies from across the world, this is not the case with Chinese sociology, which began by turning to European and American schools of sociology in order to assert its own originality. In Chinese sociology, paradigm shifts and hybridisations are structured around a rejection of ethnocentric attitudes, resistance to the imposition of post-colonial intellectual models and assertion of a ‘situated’ approach, whereas European sociologists find it difficult to incorporate non-Western thinking (Zhou Xiaohong, 2010). 3

Chinese Civilisation and Theoretical Variations Today

Today it should be said that Chinese sociologists are linked by a sort of intellectual consensus concerning the following points:

• The idea of producing paradigms freed from any form of cultural hegemony or from the West’s overbearing gaze on Chinese society • The recognition of the unicity and singularity of the Chinese experience and transformation during the last 30 years • The consideration of the effect of Chinese civilisation, both past and present • The rise of the notion of “the production of society”, through the analysis of structural processes

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3.1 Chinese Civilisation and General Scope During the three decades starting 1980, most Chinese sociologists more or less explicitly agreed that they were working in a society that was in full economic and social transition in a globalised context. This sociology of transition is both outside the theories of modernisation of Western developed countries and outside the sociology of the developing world elaborated upon the basis of research into Latin America, Africa and East Asia since the 1960’s and currently “in crisis”. However, this transition includes elements of modernisation without being reducible to it as well as elements of development without being restricted to it (Sun Liping, 2007b). Chinese sociologists utilise the effect of the cultural, historical and political context which builds civilisation (Braudel, 1979). However, it should be seen that the civilisational context is conceived from the perspective of past Chinese civilisation revisited today. Chinese sociologists use the civilisational order to summon structural processes, subjectivities and interactions. Different theoretical propositions are thus engendered by different modes of combination between the civilisational order, structural processes, subjectivities and interactions. Chinese sociologists have constructed an original conceptual space within the field of international sociology, a space for encounter and interaction between interactional, subjective, structural and civilisational orders. Conceptual spaces which were not predicted by Western sociological reasoning have emerged out of the thinking specific to this Chinese sociological reasoning. This epistemological unpredictability has yet to be examined. It can be explained by the post-1980 need to rapidly integrate North American and European sociologies without their history of academic controversies and paradigm conflicts. Here, as Raymond Aron put it, one can see that each society produces the social science which it needs with Chinese society encouraging its accelerated rebirth and development. Some Chinese sociologists are named, others are not. But above all, Chinese sociology has diversified by pro­ ducing theoretical propositions based on the effect of Chinese civilisation, propositions which combine differently structural processes, practical action, interactions and subjectivities and which are distinguished from each other by the different status granted to each concept. 3.2 Schools of Chinese Sociology Today Sun Liping (2002) qualified his sociology as a “practice sociology”: It analyses social facts in their dynamic, mobile and non-static aspect, thus considering that their normal state lies in their practical situation, without of course neglecting structural and institutional factors.

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On the contrary, what is at stake here is to pay even more attention to the effects induced by structures and institutions during functioning processes. Secondly, it stresses the discovery of the logics of things and phenomena during practical processes, logics which are difficult to reveal in their static-state. Thirdly, practice is “bigger” than structure or static-institution. Sun Liping has thus stepped away from Bourdieusian sociology that he has qualified as “static” and proposed a sociology in which the actors play roles consciously and in which the status of subjectivity has been conceived in relation with the diversity and the dynamics of social practices, historical events and “invisible” social forms. A perfect illustration of this practical sociology can be found in Guo Yuhua’s and Sun Liping’s research, starting in the middle of the 1990’s with Chinese peasants’ life narratives during the revolution, and undertaken with the purpose of understanding the reconstruction of the State and society in rural China. This is also exemplified in Guo Yuhua’s and Chang Aishu’s research on the biographies of jobless people, which articulated individual events and historical social changes at a structural level. Also, when Shen Yuan analysed the process of reforming the working-class by proposing to analyse the micro-situations of working-class-labour, the economic institutions and the context of double transformation based on the theories of Polanyi and Burrawoy, he also stepped into that conceptual space. Then, in a second movement, practical sociology has been used to develop a theory of social transition as a communist-civilisation fact – civilisation as a system of the values and functioning of social life – a specifically Chinese one because of its radical difference with that of Eastern-European countries. Practical sociology and the sociology of transition must be used together in order to analyse social change in Chinese society, and more generally the great civilisational turning point in which Chinese sociologists situate themselves while working on a microsociological level in which they analyse the interactions of daily-life and social practices. It is interesting to note that in the practice sociology of the 1990’s, structural processes, even civilisational proc­ esses, interactions and subjectivities were initially thought of as being in an equivalence. Progressively, a hierarchy was established between these concepts, and structural and civilisational processes have acquired an important status. One can suppose that the weight of “transition” is the reason why sociologists were driven to give a new status to structural processes. Today Li Peilin (2015) considers that a Chinese school of sociology, rather close to what was the Chicago school, is appearing around the definition of common research objects like migrants, urban marginalisation linked to

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urbanisation and social change. Chinese sociology, from its starting point onwards during its re-foundation process, received an obvious influence from the Chicago School. According to Li Peilin (2015) The term “Chinese school” can be traced back to 1930s when Malinowski praised Fei Xiao Tong’s anthropological study of a Chinese village which set the methodological foundations of the modern Chinese school of Chinese sociology2. Fei Xiao Tong took a lot of inspiration from the works of the Chicago school, especially from those of Robert Park, to re-found sociology in China. Chinese sociologists, confronted today with great social issues linked to the specificity of China’s experience, produce an impressive amount of empirical surveys and research. Zhou Xiaohong (2004) underlines also the influence of the Chicago school on Chinese sociology – especially in urban sociology and social psychology – but he points out its limits, theoretical and methodological shortfalls that cannot exist in Chinese sociology. 3.3 Constructivisms and Theoretical Variations Contemporary Chinese sociologies constructed from conceptions of the proc­ess therefore appear to be placed within a sort of mosaic of situated and con­textualized constructivisms often against backgrounds of historical or civi­ lisa­tional contexts in which objective constructivism, critical constructivism, sociologies of action, interpretative constructivism, organisational or strategic constructivism, interactionist constructivism, subjective constructivism and more cohabit. Within a form of revised social constructivism, knowledge is produced out of the analysis of the construction of relationships between social structures and institutions, between the State and society by raising the issue of social polarisation within a historical perspective. From a socio-historical perspective, Li Peilin (2012, 2014) proposes a sociology of the China Experience by raising the issue of social change in contemporary Chinese society taking as a starting point the characteristics of traditional Chinese society; Zhou Xiaohong (2012) would consider the Chinese Experience and micro Change of the Chinese people’s social values and mentality. Chinese sociology of social classes and social mobility also produces this form of constructivism based upon the analysis of social and historical processes of the transformation of 2 Fei, Hsiao-Tung, 1939, Peasant Life in China: A field Study of Country Life in the Yangtze Valley, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., LTD.

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Chinese society (Li Chunling, 2012; Li Qiang, 2012; Li Lulu, 2012; Tong Xin, 2008a; Chen Guangjin, 2013). Research in economic sociology (Liu Shiding, 2006, 2012; Liu Yuzhao, Tian Qing 2009; Liu Yuzhao, Tian Qing, 2014; Liu Aiyu, 2014; Tong Xin, 2012) also contributes to producing this type of social constructivism. A form of critical constructivism appears with the work of Sun Liping (2002) who describes his work as a “sociology of practice”, or with the Chinese public sociology produced by Shen Yuan (2012) or with Guo Yuhua (2014) who has developed a theory focused on the production of voices of subaltern groups. They have all shown how dominated individuals deploy reflexive, action capacity in different social situations and arts of resistance. We also could identify a form of interactionist constructivism with the sociology of networks in which various theories of the guanxi have been developed and in which the concepts of interaction and identity play an important role (Yang Yiyin, 2012) but this interactionist constructivism is linked to a historical perspective. Another form of strategic constructivism could be illustrated, for example, by Li Youmei (2007, 2012 a, b) who raises the question of the governance of communities and neighbourhoods as the bases of Chinese civil society. Some works, through a problematic of network, call on the concept of “strategies”, which plays here a secondary role in the conceptual apparatus. This could be a remainder of a structural-functionalist-inspired posture, but reconfigured in the context of the contemporaneous Chinese civilisation. Other works on urbanisation processes and social mobilities, show how individual and collective strategies are built within situations of economic and political constraints that limit the power of action of actors in transitional contexts. Sociologies of action give more space to the actor, an actor constrained by the State and the market against a background of transition but capable of reflexivity and forming herself/himself into a Subject, for example, in studies on new collective action (Shen Yuan, 2011; Liu Neng, 2004, 2009a and b). Studies of social movements and collective actions clearly show how the context, here one characterised by transition, produces interactions and collective actions among various categories of populations which, in turn, produce specific demands for recognition in Chinese society. Finally Xie Lizhong (2009, 2012a) has proposed an epistemological “Postsociology” which considers “reality” as a “discursive reality” constructed by people under constraints of discourse system and which change with the change of people’s discourse system. So Post-sociology means a pluralistic discourse analysis. Today Chinese society is conceptualised more as an objective and subjective reality, never as being static or defined once and for all. This raises the

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33

question of the construction of the individual. Subjectivity is conceived completely differently here, and is linked to the construction of “them” and “us” in a context of social stratification, an increase in social conflicts and a crisis of confidence in the Other. Studies of social movements and collective actions clearly show how the Chinese context, here a context characterised by tran­ sition, produces interactions and collective actions among various categories of populations which, in turn, produce specific demands for recognition in Chinese society. The Chinese sociologists have developed their own original approaches and sociological reasoning, they have revealed conceptual spaces that are unforeseen in Western sociological thinking. If, over the last thirty years, the constructivist and hermeneutic poles have become visible in French sociology by opening a space for a sociology of the individual, in Chinese sociology, the objectivist and constructivist poles are the ones to have expanded. 4

Traditions and Controversies in European Sociology since 1980

What about traditions and controversies in European, especially French, sociologies? Controversies arose around the modes of explanation of what individuals are capable of doing, saying and thinking and thus how scientific interpretation is produced in discontinuity or continuity with the shared meaning. In the early 1980s, the competition between sociological trends was such that it forced researchers to be in a process of discontinuity regarding certain paradigms and a process of acculturation regarding others. If, previously, sociology was presented as a succession and a juxtaposition of competing partially secant paradigms, today sociologists explore theoretical universes which arise out of partial secants between different paradigms and are wary of what appears to be “normal science” at any given moment or the history of sciences at another. In the 1970s and 1980s, neither Pierre Bourdieu’s (1987) structuralist constructivism, which continued to grant a certain primacy to objective structures by means of the concepts of the field and the habitus, nor the competences of individuals relative to their knowledge of the social world received much recognition, since they required researchers to position themselves within a situation of epistemological discontinuity. In France, in 1979, Yves Grafmeyer and Isaac Joseph (1979) translated the fundamental texts of the Chicago School and, shortly after, Isaac Joseph introduced the interactionist theories which triggered great controversies and conflicts within sociology. At that time, interactionist theories were presented as “machines of war” against structuralisms

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and structural-functionalisms; compared to structuralism these theories are based upon an inverse progression from interactions towards structures – especially in the work of Erving Goffman – but also for Howard Becker, Anselm Strauss and Tamotsu Shibutani who have tended to work more upon establishing equivalences between interactions and structures while bearing in mind that stable equilibrium never exists. The relationships between the individual and society are conceived as a process of reciprocal production. In the situations in which, according to Durkheimian thinking, the social order was defined as stable, it is defined as a negotiated interactional order supposing a non-determinist vision of social life which replaces the central concept of “structure” or “system” with the concept of collective interactions. In his Les ficelles du métier (Becker, 2002), Howard Becker recognised that individuals possess interpretative capacities regarding the social world as a universe of meanings. The liveliest controversies in French sociology revolved and still revolve around the recognition of the competences of individuals regarding the knowledge of the social world. The scientific controversies linked to the introduction of interactionist and pragmatist sociologies weakened with the mobilisation of the theories of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman (1986) a departure which opened a theoretical space in which “the symmetry between objective reality and subjective reality is never static nor defined once and for all”. In reaction to critical sociology and under the influence of interactionist and pragmatist sociologies, social constructivism – as distinct from Pierre Bourdieu’s structuralist constructivism – would develop in France by unmaking the fatal couples of sociology, namely, individualism/holism, objectivism/subjectivism, micro-sociological/macrosociological. This way of posing the issue of the non-stability of the symmetry between objective reality and subjective reality disrupts dualist reasoning in sociology and opens a space for the scientific pluralism of realities and identities with reference to structural dynamics. In the 1990s, a certain consensus among French sociologists took shape around the idea of a non-separation of the individual and structural areas contrary to the separation inherent in structuralist thinking. The interpretative capacity of actors began to be conceived as being a genuine structural property of any society which could be called reflexive. From 1990 the constructivist and hermeneutic poles became the most visible (Berthelot, 2001). The opposition between the objectivist poles and the constructivist and hermeneutic poles diversified and broadened. Constructivist and hermeneutic poles moved towards convergence opening a space for a so­ciology of the individual. Other areas of controversy formed between the Alain Touraine-inspired sociology of action and critical and interactionist

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35

sociologies. There was already tension – associated with various variants of structuralism – between critical sociology and the sociology of action over the issue of the Subject, an issue which was denied in critical sociology. Critical sociology had attacked power, domination and alienation denouncing the illusions of the reference to the Subject, an error which consists in believing in the Subject’s autonomy, the ignorance of mechanisms, authorities and other structures which regulate and determine the existence of the dominated. Then, in the first decade of this century, we witnessed the return of the Subject to the sociological stage, the Subject which had been denied in the Marxist and Bourdieu-school theories in which, according to the theory of the habitus, individuals were conceived as unconsciously determined in their perceptions, thoughts and conduct by the effects of incorporated dispositions. The Subject was defined by her/his capacity to be an autonomous actor and to construct her/his experience (Wieviorka, 2008). Although from 1980 to 1995 strong controversies divided French sociologists, by the end of the 1990s weak controversies arose around a sociology of the individual and the Subject. Indeed, François Dubet (1994), in his sociology of experience, explained how the individual was challenged when the idea of society as an organized whole declined along with the steady autonomisation of social hierarchies and class, the crumbling of collective forms of action and representation and the weakening of institutions. Following Alain Touraine and Fahrad Khosrokhavar (2000), Michel Wieviorka (2007) also questions the Subject as what is left out of or resists the logics of system. Within a sociology of identities, Claude Dubar (2001) takes as a starting point the idea that to be a Subject is first to refuse, for oneself as for others, the relationships of domination, subjection, arbitrarily imposed authority, scorn and personal subordination. Bernard Lahire (1998) proposed a dispositionalist and contextualist sociology based upon the taking into consideration of the incorporated past and individuals’ previous socialising experiences which crystallise into dispositions while considering the different present contexts of action. Jean-Claude Kaufmann (2004) showed that, in the past, social structures had supported the individual and that this was consistent with the reflexivity level, whereas, now, identity production is a condition for action and the individuation process is mediated through access to self-governance. Marco Martuccelli (2006) considers that ordeals enable the researcher to apprehend the tensions which are instrumental in the constitution of this specific historical mode of individuation in which the structural processes of the creation of the individual are constituted.

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Alongside these sociologies of the individual, Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot (1991) developed a sociology of justification based upon economies of scale inspired by American pragmatism while Bruno Latour (1989) engendered a sociology of sciences and controversies. However, the publication of Luc Boltanski’s “De la critique” (2009) constitutes a very important moment in the evolution of French sociology and the history of scientific controversies since, after much work for the development of critical sociology, Luc Boltanski had turned to pragmatism in the 1990s. He then proposed to reconcile critical sociology and the sociology of criticism: on the one hand, he retained from the program of critical sociology the revealing of forms of domination within a certain social order and made it evolve towards a theory of the political regimes of domination and, on the other hand, he retained from the program of pragmatism the attention directed at the activities and critical competences of actors as well as the recognition of the pluralist expectations within contemporary democratic societies. This fundamental moment in the synthesis of the two scientific programs which, in the 1980s, had been seen as mutually exclusive outlined a new space of agreement between French sociologists, especially young researchers, who needed highly elaborated conceptual frameworks to conceive the complexity of their objects of research. This space could resemble a mosaic of differentiated constructivisms (Loriol, 2012) in which structuralist constructivism, interactionist constructivism, sociol­ogies of action, interpretive constructivism, subjectivist constructivism and more could cohabit. If, in the 1980s, what made scientific controversies in Europe corresponded to radically different positions on the status granted to social structures, individual and collective action, dispositions for action and subjectivities, then, today, controversies are expressed in a more complex intellectual space in which sociologists are conscious of the need to avoid granting a “superior” status to any one dimension of social reality and in which they are borne along by a movement of the globalisation and circulation of sociological theories, a movement which easily erases certain scientific controversies which appear to be over-situated in a globalised context. If in European and Chinese sociologies we could see two mosaics of dif­fer­en­tiated constructivisms organized around the cohabitation of objective con­struc­tivism, critical constructivism, sociologies of action, interpretative constructivism, organisational or strategic constructivism, interactionist conctivism, subjective constructivism… the two mosaics remain situated and contextualised. Nevertheless, sociologies of action are more characteristic of European sociologies while objective constructivism still occupies an important role in Chinese sociology.

Fabric of Knowledge and Research Fieldwork

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Chapter 3 

Fabric of Knowledge and Research Fieldwork Practice is always under-estimated and under-analysed, so to understand it, a lot of theoretical competency must be engaged; paradoxically, a lot more than to understand a theory. It is necessary to avoid reducing practices to the idea that we have when we do not have any experience other than logic. P. Bourdieu (2001)

⸪ Arrangements and disjunctions between different places of knowledge are constructed through fieldwork science practices and sociological methods. Here, this raises the question of the development of sociological knowledge in a Post-Western conceptual space. Not knowing how sociological knowledge is created produces effects that are a combination of scientific and ideological colonialisms, which causes recognition effects that are limited to Chinese thoughts. It is thus necessary to show the similarities of uses of sociological methods in Europe – especially in France – and in China, which reveal active constructions in the circulation of knowledge. 1

Research Fieldwork and Methodological Theory

1.1 Regional Rationalisms and Fieldwork Sciences Epistemologists such as Bachelard (1934) and Canguilhem (1977) demonstrated that scientific methods are not all the same and depend on disciplines, regions of knowledge, and paradigms. These regional rationalisms primarily appear situated in space and time but at the same time can exist in various places of thought. These regional rationalisms do not respect national ­borders and question the universal value of sociological knowledge. While Bachelard, Canguilhem and Foucault expressed the so-called French epistemological style; it can decreasingly be considered to exist. For example, the history of French sciences has long been considered a discontinuous history (Braunstein, 2002), a history of the breaks that appeared as fractures in the spatial and geographic sense of the term, or a history of regions and continents of knowledge. However, nowadays attention is largely focused on the discontinuous © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/9789004309982_005

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continuities between research positions and practices. This tendency does not contradict the idea that, as Bachelard stated, progress within science is characterised by the revolutions, rifts and mutations between scientific theories. Nevertheless, this can mostly be found in Canguilhem’s perspective, which predicted more successive or partial rifts than total rifts; he placed more emphasis on relationships than on rifts. In China, with the ban on sociology from 1949 to 1979, the history of fieldwork sciences appears as continuous before 1949 and after 1979, and absent betwen those dates. Due to this interruption, methodological knowledge inherited from American and European sociologists was largely mobilised in an accelerated mode as part of the reconstruction process of the discipline. Chinese sociologists appropriated sociological methods by always working with anthropological methods due to the strong sociological and anthropological influence of Fei Xiaotong in the reconstruction process of sociology. Knowledge-manufacturing processes in fieldwork sciences in China and in Europe vary according to the scientific trajectories of the disciplines, a diversity of positions which defines the specific spaces and the shared spaces of knowledge that stem from research practices. In the process of internationalising sociology these same specific spaces and shared spaces are formed through situated intellectual traditions, exchanges, loans and appropriations of knowledge that is both produced and inherited. In addition to this, the rejects, the oversights, the re-exportations of sociological knowledge that sometimes seems universal and sometimes becomes singular, contribute to this forming. 1.2 Chinese Singularities Chen Yingying (2008) demonstrates that since the restoration of sociology, social survey has been the most commonly used sociological method. While quantitative methods still dominate the sociological field, under the influence of Fei Xiaotong’s socio-anthropological approach, qualitative research took its place and gave rise to substantial works. However, Chen Yingying highlights the weakness of the adjustment between sociological theories and methods due to a strong context of normalisation. Finally, it raises the question of adapting Western methods to the Chinese context by insisting on the necessity of localising research subjects. Starting from the necessity of grasping the transformation of social structures, it can be seen that the qualitative survey, in the form of the social survey, is still presented as dominant. But in the open methodological debate in China there has emerged the issue of methodological renovation around life stories, observation methods, forms of engagement in research fieldwork... Chen Yingying insists on the idea that the necessity of specifying the borders of the conceptual space in which one is placed comes

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39

before the question of methodologies. It is clearly shown how the simplification of the descriptive statistic does not mean that one must believe in the ease of its production.We also understand how the differences in scales also play a decisive role in this; China is immense, which makes the production of national statistics incredibly complex. Moreover, in China, anthropology and sociology have always been linked and are both imported from the West. Fei Xiaotong, a sociologist and anthropologist, played a decisive role in the reconstruction of these two disciplines, and thus favoured contacts and proximities between them. Luo Hongguang (2008) emphasises the important heritage of traditional Chinese civilisation. He recalls how the introduction of social sciences in China directly resulted from Western penetration. From 1928 in reaction to “missionary sociology”, ethnographic research relative to non-Han peoples was carried out. Next, Chinese ethnologists worked on common religious practices, marriage customs, traditional festivals and finally minorities. From 1949 to 1958, two major field surveys on “national minorities” were carried out across the whole of China and research on this subject followed, as the possibility of carrying out research with the Hans remained very limited. Following this, Chinese sociologists and anthropologists studied familial clans which allowed them to understand religion and politics, “village standards”, and rituals and symbols in folkloric life. For Wang Mingming (2007), three research spaces must be considered: the study of Hans, the political and cultural relationship between ethnic minorities and the central power, and the alterity approach. Nevertheless research on the rural world, a form of expression in Chinese civilisation, remains central in sociology and anthropology, which largely poses the question of modernity. Luo Hongguang demonstrates how contemporary sociology and anthropology are constructed around the affirmation of an autonomy and an eman­­cipation regarding Western anthropology and against the idea that Chinese modernity is a passive process. Chinese anthropologists must construct their own knowledge in a very different context to that of the West. They evoke convergences with Indian and Arabic societies where, from their point of view, it is individual and collective interaction “that makes society”. Faced with forms of intellectual colonialism, we see that at various moments, anthropologists and sociologists were engaged in “sinicisation” ventures in these two disciplines by mobilising the history of Chinese thought. Here the effects of cultural domination and of symbolic violence in Western thought are put forward. These must be overcome in the construction of Chinese anthropological theories and positions. Nowadays, as in sociology, the subjects of anthropological research have become diversified. However, anthropologists mostly cite the sociological

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point of view and that of the historian to give them the means to think about the complexity of Chinese society. 1.3 Creating Knowledge and Research Methods Next, fieldwork science practices are organised around the construction of sociological knowledge, which involves various decisive moments in the sociological research approach. Naming, seeing, and understanding others appear as shared moments and, at the same time, as very situated in the approach of all sociologists. The status accorded to each of these moments varies according to research positions and also according to the effects of the sociologists’ social, political, and geographic position. All researchers are faced with the issue of how to designate, classify, name, and quantify. For sociologists, the difficulties obviously revolve around problems of designation, definition, and categorisation. In China, the quantitative survey in the form of the social survey is still presented as dominant but the simplicity of the descriptive statistic does not mean each of its production should be believed, and differences in scales play a decisive role here. China is immense which makes producing national statistics very complex [Chen Guangjin, 2014]. In quantitative analysis, issues obviously revolve around problems with definition and categorisation. As in other contexts, descriptive statistics always require nomenclatures, classification, and are the subject of scien­tific debates. Quantitative surveys always contain this major issue of objectivation, which refers to the Durkheimian idea that social facts should be treated as things; it allows an explanation of what the actors do by who they are, and not by what they say they do. The value of figures varies according to historical, scientific and political circumstances. Their distinctness and above all their uses always constitute a decisive social issue in the construction of power relationships within the society [de Singly, 1992]. The construction of statistics appears as a major scientific and political issue (Desrozières, 1993). The academic issues around modes of classification and categorisation arise in different places depending on the sociological context. For example, the question of the construction of social categories is currently the subject of very fundamental debates in sociology in China (Li Peilin, 2012; Li Chunling, 2012; Chen Yingfang, 2010) and France. In Western Europe, especially in France, recent years have seen heated disputes and controversies about the production of ethnicity statistics. The question of categorisation gives rise in turn to that of designation, or even the risk of stigmatisation and of the reduction of social reality. Statistical categories are essentially conventions denoting objects of knowledge as much as subjects of actions and policies (Simon, 2005) and produce legitimate representations of the social world historically situated in

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41

given societies (Desrosières, 1993). Descriptive statistics always require nomenclatures and classifications and are therefore the object of academic debates. The analysis of quantitative surveys will be conducted by investigating the conditions under which such surveys are produced, taking as a starting point large‐scale surveys carried out in China and in France. If naming represents an important stage in sociological reasoning, seeing and watching constitute another that is above all a theoretical question which cannot be separated from a research position. Sociologists are always confronted with the issue of what they need to watch and how to watch it (Laplantine, 1996). The distance between us and societies which are not our own allows us to see what we cannot see from a socio-centred perspective. In China, a major change concerns the recent return of qualitative, particularly ethnographic, methodologies. Due to the socio-anthropological tradition in Chinese sociology, and the rise in power of the ethnographic approach or indeed ethnographic engagement (Cefaï, 2010) in European sociology, and particularly in French sociology, it can be understood that ways of observing and observation mechanisms put in place by Chinese and French sociologists take the shared idea that nowadays sociology should mobilise the ethnographic eye to grasp the complexity and the dynamics of social processes. However, when implementing the observation mechanisms, conditions vary according to political contexts; while Chinese researchers can put observation into practice in some fieldwork research, it mostly remains controlled. Liu Neng (2008b) suggested revisiting the Fei Xiaotong heritage and returning to space-based qualitative sociology by mobilising theories from the Chicago School. Here the question of the sociologist in field surveys and more widely of the relationship between sociologists and the State comes to the fore. In European and Chinese cases these issues are constructed and posed differently. Then understanding the self and Others is fundamental and assumes various significations according to the paradigms. Here in Post-Western Sociologies we will adopt the collective and life narrative methods used by European and Chinese sociologists, which have the advantage of evoking questions that are fundamental to sociology: how is the individual constructed in Europe and in China? How do sociologists gain access to that individual? For 20 years in Europe, life narrative has been widely used in sociology in order to reconstitute narratives at the level of society as a whole. Today, the biographical method makes it possible to combine narrativity, reflexivity and action and thereby gain access to the world-as-lived. Life narrative was initially defined as a temporal succession of events and situations (Bertaux, 1997), then defined as being organised around a progression model, placing emphasis on the transitions from one state to another. More precisely, biographical itineraries were defined

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as instruments of reconstruction and identity which produce a smoothing effect called biographical ideology (Bertaux, 1976) or biographical illusion (Bourdieu, 1986). Michaël Pollak (1990) considered that, though the life narrative was susceptible to multiple modes of presentation in terms of the situation and time in which it is stated, the scope of these variations was not unlimited. Following this, initial work on life narratives began with plural identities and multiple socialisations. The biographical method allows us to link narrativity, reflexivity and action and, thus, to access the world-as-lived (Roulleau-Berger, 1999; Murard, 2011). In China, sociologists question the necessity of taking oral histories and using the life narrative. They initially start with the reconstitution of collective narratives in order to work towards individual life narratives. Life narratives combine collective and individual memories, historical events and micro‐level events (Guo Yuhua, Sun Liping, 2002; Sun Feiyu, 2013). Whereas individual narratives are a form of self‐exposition, they also reflect a certain concept of the individual and ensure that biographical narratives mean very different things to individuals in France and in China (Yang Yiyin, 2009). Using individual narrative methods in Post-Western Sociology, we will reexamine cultural variations in the relationship between the individual and society and how collective narratives are reconstructed. “Stories” are thought about in the same way as “history”: constitutive of both subjectivities and civil knowledge (Ying Xing and alii, 2006). They show that is not only the “big” collective events which are likely to be remembered by citizens but also local events. While individual narratives correspond to a form of self-exhibition, it also refers to a conception of the individual; writing a biographical narrative takes a very different form for individuals in France and in China (Yang Yiyin, 2008). Finally while the question of the engagement of sociology has become central in French sociology, in China a certain number of sociologists from Tsinghua University have developed sociological intervention inspired by the Touranian paradigm beginning with sociology adapted to the Chinese situation. Shen Yuan (2007) distinguishes between two forms of sociological intervention: one being “strong” and the other “weak” stemming from the idea of a “weak society”, in this case Chinese society, where mechanisms of selforganisation have been subjected to strong oppression – even destruction – and are difficult to restore in the short-term. The “large intervention” method appears indispensable in provoking a change, making the weak less weak, giving them power, and helping them to manufacture symbolic weapons. This method is defined as a way to “escape the trap of academic magic” (Shen Yuan, 2007) which largely rests on the necessity of an intellectual emancipation visà-vis the Western methods and theories that were imported during the reformation of the discipline and applied with little epistemological distance given the urgency of recreating the discipline.

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Here we can see the very precise way that the twofold process of appropriation/adaptation of methods produced in French sociology has been reformatted in both methodological and theoretical contexts through representations that are very situated in societies. For example, it is seen here in the “weak” and “strong” societies. However, uses and redefinitions of research methods constructed in the European context, invite Chinese and European researchers to rethink the notions of “weak” and “strong” societies together, and to ask themselves about the heuristic value of this distinction. We can ask ourselves what Chinese sociologists examine in the paradigms of European sociology. Moreover, while Kuhn (1983) granted particular attention to the role of history in the science development process, we are mostly invited to consider the effects of civilisation on the paradigm’s modes and types of production. While the sociologist is invited to incessantly build bridges, to fill in “epistemological blanks” between various “pertinent spaces”, the clash between Chinese sociology and other European sociologies allows engagement in a work of epistemological reconfiguration. Here a certain distance from conceptual habitus is possible by working on the gaps which escape our theoretical, cultural, and historical reference points in order to better understand how and why we manufacture and mobilise our paradigms. 2

Multi-situated Sociology and Overlapping Perspectives

2.1 Methodological Cosmopolitanism and Multi-situated Sociology In Post-Western Sociology, it is self-evident that one should combat methodological nationalism as Ulrich Beck (2006) proposed even if, in this day and age, this is not sufficient of itself. Methodological thinking in sociology is linked to the evolution of Western society which witnessed its birth. If the process of the pluralisation of contemporary societies challenges the very idea of society as a narrative attached to modernity, particularly European modernity, the method will be defined in all its scope as a theory emancipated from Easternisms and Westernisms (Roulleau-Berger, 2012). Marcus (1995) had proposed multi-situated ethnography to account for these connections, assemblies and superpositions of a plurality of local situations. To this end, he turned the world-system into a frame of reference rather than a historical macro-context and advocated an alternation between “thin” and “dense” descriptions (Falzon, 2009). Although this author initially focused on subaltern subjects as objects of dominations linked to capitalist and colonialist economics, he later proposed a broadening of the field of investigation. Lila Abu- Lughod (1991) also proposed “ethnographies of the particular” as strategies for the fight against culturalist approaches. Although the experience of

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sociologists can be built up according to the displacements, circulation and movements of the individuals and groups with which they work, sociologists no longer confine themselves to “bounded fields” but navigate between several “shifting locations” (Gupta, Ferguson, 1997). Sociologists can conceive structural processes, situations and actions with sociological methods which are partially based upon multi-situated ethnography. Although this theoretical and methodological advance is important, these new methods cannot completely replace older methods of investigation elaborated in other historical contexts. Indeed if connections, deterritorialisations and assemblages are envisaged in the construction of field procedures, the same is true of captivities, sedentarities, segregations and disqualifications. Nowadays methodological cosmopolitanism is the choice which tends to impose itself. This signifies the implementation of multi-situated and contextualized tools to account for assemblages and disjunctions between the narratives of societies which are all legitimate as well as to describe what Ulf Hannerz (2009, 2010) calls a “continuum creolisation” and what Michaël Burawoy (2000) called a global ethnography. In this instance methodological cosmopolitanism pertains to a conceptual space of interaction between pragmatic sociology and critical sociology – as Luc Boltanski (2009) proposed – here federated around dynamic and non-hierarchical combinations of societal contexts, structural processes, individual and collective actions and situational orders. The conceptual space is relayed by a methodological space in which sociologists conceive a plurality of temporalities, places, contexts and situations in the construction of tools for field investigation in order to access the plurality of the narratives of society and the multivocality or polyphony which they contain via a “pluralistic discourse analysis” (Xie Lizhong, 2009). Just as multi-situated analysis is in no way to be confused with multi-local analysis (Falzon, 2009), methodological cosmopolitanism leads to a multi-situated approach which does not necessarily mean fields of investigation in several countries but rather in several differentiated places, an approach which is conceived within a single problematic. Multi-situated ethnography thus becomes necessary but in no way excludes the implementation of a short- or mediumterm investigative procedure in a single place at certain times (Weisskoppel, 2009). 2.2 Entering Spaces In each societal context the following question is asked: How do sociologists access their fields? Their relationship with the populations can only be constructed through honour systems which differ between Europe and China... In different cases they are fragile, vary in intensity and above all at any moment

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could evolve into regimes of mistrust. But the sources of changes from honour regimes to regimes of mistrust are difficult to compare and situated on various societal scales. For example, disqualified fields are protected everywhere, watched over by those who live there. In addition, sociologists do not enter them naturally; either they are introduced or they know the norms and are “recognised” almost immediately. Nonetheless, they maintain nothing but a social and moral contract that is not really stabilised with the actors. The more the fields seem to be “mined”, for example working in suburbs and slums... the less the borders are open and the more difficulties the sociologist meets in defining a social and moral contract with the actors. Here sociologists are subjected to defiance and suspicion and at every turn must prove why they are present and what their intentions are as quickly as possible. The issue here rests on constructing a symmetry in social relations with “proven” individuals in their social existence by establishing “non-violent” communication (Bourdieu, 1993). And when individuals perceive that the sociologist’s approach involves them, they can thus construct joint ventures which define the honour systems. Let us take the example of Chinese fieldwork. To construct honour systems in China the first question appears to be: How does one escape the policies of surveillance systems put in place by the Chinese State? The foreign sociologist can hardly escape them; at best they can get around them and be confronted with authorisations, injunctions and bans from Chinese authorities. Here, honour value are defined at the level of institutional research, at the political level and at the level of the populations in question. Foreign sociologists in China may find it difficult to enter a field without negotiating a contract of trust. They must first be recognised by their peers who will accompany them in the field. They can also be forced to negotiate an agreement with the Communist Party of China to obtain authorisation to do fieldwork. In the case of a research trip which was a joint-venture with a team from a Chinese university, we had to negotiate our entry with the workplace’s CPC secretary in order to be able to carry out interviews with migrant workers. In certain cases a long stay in a Chinese field can lead to the researcher being rejected, particularly with migrants who feel nervous in the presence of a foreign sociologist. In China, disqualified fields are triply watched by the interviewee, the CPC and the police; the sociologist is confronted with the superposition of three systems of protection that transform the fieldwork experience into a real test. The construction of honour regimes can only be understood when taking certain structural and situational aspects of host societies and the roles of the States into consideration. The sociological survey as an experience can only be understood through contextualisation. In effect honour regimes are always fragile, of variable intensity and above all can evolve into regimes of mistrust at

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any moment. The researcher is obliged to constantly adapt to the constraints of the situation in order not to impose a spokesperson status or to be rejected as a denouncer of the collective’s practices and treatise. However, the sources of the reversibility of honour regimes to regimes of mistrust are difficult to compare and are situated on various societal scales. 2.3 Contexts of Meaning and Scopes in Fieldwork Experience In a cosmopolitan context, the sociologist, like other members of various societies, remains inscribed in intersubjective relationships with others. Each person’s roles cannot be defined as pre-established but rather as the product of alignments that are somewhat adjusted to engagements linked to an active construction and reconstruction of reality (Roulleau‐Berger, 1996, 2004a). It imposes the necessity for the researcher to construct theory in accordance with social experience, by recognising individuals’ capacities to interpret the social world as a universe of significations. To “enter places” the sociologist identifies and selects subjects that are common and different between themselves and the actors. When sociologists are engaged in multiple fields, they recommence this work in each of them, each time taking in a new tension between insider and outsider. The intensity of the tension between the role of insider and outsider plays on what Goffman (1991) called framework-setting operations in the production of social spaces in fieldwork experience. Fieldwork experience refers back to “contexts of meaning” (Cefaï, 2007) knowing that contexts of meaning activate contrasting cultural forms. However, while pragmatists insisted on the dimension of immediacy and naturality in the meaning of a situation, this point of view cannot be defended in distant and plural fields where accessibility to contexts of meaning is more difficult and more complex. Framework-setting in a far-off field clashes with difficulties of access to very situated contexts of meaning; the sociologist is this obliged to carry out multiple successive framework-setting operations in order to stabilise the research experience frameworks. The intensity of the insider/outsider tension plays on the plurality of framework-setting operations and research experiences. Framework-setting operations follow on from each other and superimpose more quickly on a field “over here” and organise contexts of meaning knowing that they could be interrupted due to political, social, and moral pressures at any moment. Mutual engagements can thus be adjusted if we accept fieldwork as a sociali­sation task thought about more as direct access to the transparency of the other’s point of view (Dodier, Baszanger, 1997). It is always difficult to say whether the distance is sufficiently reduced to appreciate the degree of alignment in the mutual engagement of the populations and researcher.

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Paradoxically, the cultural, political and affective distance of the researcher from the surveyees can become a communicational resource in a field in which populations that are rarely recognised as socially and politically competent can raise their “voice” and be heard. For example we recall an interview with a thirty-two years old migrant worker who worked in a small restaurant in Shanghai and who expressed his disgust and feeling of injustice at being faced with the economic, social, and urban discrimination that he encountered on a daily basis, while making it known that the French researcher could not understand his situation. The intensity of engagements appears to be linked to the interactions between the researcher and the populations in presence and varies according to local situations but also depends on societal structures. For example, in France, unemployed, “poor”, and unskilled migrant populations appear as spatially and socially trapped more often than migrant workers who travel migratory routes within China and continually travel from one province to another, from one town to another. So, while the French sociologist working in the northern neighbourhoods of Marseilles has enough time to define research frameworks, they cannot follow the geographic movements and mobilities of migrants in China. Here, the research framework undergoes an unknown amount of biographical journeys which do not favour the alignment of commitments due to the linking of mobilities. Moreover, even when engagements were very strong in terms of the contract framework with the researcher, they could be withdrawn at any moment due to the fragility of the situations which never cease to disrupt individual aspirations, interests, motivations and desires. For example, in disqualified fields the engagements are surrounded by a sort of halo linked to the uncertain side of the lives of “vulnerable” populations. The question of the viability of the engagement is constantly posed by those who live in fragile economic and social situations. Here it can clearly be seen how societal effects play on the construction of research framework in local situations and in the alignment of the engagements. And while the sociologist must be mindful of the “framework security” so that there is no exterior interference such as actors who seek to manipulate or falsify the framework of the social contract, it is clear that the issue of “framework security” is posed in different terms in a French field than in a foreign field. When frameworks of common action were almost stabilised between the sociologist and the actors, when the mutual engagements are almost aligned, then partial access to the endogenous meaning of the action can take place, starting with the articulation between the competences of the sociologist and those of the actors. But we never acquire the same competences as the actors.

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Thus a continued process of constructing research frameworks is defined; however, the sources of framework disruption remain situated and linked to societal contexts. The issue of ruptured or failed frameworks is complex due to the fact that the researcher does not know exactly when they will find themselves in a situation of rupture or produce a failure that could put populations in danger or make the researcher vulnerable. The sociologist does not always know how to restrict the research situation, and according to the nature of the political context and the local situation, the researcher must develop emergency skills in order to fix framing errors and to avoid all danger for the populations and the researcher. For example, migrant populations in France, who are the subject of stigmatisation, symbolic violence and racism, can at any moment react with a decision to halt the research framework. The research position in near and far-off fields thus holds the capacity to combine “situational” and “structural” properties in the social factor, and to mutually shed light on them (Schwartz, 1993). We consider that the research experience is born from a process of negotiated cooperation which signifies a distributed knowledge in “the para-ethnographies” (Marcus, 2009). 2.4 Ethnographies of Recognition and Moral Economies We have considered that both the people we met during our surveys and ourselves have the same bases of competencies at our disposal. We have adopted an approach which rejected “methodological irony”, otherwise known as scholarly knowledge to produce a concurrent analysis, which even sometimes corrects the attitudes of the members of ordinary society (Watson, 2001). For example, we have considered the nongmingong (peasant-workers) requests for recognition in China (Roulleau-Berger, 2009) and similar requests of the young French-Maghrebi who live in working-class suburbs in Paris, Lyon and Marseilles (Roulleau-Berger, 1999). The definition of the framework of the research experience can thus be developed around the production of moral economies, or the transaction, circulation, and exchange of moral and symbolic goods such as confidence, reputation, and consideration. Transactions and exchanges take place when the sociologist’s and the actors’ in the field categories of perception and appreciation are sufficiently close; when acts of mutual knowledge and recognition take place. If, in a field “over here”, we can talk about the shared experience when the sociologist and the actors manage to exchange symbolic goods and to determine their value together (RoulleauBerger, 1996), the terms of the question are very different in a far-off field. Indeed, the modes of recognition refer to various symbolic orders and the value of the goods to exchange is complex to fix and the researcher must prove her/his situational competencies in order to define their nature and also

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evaluate what “incurs debt”. Knowing what must be given or exchanged with a Chinese migrant worker or an earthquake victim, at which moment and in which situation, is relatively complex. The production of moral economies is the foundation of the interactions between the researcher and the individuals they meet in various societal contexts and local situations where the sociologist is increasingly confronted with an increase in demands for social and public recognition by populations in situations of vulnerability, poverty and social or economic disaffiliation. It is thus necessary to think about the diversity of multi-situated fields by referring to places of social conflict and to requests for recognition. And when we find ourselves in the fields of disqualification, of “bottom up migration”, of vulnerability, of racism, researchers do not lose ethical responsibility, contrary to what Marcus proposes. This issue clearly appears with the question of recognising discriminated speech. The more fights for recognition are present in the field, the more their ethical responsibility increases; even more so when the fields diversify. Situations with social, ethnic, economic and political tension in the field produce mental and moral loading effects on the researcher. Moral economies and honour regimes organise and orient the meaning of the engagements which are never really aligned between the researcher and the individuals solicited. The engagements between the researcher and the individuals in a field are always detailed, temporised and localised in terms of honour systems. We accept fieldwork as a work of producing moral economies and of socialisation, thought of more as direct access to transparency from the other’s point of view (Dodier, Baszanger, 1997). The collaborative construction of honour regimes also defines the processes of discrete subjectification and configure a specific social space implacably linked to the survey which implies significant adjustments. In a field “over here”, the sociologist will produce moral economies more quickly with the surveyed populations while, in various multi-situated fields, they must redefine the value of exchanging moral and symbolic goods multiple times. The degree of structure in moral economies and honour regimes plays on the intensity of engagements in the fieldwork experience. The higher the degree of structure and stabilisation, the more the mutual engagements reinforce each other. Inversely, the greater the fall, the less the engagements are aligned. The intensity of the engagements seems to be linked to interactions between the researcher and the populations present, varying according to local situations but also depending on societal structures. For example, work in a “marked” field seen by the researcher in terms of spatial and temporal dispersion can modify the intensity of the engagements. Even when engagements are very strong, they can change into disengagements at any moment due to the fragility of situations

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that disrupt individual aspirations, interests, motivations and desires. Here we can very clearly see how events and societal processes play on the construction of research frameworks in local situations and in the alignment of engagements. And while sociologists must be watchful for framework security (Goffman, 1991) so that they do not have exterior interferences such as actors who seek to manipulate or falsify the framework of the social contract, it is clear that the issue of “framework security” arises in different terms in a near and a far-off field. Producing a multiplicity of narratives on contemporary societies depends on the competencies of individuals and groups, as well as those of the sociologist who constructs them from honour systems, adjustments, links of the meaning given to the action in the research process, and produces moral economies. Here, the production of knowledge imposes negotiation competencies between the sociologist and the actors which will give rise to cooperative knowledge, abilities to exchange and share competencies, and to correct and readjust action. More precisely, it is about mastering systems to return knowledge upon which configurations of the actors’ experiences and activities are based, to understand the grammar of situations and interactions to which the experiential and pragmatic engagement of the actors conform (Cefaï, 2003). 2.5 Politics of Intimacy and Narrative Pact Complex societies produce multiple collective narratives which co-exist in a relatively autonomous way or on the contrary, intertwine or fit together. Narratives of contemporary societies and individual life narratives are increasingly thought about in terms of their dynamics and complexity. Life narratives reveal juxtapositions and overlaps in societal and civilisational contexts (Marcus, 1995) and give access to the plurality of collective narratives. For example, we know that the processes of individuation which are very active in Western societies and are emerging in Asian and African societies are characterised by a multiplication of biographical changes and reversals of situations. Individual biographies are constructed from junctions that correspond with changes in spatial regimes in the form of geographical mobilities, as well as changes in economic regimes in the form of professional mobilities (RoulleauBerger, 2010). In the journeys of insecure, discriminated, and segregated populations, “biographical crossroads” appear in a repetitive manner in migration (Bessin, Bidart, Grossetti, 2010). With each change of place, events (wars, unemployment...) have an influence on the repertoires of individual resources that re-organise to compensate for the social statuses, places and identities of individuals. The succession of junctions and the formation of biographical crossroads result from the structural processes of the work in societies and the

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capacities of action, mobilisation, circulation of various categories of social groups and individuals. For the sociologist, these junctions are impossible to grasp in their materiality in the framework of the fulfilment of biographical narratives, even in a multi-situated ethnographic approach. The biographical narrative can decreasingly be apprehended in a relative linearity but rather as starting from disjointed sequences linked to various spaces and temporalities. For the sociologist, the issue becomes that of returning to the meaning of the conjunctions and biographical ruptures with the actors. Obviously this means thinking about the journeys and contexts while avoiding reducing the contextualisation of journeys into distant forms of determinisms (Demazière, Samuel, 2010). The issue becomes: What causes rupture? What causes conjunction? To respond to these questions, the sociologist takes into account the way in which structural processes play on the construction of ruptures and conjunctions and the meaning that is attributed to them by individuals. The researcher is thus invited to produce a biographical method which allows the pluri-situated dynamic of migrant experiences to be recreated. This means following them, for example, in their geographic mobilities and in various societal contexts as Alain Tarrius (2000, 2007, 2010) was able to throughout his numerous research field trips from the 1980s onwards. Knowing that it is difficult and costly to attain the “multi-situated biography”, the key question which can be asked is: What is the policy of intimacy? How does the researcher access the self of the individuals when reconstituting biographies? In neo-liberal capitalist societies, injunction to autonomy must allow the poorest, weakest and most vulnerable to enter the competition and to remain there (Ehrenberg, 2010); thus, a process of domestication and instrumentalisation of the subjectivity in neo-liberal capitalist societies has developed. The fights and the competitions between various categories of social groups occur in order to access a moral autonomy controlled by others. Individuals must show themselves to be autonomous, and capable of action and of reflection in various stages of social plans to restore self-respect which permits harnessing the subjectivities and confiscating the “selves” of the individuals. Individuals, pledged to these plans despite themselves, are constrained to competitive relationships and inter-individual competition to access legitimate moral economies. Here individuals endure double-bind hardships where there is a gap between being themselves and capturing subjectivities, consequently difficulties in accessing the “self”. The sociologist is thus also confronted with a double-bind situation: on the one hand he/she cannot participate in this process of capturing subjectivities in the survey and on the other hand if he/she cannot get close to the individuals, no honour system can be installed. For example, fieldwork in fields of

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“bottom-end” migration, disqualification, racism ... can only take place from the moment that the researcher and the actors co-produce a moral economy in which the researcher accepts to include the demands of meaning and recognition, and the actors recognise this moral, even political, competency that produces an honour system with variable intensity according to situations encountered and political and societal contexts. When the life lines of the individuals met are often exhausted, researchers are regularly confronted by a feeling of self-shame that the individuals experience and which is not always visible or expressed. The life narrative thus became impractical or even indecent in some instances by getting too close to that which creates the feeling of shame in the individuals. Biographical interviews inevitably reopen some wounds, rekindling ancient sufferings. The biography in practice does not always allow for respecting the narrative pact, so it becomes necessary to construct a methodological scope to redefine the terms of the narrative pact, to invent a methodological plan in which making the narrative allows the redefinition of the narrative pact with individuals. This is achieved by trying less to know how the narrative is determined but rather how it is determining, that is to say how it models the past and the future. It is possible to construct a scope which favours maintenance of self by creating a protected space by avoiding showing situations encountered by individuals, lesions, and sufferings, as too negative. We have thus proposed city narratives to individuals to avoid life narratives (Roulleau‐Berger, 1991); we asked individuals to take us to the places where they underwent the work experiences that they recounted. The city narrative thus became another form of life narrative. In foreign fields, the political and local constraints do not always allow a foreign researcher to travel around on their own with the autochtons and the researcher is thus limited in the elaboration of their methodological plan. But the more individuals move around, circulate, and migrate, the more difficult it is to redefine the terms of the narrative pact which redefines itself in each new situation, in each new context. The effects of the societal and cultural contexts combine to define the horizons of more or less limited action in the interaction situation between the researcher and the populations. In certain cases the political surveillance systems, economic situations, constrained mobilities and the slow construction of a self play on the limitation of a horizon of action for a researcher in a far-off field. Moreover, if the individual narrative corresponds to a form of self-exhibition it also refers to a conception of the individual in various societal contexts. The culture of self and worrying about the self represent strong intellectual issues in the construction of the biographical order. In Europe, individuals are confronted with injunctions to overexpose the self and simultaneously with

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the necessity of developing self-protection strategies for the self. In other societies, for example in China or Japan, the rites of presenting the self depend on forms of reserves in talking about oneself, of one’s sufferings. The self will not necessarily be situated at the same place in a situation of interaction between the researcher and the surveyees. In Chinese areas, conscience of the self is rarely claimed; individuals reconstitute their personal histories from events and familial and professional situations without readily taking part in their subjectivity. Individual narratives with Chinese migrant workers in China do not occur in the same way as with migrants living in France from African or Maghrebi backgrounds. While, in French areas, the populations with whom we constructed life narratives expressed a reflexivity about their experiences, this capacity of “returning to the self” appears less rapidly in the biographical interviews conducted in China or Indonesia. We can also hypothesise that these populations have internalised the fear of giving their point of view and do not really allow themselves a reflexivity competency in what they do and who they are. 2.6 Translation and Publication Sociologists are always confronted with the issue of knowing how to translate or not what they see, and why in one way rather than another. We cannot adhere to a positivist version of translation with its belief in the possibility of a word by word, segment by segment, item by item correspondence. We can thus say that we have re-situated the ends of the earth through the horizons of meaning. Sociologists cannot have the illusion that they have the power to faithfully reproduce reality but they are invited to ask themselves about the risks of surplus and of failing that they can introduce into translation work, a task that increases in multi-situated fields. Sociological writing, like ethnographical writing, subscribes to the notion of fiction, engendering the figures and the tropes which select and impose signifiers in the process of translating observed reality (Affergan, 1999). When the stories become public, a feeling of anxiety always overcomes the researcher, as a contract of trust is always charged with tacit requirements, all the more so in the worlds that are the least legitimised. Rather than thinking in terms of the “contexts of discovery” (in observation and interpretation) and “contexts of justification” where the researcher must grant (or not) legitimacy to the result in dichotomous terms, like Latour and Woolgar (1988), we consider that the fluxes of actions produce inscriptions which rely on the heterogeneity and the discontinuity of the representations (Clarke, Fujumara, 1992). Here, control of information not only demands that secrets are preserved but, in certain cases, requires that we do not even consider that there is

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information to be controlled, especially in tense political situations. There are moments in research when the sociologist will feel a dull anxiety linked with the accumulation of secrets they keep. There are moments when the variance between the fieldwork knowledge that the researcher has and what he/she can say grows, when he/she is in a violent tension between the status as a researcher and the role as a citizen facing ethical and moral issues. So as to not put themselves in danger, sociologists must be careful to never unwittingly find themselves in a contradictory role, that is to say a role which appears deceitful. For example, they must not adopt the role of intermediary or go-between learning the secrets of two parties and giving each of them a genuine impression that they will guard their secrets. Knowing how to keep silent is also part of the construction of the researcher’s engagement. Silence is constructed in different ways according to societal and political contexts, and the sociologist is constrained by declared or undeclared orders, invitations and warnings to keep quiet. In the theory of Post-Western methodology, sociologists lay claim to the knowledge of the individuals, they remain extremely attentive to writing style and to its effects contributing to the enlargement of possibilities of intelligible discourse knowing that they are all co-authors in a shared world (Geertz, 1996). The issue of publication is one way of revisiting the issue raised by Max Weber about the scholar and politics, or, in a more modern version, the issue of the researcher and the citizen. For the researcher, this issue of engagement poses that of the intellectual struggle against forms of social stigmatisation and damage to identities, colonialisms and local and international inequalities. For the researcher, engagement means acting “with” the world to rebuild it (Lapoujade, 1997).

Fabric of Knowledge and Research Fieldwork

Part 2 Sociological Questions in Europe and in China

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Urban Boundaries, Segregation and Intermediate Spaces

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Urban Boundaries, Segregation and Intermediate Spaces From 1949 to 1979, the urbanisation process stagnated in China before entering a period of considerable acceleration in tandem with industrialisation. In Europe these two processes were spread over several centuries as against two decades in China. This lead to the appearance of specifically Chinese economic and social phenomena which have been the subject of much recent research. The specificity of these processes has raised questions which have not really been asked in Western Europe. Contemporary Chinese cities are characterised by new urban hierarchies, which are less contrasted than in European cities, since they are scattered around the city and concentrated in certain specific areas. Individuals and social groups are caught between assignment to certain localities and flowing through the city. Depending on the moment, life phase or situation, they may seem to be trapped or able to move. Contemporary cities may have many different forms of segregation, but they still allow access to different kinds of space and provide renewed opportunities to individuals and groups, making it possible to enter high legitimacy urban spaces as demonstrated by some migrant workers who construct and experience upward social mobility (Roulleau-Berger, 2009). 1

Social Stratification and Urban Hierarchies in the Chinese City

From 1949 to 1979 Chinese cities had a clear structure focused around the labour unit (danwei), which protected those who were employed in state-owned companies. Cities have drifted away from this model towards a more inegalitarian one layered with tensions, ordeals and apartness. From 1989, along with the crumbling of the socialist/Maoist structures of control and the fading of industrial complexes and danwei, housing reforms fostered private ownership and allowed spatial mobility strategies to appear on a professional and residential level. Chinese urban society has become increasingly stratified and is becoming increasingly diversified in terms of the constitution of socio-occupational categories: the upper, middle and working classes and individuals who are economically inactive, unemployed or partially employed. This emphasises how the urban and social structure has become more complex, social groups more

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/9789004309982_006

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differentiated, residential trajectories more diverse and access to social mobility unequal. Thus the structure of Chinese urban society has changed radically since the economic reforms began. Social mobility pathways have diversified since 1978 and the structural barriers to mobility have been redefined. The paradox of the reforms consists in increasing the opportunities for mobility while simultaneously making the urban boundaries between the social groups clearer. 1.1 Urban Society and the New Middle Classes In an urban society in the process of modernisation and moving towards the market economy, the emergence of the middle and upper classes very closely reflects the structural evolution of this society: how the middle classes have very quickly become stratified as part of the general process of stratification in Chinese society and how an awareness of belonging to the middle classes has developed (Chen Yingfang, 2012). Differentiated urban lifestyles have thus arisen, especially among the middle classes, starting a gentrification process leading to them living in closed housing complexes similar to gated communities: homeowners’ occupations vary form business manager, to journalist, to doctor, to college professor, to middle school teacher…(Zhang Dunfu, 2010). New urban dwellers with a certain social capital are settling in the main cities. Chinese cities seem to be more accommodating of the new middle classes than of unskilled migrants. Not all city dwellers obtain the same access to urban spaces and territories, since these are parts of different kinds of legitimation and hierarchy systems, linked to the diversity of activities and population heterogeneity. New internal boundaries and new urban hierarchies are emerging as a result of the joint presence of different categories of citizens. Professional and residential mobility is growing, producing increased inequalities and social apartness, leading to conflicts and tensions. China’s economy has experienced rapid growth over the last thirty years; migrant workers will remain a major driving force (Li Peilin, 2012) but with the decline of socialist institutions they also increasingly experience situations of insecurity and great vulnerability. This means they oscillate between urban integration, segregation and marginalisation. Migrant workers are confronted with real deprivation of social rights involving new forms of poverty, new injustices and new forms of marginalisation (Roulleau-Berger, 2007b,c). The rapid urbanisation of China has also involved an increasing privatisation of housing and a strongly marked gentrification phenomenon with the rehabilitation of the “old” city centres urban villages, industrial areas and residential districts. Today more than three quarters of Chinese urban households own their abode. In present day Peking there are between 700 and 800

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highly organized residential communities with owners’ associations (Gransow, 2014). A housing market has taken shape with the urban property reform which enabled the conversion of industrial land to commercial use as well as expropriations and the displacement of populations living in pauperised old districts. 1.2 Segregation and the Rural Population In the cities, urban and rural populations are segregated by means of processes which are mirrored in the way discrimination against the ever-increasing numbers of migrants is managed politically. In some provinces, local governments are trying to limit the flow of peasant workers by establishing a threshold figure for hiring migrants from other provinces and demanding that each city adheres to the quotas. These discriminatory policies are one of the main factors in the regulation and segmentation of urban labour markets, strengthened by the fact that most peasant workers do not have an urban hukou which would grant them access to social rights, healthcare and retirement benefits. Nevertheless the second generation of migrants is flocking to the Chinese megalopolises, where they face moral, urban, social and material ordeals. Local city governments contribute to this discrimination by portraying migrants as a homogeneous social group made up of “poor people” and “vagrants”, individuals without a past who cannot be considered as actors in Chinese society (Wu Fulong et al, 2010). The less qualified are conflated with dangerous classes threatening public order, while other urban citizens see them as competitors for public goods such as water, electricity, transportation and even food. The new working class in China is mainly drawn from these migrants; they face precarious and vulnerable situations, with very few of them employed in the urban public sector. On their arrival, these migrants face stigmatisation from the pre-established populations and are seen as “internal foreigners”. They are limited to inferior pay and status. Some live inside the factories and workshops in which they are employed, in dismal conditions, sharing facilities with twenty other workers, without access to basic sanitation. These situations of great social and symbolic vulnerability are strongly resented since, in the former socialist model, status was granted by the danwei, which provided housing and access to material resources. Almost all of them are temporarily employed on short-term contracts in private companies or are self-employed, while 71.6% of local (non migrant) citizens in urban areas benefit from job security and basic healthcare (Li Chunling, 2008). A new constantly growing underclass can thus be identified in Chinese cities; for example, in certain cities some of these poor hukou-less migrants rent shacks, settle in vacant lots or

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live in dismal conditions in employer-granted housing. In short, migrants are the main users of the informal housing market. 1.3 New Underclass and Urban Poverty In Chinese megalopolises a wide variety or urban villages has developed over thirty years. There are now two generations of “urban villages” in which migrants form a new urban underclass and experience a new poverty. Today, two specific urban forms have appeared: the old urban villages, which exist in the metropolis, and the “ant colonies” or new urban villages which appear on the outskirts of megalopolises. More and more urban villages appear in megalo­polises with the very rapid process of urbanisation, and more and more are destroyed. In the first generation of urban villages the floating population which passed though may have been evicted from their property, seeking temporary work or establishing a new small company… These “urban villages” are specific to Chinese cities and part of an urbanisation process whereby villages are integrated as “urban enclaves” into megalopolises (Li Peilin, 2008 b). If peasants have not only lost their lands but have also been stripped of all the protections they had while they were part of a rural community, then the first generation of “urban villages” provide some autonomy in terms of limited local government and economic organisation. As such they are a phenomenon embodying the paradoxes of an increasingly complex Chinese urban society. Former peasants who have become urban landlords and low-skilled migrants looking for cheap housing share these “urban villages” which seem to be a specific urban device used by migrants to combat impoverishment. The boundaries that set these villages apart become clearer as they become symbolic, economic and social. In the second generation of urban villages this structural downgrading has lead to new forms of urban marginalisation as seen with the rise of the “ant colonies”. Migrants and young people, between 22 and 29, who have left university in the last four years, now live in villages on the outskirts of Peking, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Canton…: villages of “ants” (Lian Si, 2009) where low-rent housing projects have recently been built. Their situation shows that Chinese urban society is riddled with processes creating precariousness leading to regular and frequent changes in employment and relocation between big cities and other average-sized or small cities. Sex workers and nannies are also a significant part of this new urban underclass. Nannies are an important category of temporary workers in Chinese cities (Angeloff, 2010). Usually young (a third are under 25) and with few or no qualifications, they avoid working in factories by being employed as domestic

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helpers (baby-sitters, carers for the elderly, housework…) (Zhou Jianxin, Zhou Daming, 2009). Increasing numbers of migrant women become sex workers as they settle in cities. The establishing of dormitories for male migrant workers has lead to a demand which has fostered a sex market. The rise of such a market has relied on the globalisation of Chinese labour markets and moral and physical violence against impoverished migrant women (Liu Linping, Li Chaohai, 2009). In degraded workers’ villages the sex market is seen less and less as stigmatising in Chinese cities, because urban dwellers are becoming aware of the level of impoverishment among migrants. Sex workers internalise the idea that there is a legitimacy in being constrained to prostitution by creating for themselves an identity which they never share with their family in their home village. Less-qualified people with only a limited role repertoire (Hannerz, 1983) do not have easy access to employment and work situations; since they can only access a limited part of the city’s opportunities they can be trapped in certain spaces. Those with an extended role repertoire can navigate from one urban place to another and increase their chances of finding employment; high accessibility leads to spatial mobility. Next to entrapment stands low mobility and plural spatial mobilities, but young people who face job insecurity keep swinging between urban affiliation and disaffiliation. They may lack access to employment at a specific moment, then attain it and later be deprived of it again. The narrower the role repertoire, the more tension there will be between mobility and entrapment (Roulleau-Berger, 1999); the wider the repertoires become, the less tension there will be between gaining access or not to the opportunities the city provides. 2

Social Division of Space in the European City

In the European city, urban hierarchies are defined differently within a political history linked to an inegalitarian democracy. In present-day Western European cities, the discrepancies, distances and inequalities between the popular classes and the new middle classes and even the new economic elites are continually increasing. In these more or less pronounced forms of segregation, which are both dispersed throughout the city and concentrated in specific places, individuals and social groups are caught in the tensions between confinement to certain places and circulation within the city. Social affiliations define specific forms of appropriation and control of urban space, even forms of its privatisation by the upper classes organised around the principle of social homogeneity; the streets of the “desirable districts” are

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the object of strong closure strategies based on class togetherness with forms that vary according to the feeling of belonging, the length of residence in the district and the pre-existence or otherwise of links between the families with the groups which were in the district prior to their arrival (Grafmeyer, Authier, 2008). The desirable districts contain ways of inhabiting which are based upon the idea of learning to socially situate oneself, become aware of one’s position and of preserving a bourgeois group togetherness (Pinçon, PinçonCharlot, 2007). Alongside the traditional bourgeois towns and districts there is a property-owning bourgeoisie – upper class populations with high cultural capital – in the popular and middle-market districts of city centres, historical districts of previously popular but now gentrified old towns and cities and former popular and industrial spaces – inhabited by private sector managers – in close proximity to the new business centres, areas qualified as districts of re-foundation in European cities (Cousin, 2012). Marc Oberti and Edmond Préteceille (2011) have identified the relationships of the upper and upper middle classes to the social mixing of populations in a differentiated and localised way. The middle and upper classes also set their sights on working class housing projects close to city centres by participating in the appropriation of this urban heritage (Duchêne et al., 2013). As the stakes of social struggles, city centres have been represented as places of appropriation and normalisation of urban space by the middle classes, especially the upper portion which contribute to the gentrification of the former popular districts of the city centres (Collet, 2012). The middle classes become property owners in order to constitute a capital asset or avoid residing in the accommodation of the popular classes (Cusin, 2012). Thus house-based (as opposed to flat) residential zones have become the objects of privatisation strategies implemented by the middle class families occupying them. Periurbanisation has also contributed to the departure of the middle classes and the impoverishment of urban centres: for example, 12% of the jobs in the Paris conglomeration are held by peri-urban residents. For the middle class households which settled in the 1970s and 1980s in these house-based residential districts, this new town habitat first facilitated access to property-ownership, strong involvement in the local political and associative life and itineraries of ascending social mobility. Today,however, on the contrary, this habitat has become synonymous with the place of social declassing in which inhabitants are captives in their district and co-inhabit with new more modest and/or immigrant populations which do not develop the same style of urban life (Lambert, 2012). This also means that, today more than ever, middle class families develop strategies of over-investment in education in order to further differentiate themselves from the popular class families (Duru-Bellat, Van Zanten, 2012; Van Zanten, 2012).

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New socio-spatial and economic divisions mean a reduction in the experiences and ordeals of urbanity. Increasingly large inequalities and distances separate social groups facing differentiated access to the social, economic, material and virtual resources of the contemporary city. In French cities, for example, the “banlieues rouges” or red suburbs have been described as “a social system articulating a community logic constructed around a popular culture, a class-conscious logic and a social participation logic constituted around [political] parties, unions and associations” (Dubet, Lapeyronnie, 1992). The sharing of a same working-class condition and political experience – as members of the communist party – have produced communities of values (Grafmeyer, Authier, 2008) and progressively these red suburbs have become the so-called problem districts, the so-called segregated districts. During the 1980s in France, a certain number of French sociologists questioned, even deconstructed, the notion of suburb while others analysed the emergence of the new city centre model meaning “village-district” in opposition to “housing project” and “social mix” in opposition to “ghetto” at a time when immigrant populations were accessing and the middle classes were leaving public sector social housing in a context of de-industrialisation of cities (Tissot, 2012). The urban segregation process has been built upon a gradation in which the scale taken, at the local level, by the entangled and cumulative processes of relegation (Grafmeyer, 1994) has led to the labelling of this or that urban space as a segregated district because it appears to be a “district in crisis” in which a new urban underclass has formed. Today, social urban classes in France and in European cities are becoming more impervious to each other through the cumulative effects of social mobility, chain-reactions of downward mobility and structural de-qualification processes. Economic slowdown has triggered a transmission crisis which has impacted workers most violently, as status reproduction from father to son has been hindered by the decline of the working class as a valued condition, the intensification of working conditions, casualised statuses and chain-reactions of downward mobility as the result of fierce competition between diplomas. 3

Migration and Ethnic Boundaries in Cities

Cities and districts contain memories and identities which are constructed in the history of peopling and migrations. Migrants arrive in a city and appropriate streets then other groups come and cover the traces of the first migrants and so on. The histories of European cities relate the insertion of migrants into the city and their distribution in the urban space. The “from enclave to dispersion” model has become obsolete; this model showed new immigrants settling

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first in enclaves on the periphery of the city centre before dispersing throughout the city. European cities have become globalised with the arrival of poor migrants from Eastern European countries. New Chinese immigrants represent the majority of new arrivals in certain districts. These new migratory influxes from Eastern Europe and Asia have transformed large European cities. These unexpected new populations have to conquer a space. Different social and ethnic groups co-inhabit popular districts in city centres and urban peripheries. Community memories and identities become visible in public space by means of economic and professional activities. Shops and places of worship appear to be important places of hospitality for immigrants. When there is a shortage of community spaces, marks of recognition weaken and interpersonal relationships in the public space are affected. Intercultural transactions which play a central role in the public space of the multicultural contemporary city develop around shops. Ethnic shops, restaurants and markets as well as the persistence of small trades in certain districts play a determining role in the modes of organ­ising the life of urban minorities. They reveal how populations of foreign origin penetrate urban areas which were physically and socially constituted prior to their arrival, how territories are redefined through relationships of succession and competition between communities of different origins within a single urban area (Raulin, 2001). Different cultural groups present differentiated residential itineraries. If some groups rapidly disperse in the city, others are obliged to live in districts of relegation without always being able to move around the city as they would like. However, economic and social success does not necessarily alter the tendency for communities of the same origin to live in residential proximity: this can bolster strategies for the construction of institutional networks. The increasing complexity of the forms of insertion of ethnic groups into the urban reality shows how the modes of urban life constantly increase in number today. Certain districts are commercial intersections which have become colonial counters in which supply networks link streets and cities to each other given the international economic relationships. And now in Chinese Cities, because of the new presence of migrants in China, for example Korean and African immigrants, interethnic competition and conflict between foreign traders and ordinary Chinese citizens influences the production of new micro-segregations and the redefinition of social identities in the public space between Chinese citizens and new immigrants (Liu Haifang, 2013). The cosmopolitan districts of international cities witness successive waves of migration which leave their marks on collective memories. In the streets of these cosmopolitan districts pluri-ethnic sociabilities take shape through

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understandings and conflicts, complementarities and oppositions, not only between “natives” and “immigrants” but also between “natives” and between “immigrants”. Pluri-ethnic co-existence does not form a “bipolar system oscillating between extreme models of war and peace but reveals a diversity of situations and relationships based upon integrated conflicts which, contrary to received wisdom, do not provoke ethnic splits (De Rudder, 1990). The processes of mobility and taking root both facilitate and restrict the possibilities of coexistence with, recognition of and interaction with the Others. 4

“Foreigners” and “Hobos” in Cities

Migrants without hukou in Chinese cities and undocumented migrants without proper work and/or resident permits in European cities are threatened, hunted or mistreated. The issue of non legal residence appears to be a very important stake in the urban space; it directly challenges the capacity for tolerance, hospitality and welcome of urban societies. Although the experience of non legal residence may vary according to the conjunctional, structural, legal, ideological and economic context, it is synonymous with exclusion from civic rights and the “legal” labour market – whether without hukou in China or undocumented in Europe. Non legal residence appears to be a political product resulting from the interaction of an individual in the receiving society and the variations in the legal and administrative tolerance of her/him; the experience of non legal residence involves a diverse and complex range of situations (Fassin, 2005). Individuals in this non legal residence situation are without rights to singularity and justice – in the eyes of justice they are identified as “illegitimate”, condemned to live in fear and self-shame. The fight against non legal migration in China and non legal immigration in Europe – a permanent political goal for the last twenty years – focuses on the emblematic figure of the “clandestine as a threat to law and order”. Urban imagination is thus fuelled with the idea that there are supposedly un-assimilable populations which should not be accepted. The “clandestine” is a notion mobilised to slow down the stabilisation of legally settled populations; the “clandestine” is neither a legal nor an economic category, it is a category of political discourse. Simultaneously, in European cities, immigration policies have hardened, refugee influx policies have been reduced and immediate repatriation procedures for refugees have been implemented. In Chinese cities such as Peking and Shanghai rural migrants are regularly returned to their provinces. In European cities, alongside the figure of the “foreigner” the example of the Roma enables one to grasp how the order of the

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street is constructed around the obligation of being sedentary. The presence of Roma populations in European cities has produced different responses from city mayors confronted with attitudes towards minorities. In late 19th century Europe, the influx of Roma families from Central and Eastern Europe provoked strongly hostile reactions which have still not disappeared. Political authorities have always sought to restrict the expansion of nomadic populations. The order of the street has been constructed upon the imposition of sedentary modes of living. Everything is implemented in order to avoid the visible expression of forms of poverty – especially in the street – by attempting to integrate traditional economic or cultural activities into the circuits of the official economy whereas the Roma economy is based upon a vast and modular space implying a fluidity of family groups (Humeau, 1995). If, today, the public issue of the place of nomadic populations revolves more around integration than exclusion, it is nevertheless true that they are perceived as being dangerous and are often the object of suspicion and victims of repression. Regardless of whether one is discussing European or Chinese cities, public space is the first public good accessed by each citizen and is the privileged place of expression of inequalities, uncertainties and the non recognition of the Other. This phenomenon reveals the increased risk of not being able to obtain a place and be oneself. Public space thus asserts new forms of inequalities regarding social risks and how they spread in the Global City in which individuals owning economic, social and legal assets as well as themselves coexist alongside others with few resources and support and who own themselves to a lesser degree (Castel, 2001). Public space appears to be a primitive stage for politics upon which identities and group memberships come into contact and tension with each other (Joseph, 1998). In the European cities of the 1950s, agricultural workers, seasonal workers, occasional workers, the unemployed, the “uprooted” from the countryside, the elderly and infirm, political refugees and so on could find themselves homeless and obliged to live in the streets. In contrast, the entry of today’s new “hobos” (Anderson, 1993) into cities involves squatting vacant premises (Aguilera, Bouillon, 2013) in Europe and shanty towns in China where they develop survival “careers”. The public space of Chinese cities is increasingly occupied by the new poor, workers from the countryside who find themselves descending into a process of social and economic disaffiliation despite their best intentions. A survey undertaken in 2007 by Tang Xiujuan in Canton revealed that in the Chinese city 95% of the beggars were rural migrants, often elderly, ill or handicapped workers. Another survey in Canton directed by Lu Guoxian revealed that 69% of the beggars were single people who had lost economic and social links.

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In European and Chinese cities street cultures emerge in which the new poor must face not only situations of uncertainty and urgency by surviving through the work of begging, through links of sociability with their peers but also codes of behaviour and mental habits in a ritualised, codified and ordered world. Street cultures are based upon an economy of exchange and the development of activities for obtaining resources through exchange, theft, scavenging bins and begging. These street cultures trace differentiated geographies of charity (Pichon, 2007, 2014). With the development of street cultures – in both European and Chinese cities, in both democratic and authoritarian contexts – public space has become a place of political stakes and the object of investigations by those who discretely manage “social risks” by ordering, disciplining and moralising. This phenomenon is characteristic of societies experienced as uncertain and in which the Other must be protected in order to protect oneself. Measures for public action assert the idea that there has been multiplication, refinement and miniaturisation of forms of social and political intervention and instrumentalisation concerning those who appear to be “excluded from the inside” in the eyes of those who consider themselves to be “included”. These measures constitute increasing amounts of control, surveillance and mediation and reveal a continuous process of increasing state control effected via the issue of managing social risks. According to Jacques Donzelot (1999), these measures are based upon an immunological conception of the role of the State regarding society: it must “make society”, create a “harmonious society” in the Chinese case and “re-create social links” in the European case. In both the case of aid shelter workers and mobile aid service teams in Chinese cities (Flock, 2014) and the case of educators, doctors, social workers and the militants of humanitarian and charitable associations in European cities, social work for the street also asserts the idea that there has been multiplication, refinement and miniaturisation of forms of social and political intervention and instrumentalisation concerning those who appear to be “excluded from the inside” in the eyes of those who consider themselves to be “included”. This miniaturisation of the political management of the affairs of the City is constructed from the ramifications between different places of decision-making and power, closely knit in the authoritarian context and more loosely knit in the democratic context; in pauperised districts of European cities, for example, street workers are strongly encouraged to work together in order to manage issues of public order. However, in both cases, social work for the street reveals the processes of social polarisation. In Chinese and European cities public space appears to be a space of distance and proximity, a space of civility and incivility, a place for dealing and exchanging. The “excluded from the inside”, the poor, the migrants and the

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“included” co-exist or avoid each other. For Chinese and European sociologists urban poverty is referred to a political construction, that is, directly linked to measures of categorising and fixing populations experienced as potentially dangerous for social order. In China, urban poverty is conceived more as a state linked to the lack of social, material and financial resources than as a process of the deterioration of objective and subjective identities; the “new poor” are xiagang, very poorly qualified migrants, young unemployed people… (Sun, 2006). European cities are conceived as containing a diversity of experiences of poverty which may take the shape of integrated poverty, marginal poverty or disqualifying poverty (Paugam, 2005). The “foreigners from the inside” continually question the social, economic and cultural practices of the so-called “integrated” citizens. They also pose the question of both the political and symbolic boundaries. The issue of the drawing of the internal boundaries of European and Chinese societies is violently raised by the treatment experienced by foreigners and “hobos” in public space. .

5

Circulations and Marketplaces in Chinese and International Cities

Since Chinese and European cities are involved in the globalisation process, they are the scene of the simultaneous production of new internal social, economic and moral boundaries alongside new cosmopolitanisms with transnational territories. This simultaneity reflects a double phenomena of closed local spaces and opened global territories, which in turn reflects a double proc­ess of multiple inequalities in international cities and new economic and social links between international cities (Roulleau-Berger, 2014a). Ethnic districts exist in every international city and they are always linked to other ethnic spaces situated in other international cities. For the inhabitant of the city concerned, these districts may appear to be urban enclaves, while, for the migrant, they are a place of international exchange – they are, in fact, both at one and the same time (Deboulet, 2012). For example, in Lyon (France), the “Place du Pont” could be understood as an urban entity rather than a district linked to the Maghreb by commercial routes and in which different ethnic business and merchant figures have been elaborated (wholesalers, sales representatives, dealers, street vendors, etc) (Battegay, 2008). If globalisation is a multi-dimensional process, if we have already seen ­several globalisations, then present-day globalisation is more a phenomenon in which the relationships between the singular and the collective, between the local and the global, are endlessly being reconfigured. If the faces of European metropolises have been largely “cosmopolitanised”, Near-Eastern

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and Middle-Eastern capital cities have become either major places of deliberate and negotiated international migration or gateways to the West. In Chinese cities, numerous poorly qualified migrant populations “take position” becoming the object of plural stigmatisations while also developing resistance strategies in their circulations and their capacity to start businesses. Transnational spaces are the scene of a proliferation of new combinations which can be seen in the increasing differentiation of areas which were formerly a part of the national and supranational fields. This engenders a diversification of spatial-temporal frameworks and normative frameworks. Adopting the terms of Saskia Sassen (2006), we can say that we are moving “from a dynamic centripetal force which characterised the Nation-State to a dynamic centrifugal force in which the multiplication of specialized assemblages demonstrates how the access to these territorialities is constructed from diverse and varied capabilities”. Locality, commerciality and ethnicity construct assemblages between polycentric economies and hierarchically organised economies beyond the Nation-States, conjunctions between economic forms of unequal value. International marketplaces and “bazaar economies”, in particular, are the vectors of globalisations. However, the international marketplaces are positioned within a hierarchy according to whether the international cities are “global”, “partial” or “minor”. For example, in China, Liwu and Guangzhou are global cities (Sassen, 1991) which appear to be highly visible marketplaces linked to a diversity of marketplaces in Africa, Asia, India, Iran, etc, showing a hierarchy of polycentric economies. In eight-storey buildings on Dashatou Street in Guangzhou, there is a multitude of small workshops and shops housing the activities of tailors, fabric sellers, haberdashers, curtain sellers… For example, in the city centre, the Pearl Market, the Jade Market and the semi-precious gem market are frequented by Chinese, African, Indian and Brazilian traders who come to purchase stock as well as to have stones cut in China. The partial cities communicate with the global cities and supply them through commercial exchange leading to the multiplication of bazaar economies (Geertz, 2007). For example, in the bazaars of Naples, Chinese merchants sell new clothes, belts, scarves, bags, bracelets, calculators, etc in central districts. For ten years, there have been more and more Chinese bazaars in international cities. In other partial cities like Sofia (Bulgaria) the peripheral districts of Sofia have been the scene for the organisation of a wholesale market called Ilientzi in which ethnic businessmen from the Near and Middle East and Chinese businessmen have created ethnic enclaves employing Bulgarian workers. Sportswear, lingerie, household linen, watches, toys, electrical goods, etc can be found in this market… Moreover, the Chinese traders have purchased

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nearly all the shops except those owned by the local mafia who hold the covered and renovated areas of the market (Tcholakova, 2012). Transnational economic networks linking cities compete with or even engulf national economies. The nearer international cities come to being “global cities” the more this phenomenon can be observed. Different facets of economic globalisation reveal new hegemonies, competitive forces and rivalries between the international cities. These economies form networks out of hegemonic dynamics or the dynamics of resistance which, for example, are visible in the transnational circulations of poorly qualified populations. Processes of re-composition, segmentation and diffraction of the local and global labour markets find expression in the multiple constructions of arrangements between the diversified and hierarchically organised forms of labour which influence the mobilities and circulations within and between international cities. Even if international marketplaces and bazaar economies are the vectors of globalisations, even if arrangements link international cities from the top and from the bottom, talking of assemblages also obliges one to talk of compositions, competition and conflicts in the urban space. Conse­quently, a new map can be drawn, a map of new transversal anchor points for both economy and identity, points which are linked by more or less visible lines along which the more or less qualified populations circulate in Chinese and European cities. Populations, which are compelled to follow the injunctions of mobility, are subjected to numerous displacements and are positioned according to plural modes within economic spaces of weak or strong legitimacy. These plural positioning modes emphasise the inclusions and separations between commercial and non commercial markets, between official and natural markets and between formal and informal markets, on both local and global scales (Roulleau-Berger, 2013 d). 6

Civil Society and Intermediate Spaces

Chinese and European cities also produce various intermediate spaces of apartness and marginalisation, in which individual and collective actors develop urban skills and take ownership of places and symbolic, economic and social resources. We could speak of intermediate spaces, notably urban recomposition spaces in the authoritarian system (Roulleau-Berger, 2014b). With growing job insecurity, the decline of institutions in China and in Europe and increasing inequalities and discrimination, intermediate spaces have been growing in number, as they formulate recognition struggles. Some of

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these spaces, serve as moral areas (Park, 1926), compensate for discrepancies and gaps within public programs and institutions and find a way through the fissures of low-legitimacy spaces. Such intermediate spaces become established in places near instituted spaces to produce liminal, quiet forms of socialisation which develop into non-institutional worlds where roles are not defined according to the division of wage labour and where meanings are linked to processes creating precariousness, impoverishment and discrimination. Nowadays, there is an increasing number of these intermediate spaces in which young unemployed people, migrant workers, community activists and so on rally together to produce survival strategies and set up artistic, cultural and economic micro-organisations. Other groups build up informal protest networks relying on digital resources in order to gain recognition as collective actors and make their voice heard vis-à-vis local government. Intermediate spaces emerge in which artistic activities serve as a focus for producing dissident voices and re-gaining ownership of social times and places. In this way, intermediate spaces are born in old inner urban neighbourhoods, existing distant from or close to the urban institutions where double bind situations and conflicting recognitions are dealt with. In these spaces, mutual recognition is slowly built based on shared norms, albeit non-mainstream norms. Individual capacities are then collectively claimed and sub­mitted for public approval and evaluation. By using different scales and contexts, individual capacities become societal capacities (Ricoeur 2004). Intermediate spaces then bring to light how active minorities or invisible groups of people in Chinese and in European cities can empower themselves and claim the “right to capabilities” (Sen, 1992), be they social or societal capacities. Individuals experience peaceful mutual recognition based on symbolic mediations independent of legal as well as market orders. Based on peculiar and plural minor proceedings, these spaces do not eliminate domination but allow migrants to be redefined as inventive and creative in ways of “coping” or tactics used by the “weakest” against the “strongest” (De Certeau 1980). Within these spaces, social groups in vulnerable situations mobilise in order to develop economic survival strategies and to put together and bring into circulation resources of various kinds. The worlds of small-scale, urban production are a locus for the development of a polymorphous economy based on the coming together of “semi-formal neighbourhood economies”, symbolic economies and “coping” economies. Semi-formal neighbourhood economies are structured around activities intended to inject new life into local areas. Symbolic economies are based on the production of cultural goods such as artistic productions, symbolic goods such as hospitality and moral goods such as self-esteem. “Coping” economies are structured around bartering and

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moonlighting; illegal activities also play an obvious part in the worlds of smallscale, urban production. These intermediate spaces are also a locus for the development of collective learning processes which, in turn, give rise to small-scale urban production and both activate and transform individual knowledge and competences. They are constructed around a distribution of roles likely to create the conditions for this small-scale urban production and to develop through the management of situations characterised by uncertainty, instability and urgency. These intermediate spaces give rise to cultures of uncertainty that define themselves through unobtrusive inversions of a regime of precariousness that ends up being subverted by individuals who metaphorise it, making it operate in a different register without leaving it. These cultures are born out of a style of social exchange that is constructed from the experience of precariousness, of economic invention, of a style of moral resistance expressed through different ways of rejecting disqualification, humiliation and discrimination in precarious work. Of course, these cultures of uncertainty are constructed against a background of social, urban, economic and cultural capital: individuals draw on their previous social experiences in order to be able to navigate their way through the floating networks that make up the cultures of uncertainty. These cultures may be the starting points for careers based on integration in the world of wage work or, conversely, for careers marked by social disaffiliation (Roulleau-Berger, 2011). European and Chinese cities have been readjusting along new internal boun­daries, and these boundaries ascribe, separate and stigmatise along social, economic, ethnic and moral lines (Roulleau-Berger, 2013c). Individuals have to face different sets of moral, political, economic and social challenges. Urban capital plays a part in the reciprocal exchanges with other resources, but these interactions are fluid, depending on the incentives offered by the social or societal context. As these boundaries become fixed, citizens tend to encounter double-bind situations, when there is an injunction to take a place in a City while this place is difficult to access. Fast growing inequalities along these internal boundaries foster social conflict and can reveal a plurality of hierarchically organised normative and recognition orders, which are able to foster collective action in public and intermediate spaces. In Chinese and European cities new moral economies are emerging and taking place in a diversity of spaces where vulnerable groups are struggling for public and social recognition.

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Uncertainty and Economic Institutions In China and Europe, flexibility and job insecurity have both contributed to building employment systems which strengthen social inequalities and exclude those who are less qualified, relegating them to other so-called legitimate economies. If, in Europe, the boundaries between market and organisation, work and product, salaried employment and self-employment are becoming increasingly unclear, in China, the superpositions of economic forms inherited from socialism and new economic forms linked to a specifically Chinese capitalism have blurred the boundaries between differentiated economic worlds. Such societies, marked by job insecurity, grant differentiated access to social recognition through labour and thus produce moral insecurity. 1

Uncertainty and economic transformations

In Europe, the traditional wage relationship has become fragmented as a result of fluctuating but persistent unemployment, the increased vulnerability of jobs in those sectors exposed to competition and the development of atypical employment forms. For some two decades, intermittence and discontinuity of work have permeated all modes of production thus signalling the weakening of so-called Fordist salaried employment (Pilmis, 2013). For the official French national statistics agency, INSEE1, employment statuses other than the permanent or open-ended contract are defined as particular forms of employment; these include: apprenticeships, fixed-term, temporary, subsidised and parttime contracts. From 1982 to 2012, the proportion of particular forms of work more than doubled, increasing from 5% to 12% of overall employment (from 0.8% to 1.5% for apprenticeships, from 0.5% to 2% for temporary employment, from 4% to 8.5% for fixed-term contracts). Amongst the young aged 15 to 24, the proportion of particular forms of employment rose from 17.2% in 1982 (4.4% apprenticeships, 1.2% temporary contracts and 11.6% fixed-term contracts) to 50.3% in 2012 (17.4% apprenticeships, 6.3% temporary contracts and 26.6% fixed-term contracts) (Giraudo, 2014). In 2011, 8.7 million people could

1 INSEE: Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/9789004309982_007

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be considered to be poor, that is, 14.3% of the French population2. This poverty pursues a slow but constant rising trend and affects mainly the unemployed and the young aged 18 to 29. One pole of the continuum is still the primary labour market in which qualified workers can secure stable contracts granting a reasonably high income, but the other pole of the continuum is the secondary labour market, which is continually growing and becoming a common experience for poorly qualified, underpaid, unprotected workers who are also often victims of racial discrimination because of their foreign descent. Most importantly, though, there has been an increased blurring of the boundaries between the primary and secondary markets. This has taken place while economies have been experiencing pluralisation. European labour markets may thus be divided into several categories (Supiot, 1994):

• The executive market, in which workers have both the benefits of con• • •

tracted workers and also the benefits usually linked with ownership and leadership The main labour market (long-term full-time contracts) in which workers benefit from all the rights of labour legislation The insecure or precarious labour market (short-term contracts, temporary work, internships etc) in which workers are deprived of some rights, by law or by custom because they do not stay in the company long enough to gain and enforce these rights The subsidised labour market.

Taylorism has been strongly challenged and a new management model has arisen: outsourcing labour-intensive production to foreign countries. Michel Lallement (2012) focuses on the changes in industrial relations, which are reflected in a weakening of trade union power, the spread of forms of work organisation requiring flexibility and employee involvement and the decentralisation of productive structures. The normalisation of flexibility appears to be fundamental to the construction of social Europe; however, contemporary economies do not, of course, follow the same guiding principles and models as they develop and change. Thus what we are witnessing is not so much unadulterated deregulation as a proliferation of new rules and, above all, new sources of regulation; at national and international levels, procedural rules are negotiated or even imposed (Lallement, 2007). At the same time, however, local 2 Cf. Houdré C., Ponceau J., Zergat Bonnin M. (2013), “Les niveaux de vie en 2011”, Insee Première, n° 1464, septembre, pp. 4.

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actors adapt these normative models in order to coordinate different forms of local regulation in response to demands for flexibility. David Marsden (2012) adopts a similar line as he shows how deregulation and privatisation in the European Union have considerably reduced the role of the State while also showing how the contractual form (employed or self-employed) is the result of choices made by workers and employers. Employment relationships have been redefined in European labour markets; the regulation of employment and employment relationships are also changing considerably in “the socialist market economy”, in which “the area of acceptance within which workers accept that their employers should manage their work and complete their contracts” is also becoming blurred with the implicit and explicit rules governing work being decreasingly observed. Catherine Paradeise (2012) invites us to reconsider the dialectic between autonomy and control in employment relationships. She sees the “golden age” of industrial relations as a time which saw the birth of “industrial democracy” based on pay bargaining and which was concomitant with political democracy; this created a common focus for the individual and collective negotiation of workers’ rights against the background of industrialisation, with individual and collective actors working to produce agreed conventions, rules and principles. The process of constructing the wage-labour nexus also had its origins in disputes linked to inequalities in rights and status as well as in the trade union movement and its struggles. In Europe, the industrial relations system developed with the emergence of collective actors with a shared awareness of their situations (Lallement, 2007). Although industrial relations in Europe have been restructured, with the weakening of collective forms of regulation, the forms of capitalism specific to the emerging countries are not necessarily associated with the forfeiture of workers’ rights and the loss of collective resources. The effects of industrial restructuring in Europe have disrupted the division of labour and caused mass unemployment, creating insecurity and instability for young people and forcing them into various forms of illegal or informal work (Mingione, 2012): in Southern Italy, for example, the combination of a high female employment rate and a high unemployment rate has given rise to new forms of poverty. In societies in which capitalism has been restructured on the basis of flexible and unstable employment, structural tendencies can be observed that reinforce social inequalities, with the result that the least well qualified are permanently excluded from the so-called legitimate labour markets and economies. Individuals trapped in unemployment oscillate between engagement and disengagement with regard to social norms. These societies, characterised as they are by “wage insecurity”, give rise to different levels of access to public recognition, thereby producing moral uncertainty.

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In investigating the issue of economic change and the new social inequalities, Chinese sociologists take the transition as their starting point. A fundamental distinction must be made between local and national markets and between rural and urban markets if we are to really understand how the process of economic transformation works in China. Some sociologists (Li Peilin, 2002; Sun Liping, 2003; Li Qiang, 2006) seem to have reached an agreement about the dualisation of Chinese labour markets. Li Chunling (2005) distinguished three processes leading to this dualisation:

• Social structure dualisation: Countryside and cities have been drifting • •

apart, and different regions have developed their own local systems. Holding a hukou has been a key part of this process. Since 1979, rural and urban labour markets have seemed to converge again because of the weakening of the hukou system, but there is still a clear gap between them. Economic structure dualisation: Public and private sectors experience very different situations as do their respective employees. The private sector labour market is becoming increasingly important in industry as well as in the service sector, representing half of the growth in employment between 1978 and 2001. Labour market dualisation: There is a growing discrepancy between those who gain access to a real employment status and those who remain in insecure conditions. More and more jobs have been created in private and Sino-foreign companies while a great number of jobs have been created in the informal sector in which most migrants (whether poorly or highly qualified) work. However, since the beginning of the 1990s, with the shrinking of state companies, the growing size of the private sector and the slowed growth of rural employment, new kinds of unemployment have been on the rise and new categories of unemployed people have appeared: first, the xiagang and ligang and then young graduates and young migrants. This new economic dynamic has lead to a huge growth in informal employment, in which most jobs are occupied by migrants who can be described as being “partially employed”. The unemployed and their families congregate in a “low society” in which resistance strategies are produced to cope with the transition and survive by means of family solidarity.

Even if this triple dualisation process can be contested, it has the merit of illustrating how the rural and urban labour markets, private and public sector jobs and formal and informal economies form three couples, the dynamics of which are instrumental in moulding the discriminations and disqualifications

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which migrants face. Labour markets, like economic institutions are described as social constructions linked to a communist ordering process, and, as such, they create strong structural shifts and give birth to a new social stratification. In China job insecurity and flexibility are increasingly gaining ground; half of urban jobs are informal, held without contract or on a short-term basis, such as seasonal work or piecework activity. Chinese sociologists do not write about “casual labour” but they do investigate “informal employment”, a form of employment which is repressed and punished. They show that such “informal employment” happens in both the private sector and the public sector, even though the latter was habitually a provider of formal employment. The 2011 Chinese Social Survey revealed that informal employment has risen by 20% per annum representing 60.4% of employment, that temporary work has become widespread and only 41.1% of young workers – particularly migrant workers – have signed a fixed-term contract and 13.8% an open-term contract. The transition from informal to formal employment is difficult. Moreover, the number of diploma-holders progressed from 1.07 million in 2000 to 4.13 million in 2006, representing 13% of the age group. The conditions of work for young diploma-holders have continually worsened: until the end of the 1990s, they were considered as the elites of society and once the diploma had been awarded they obtained stable employment in State corporations and public institutions; this is no longer the case. These young diploma-holders are forced to take informal employment or endure unemployment. While the former socialist order promoted a vertical division of labour, new global capitalism has brought new hierarchies. Chinese sociologists have shown how the decline of socialist institutions has lead to de-collectivisation and individualisation, depriving some workers – including peasant-workers – of their economic, judicial and social rights. To analyse discrimination and domination in the labour market, the notion of “citizenship access” is thus used, as these discriminations and dominations are seen as the result of a clash between socialist and capitalist regimes. Continuing socialism, while also pursuing a process of transformation, three dimensions of the capitalist regime – control, power and capital – are being restructured along specific lines. Flexibility is becoming a dominant norm to ensure labour market regulation, and under-qualified migrants are made “redundant”. The “nongmingong”, or peasant-worker, really embodies the segmentation, reconfiguration and increasing importance of casual work in the Chinese labour market (Liu Yuzhao, Tian Qing 2009). The development of temporary work among young migrants demonstrates how the new generations born in the 1980s and 1990s (Shen Yuan, 2013) are forced to undergo a succession of spatial and professional mobilities placing them, de facto, in itineraries of horizontal social mobility.

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Markets and Economic Institutions

In order to apprehend the process of major economic transformation, Chinese sociologists have first distinguished local from national and rural from urban markets. After the de-collectivisation of the early 1980s, the development of rural non agricultural businesses or township and village enterprises (TVE) was the subject of numerous studies. In local rural markets, the first phase of economic reforms (1978–1992) saw the birth of TVE – collectively-owned industrial enterprises created in rural areas. Later, when faced with increasing competition from urban enterprises and financial difficulties, these TVE had to diversify their modes of ownership. They became collective, or cooperatives, limited responsibility firms, private firms or individual firms carried along by the tide of privatisation. From the second half of the 1990s, these TVE have been the subject of much research into the move towards the market economy and have been analysed as absorbing a large proportion of surplus agricultural manpower. Liu Shiding (1997) wrote of villages evolving towards industrial villages within a context of industrialisation and Peng Yusheng [2000] wrote of the “local transnational market”. Different regimes of collective ownership have been replaced by State ownership while some have evolved towards private ownership. According to Zhe Xiaoye and Chen Yingying (2006) the boundaries between different regimes of ownership and their modes of regulation have thus become increasingly difficult to define. Other sociologists (Shen Jing, Wang Hansheng, 2006) have raised the question of property rights as the place of interaction between individuals and contexts. Collective property rights could be defined as an intermediate structure between the “top” and “bottom” of rural society. Liu Shiding (2006) has demonstrated that the right to property is a fundamental concept in Chinese economic sociology. He has extended the theory of property rights to the analysis of non business social organisations emphasising the meaning of the right to organisation included in the definition of the right to property. The right to organisation linked to the right to property plays a fundamental role in the transformations of present-day Chinese society (Liu Shiding, 2014). Chinese economic institutions with no European equivalent can be clearly discerned. These institutions are linked to both the history of socialism in China and traditional forms of economic relationships. It is understandably impossible to apprehend the economic trans­formations in China without conceiving the boundaries between the different regimes of property and their modes of regulation, without conceiving how collective property rights should be envisaged as being based upon both social relationships and the market.

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Moreover, Chinese sociologists (Liu Shiding, 2002) have demonstrated the specificity of local Chinese markets established between major supply markets and domestic workshops. Rural family businesses can maintain their organisation by means of very tight social networks within a context of great competition marked by highly dominant commercial spaces. This reveals the complexity of local markets with regards to a national market which produces its own norms, conventions, rules and modalities of circulating goods and men. This analysis has become more complex with the introduction by Shen Yuan (2002) of the influence of local political power upon the organisation of this commercial space and the construction of forms of agreement and disagreement between sources of local authority and the local market. This in turn raises the question of forms of economic coordination between different categories of spaces and actors. From the same perspective, Liu Yuzhao, Tian Qing (2009), Qiu Zeqi and Zhang Maoyan (2014) have dealt with the “spontaneous industrial grouping” of small- and medium-sized enterprises, a phenomenon which is specific to the process of industrialisation of rural zones created by local farmers who create businesses locally with their own capital. These zones are born out of the conjunction of the diffusion of industrial technologies, the effects of industrial agglomeration and social networks linked to rural communities. These forms of industrial grouping do not result from the presence of foreign capital but from the creation of industrial activity by rural actors linked by relational networks, the local environment and the spirit of enterprise. Chinese sociologists have studied the role of the social inclusion and position of these entrepreneurs within a type of economic organisation qualified as transitional and linked to local histories and Chinese productive worlds. Research in the field of economic sociology into entrepreneurs in China has provided evidence of the production of both a plurality of economic orders and a plurality of types of entrepreneur engaged in regimes of coordination which allow their activity within a diversity of productive worlds. An economic sociology of entrepreneurs has been elaborated by taking into consideration local contexts, provinces and the national and international contexts. Chinese sociologists study the ever-increasing presence of Sino-foreign and foreign corporations which transforms the modes of structuring Chinese employment markets. In their research into this phenomenon, they pay particular attention to the processes of both integration and disruption provoked in Chinese society by this presence as well as the discriminations which Chinese workers face in these foreign corporations. In Europe, the uncertainty of markets has given way to uncertain markets (Pilmis, 2013). As economic institution, markets have been increasingly conceived as being situated within a dynamic perspective. This means

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“going against” the idea of the naturalisation of the wealth-producing market economy. It means challenging the pairs: market / non-market economy (Roulleau-Berger, 1999; Laville, 2009), legitimate / illegitimate economy, legal / illegal economy. It means calling into question the distinctions between rare and abundant goods and services, between monetary and non-monetary wealth… From this perspective while also taking into consideration the link with the problematics of supervision, the concepts of the social network, strong and weak ties (Granovetter, 1994), and social capital (Burt, 2000, Putnam, 2000) have retained their power and theoretical relevance for the analysis of the new structures of competition and cooperation in the capitalism of flexibility (Veltz, 2008), the phenomena of the geographical delocalisation of economic activity, the forms of economic coordination and the process of accessing the labour market and professional socialisation, to name just a few examples. In the wake of the complex phenomena of the decline and re-composition of economic institutions within the context of globalisation, the concept of embeddedness has started to lose its strength as a convincing theory. After first reminding us that the embedded and interlaced nature of all economic relationships enables an understanding of different contexts of reciprocity and their transformation, Enzo Mingione (2004) then points out that this approach to the pluralisation of economies is insufficient. He considers that it is also necessary to take into consideration the configurations of change, innovation and adaptation from a macro- and a micro-sociological point of view. From a similar perspective, taking into consideration the principles of the plurality of economic facts and phenomena and the tensions between different forms of rationalisation (of work, exchanges, organisation, etc), Michel Lallement (2007, 2009) has conceived an approach to institutional dynamics using the notion of “institutional plurality”. In adopting a dynamic approach to social exchange, we have conceived places of superposition, redundancy and interlacing between worlds of production which, to us, appear to play a fundamental role in understanding what creates adhesion and fragmentation in contemporary societies. We have proposed that the plurality of economic orders should be conceived according to the degree of legitimacy of the worlds of production within different societal contexts (Roulleau-Berger, 2009) and according to the capabilities – as defined by Amartya Sen (1992) – of the individual and collective actors. Emmanuel Lazega (2006) has criticised the descriptive and static character of the notion of embedding and has consequently suggested that the theory of social exchange should be enriched by means of the analysis of the “multiplexity” of economic relationships which he defines as referring to the existence of several types of exchanged resources in the framework of a single relationship. This approach is claimed to enable researchers to go beyond analyses of social

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exchange in terms of gift and counter-gift, analyses which have been widely developed in economic sociology (Caillé, 2000) and thus apprehend multilateral interdependences. Within French economic sociology, reference to the notion of embedding has been progressively challenged while the notion of the social construction of commercial relationships has gone from strength to strength with its focus on the institutional conditions which govern the forming of these commercial relationships: the intended reference is not the market but the distinction of “grammars of exchange articulated with the properties of the exchanged goods” (Trompette, 2008). The notion of apparatus (Beuscart and Peerbayen 2006) has come to challenge the apparently more stable and steady notion of the institution. As Karpik (2007) wrote, “it partially replaces the notion of institution, the global and vertical aspects of which remain totally relevant but which cannot account for discrete invisible interpersonal arrangements, contracts, signs and acquaintances” regarding what Karpik calls the markets of singularities, that is, the markets of singular products embedded within mechanisms of personal and impersonal judgements. In Europe and particularly in France, this movement has given rise to an area of contact between economic sociology and economic anthropology. Economic ethnography does not postulate the limited rationality of a homo economicus, instead it reproduces the plurality of commercial and non-commercial exchanges in which the circulation of the gift plays a major role (Weber, 2007). As early as the 1980s, for example, sociologists analysed such phenomena as: commercial places (Péraldi, 2001) constructed upon circulatory territories by migrant populations (Tarrius, 2000); the commercial spaces of globalisation in China (Guiheux, 2011); ethnic enterprise and commerce; urban economies in working-class suburbs (Roulleau-Berger, 1999); the diversity of market places for both the agricultural production of strawberries and local commercial spaces (La Pradelle, 1996); and the flea-market (Sciardet, 2003) or the second-hand market (Chantelat, 2002). These research projects have not been based upon an epistemological caesura between commercial and noncommercial spheres but rather upon a continuum of economic spaces and activities of varying legitimacy implying the mobilisation of material, technical, social, cognitive and symbolic resources. This economic ethnographic approach has become increasingly important. 3

Professional Relationships and Regimes of Employment

In Western Europe, economic transformation can be analysed as the fragmenting of the employment relationship, the weakening of unions, the growing extension of forms of labour organisation insisting on flexibility and employee

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participation and the dispersing of production structures (Lallement, Dupré, Giraud, 2012). New rules and conventions are discussed, negotiated and sometimes imposed at a national and international level. Local actors still produce different forms of regulation, while all are subjected to the flexibility model. As a norm, flexibility is a core aspect of the on-going construction of social Europe, even though all contemporary economies do not follow the same path towards change. Thus, in Europe, we are faced with a remodelling of professional relationships during a period of weakening collective regulation. As Robert Castel (2009) wrote, there has been a movement from an organised modernity (as defined by Peter Wagner) to a disorganised modernity. Organised modernity was a period in which individuals were included in different groups which gave them a stable status. The last thirty years have seen the rise of a new form of capitalism characterised by dynamics of de-collectivisation and re-individualisation, as can be seen in the right to employment which is increasingly conceived as an individual right. Some see institutions as being in decline (Dubet, 2009); they are expected to provide workers with services and rights, but now they find it difficult to face the individualisation of tasks and careers, job insecurity and deprivation of social rights. Labour norms are losing ground and full-time wage labour is fragmenting. Job insecurity, increased diversity of labour uses, gender discrimination and racism, all contribute to “atomise labour contract conditions” (Beck, 1998) under the pressure of plurality, labour flexibility, short-term contracts and under-qualified labour. All these phenomena are part of a re-individualisation of professional activity, the core of which relies on “casual employment”, unemployed men and women and migrant men and women, all forced to accept such situations by local and global labour markets. It is understandable that a remodelling of professional relationships during a period of weakening collective regulation has produced a diversity of regimes of employment. In both China and Europe, the construction of regimes of employment is directly linked to the division of professions and professional categories. It is worth noting that a regime of employment such as that of part-time employment produces loss of social, economic and symbolic resources in the European context whereas it can create a gain in resources in the Chinese context in that it favours pluri-activity. Moreover, in China and Europe alike, the feminisation of salaried employment has reinforced a gender-based division of jobs, with reinforced gender discrimination in the access to higher positions within the hierarchy and inequalities in salary reflecting gender inequalities. Tong Xin (2012) analysed the relationship between structural transformations and gender inequalities in the distribution of the roles in familial space

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and competition for work, their differences in rural and urban context, their evolution and new articulations between familial life and professional life. Tong Xin (2014) also based upon a comparison of the careers of female company bosses and their male counterparts in China focusing on the vertical mobility of women in the context of the market economy and the particular mental dispositions of these women in a masculine world. Concerning the present day French labour market, Tania Angeloff (2014) has demonstrated that, although women hold higher qualifications than men, the construction of gender inequalities in the labour market is manifested by vertical and horizontal segmentations based upon an intersectionality of social relationships. In France, the mixing of sexes has not lead to equality. The boundaries of the division of labour have not disappeared. Instead they have taken on new forms with mobility benefitting men more than women in terms of career development. The “glass ceiling” is a concentration of the ideas of visible and invisible barriers for women engaged in projects of vertical professional mobility. Although, in both situations, the distribution of employment, the type of business, the sector and the position held, the type of employment (full-time or part-time) as well as the career itinerary contribute to the construction of invisible barriers for women, in China, membership of the Communist Party plays an important role in overcoming these obstacles. Party membership thus appears to be quite a decisive element in the conception of the intersectionality of social relationships whereas, in Europe, ethnic identity can appear to be a factor of discrimination. Although the theory of intersectionality is widely employed in European economic sociology to analyse inequalities and discriminations in gender relationships, this is not the case in China where it is integrated into economic sociology including social class sociology in which the concept of mobility occupies a central position: the issue of gender inequalities is situated within reflection on the process of economic transition and the forming of female elites after 1979. Similarly, although temporality is conceived as a factor of inequality in the French approach, it is not evoked in the Chinese situation. Finally, the forming of feminine elites in China is not conceived within reflection on the division of labour. In China, the vertical division of labour and the system of professional relationships conforming to the socialist order is being progressively concealed by new hierarchies linked to a globalised capitalist order. Several Chinese sociologists have demonstrated that, with the decline of socialist institutions, there is a process of de-collectivisation and individualisation which is depriving certain categories of workers – including peasant-workers – of social, legal and economic rights. The systems of professional relationships produce situations of discrimination and domination in labour markets analysed as resulting

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from a conflict or shock between socialist and capitalist regimes. In the extension of communism and within a process of transformation, capital, power and control linked to a capitalist regime combine according to a specific mode. Flexibility appears as a dominant norm in the regulation of the labour market in which poorly qualified migrants genuinely occupy a position as supernumeraries. The figure of the migrant worker or nongmingong (peasant-worker) has thus become truly emblematic in the apprehension of the processes leading to the reconfiguration, segmentation and increased precariousness of Chinese labour markets ( Shen Yuan, Wen Xiang, 2014). In China, nongmingong without urban hukou are subjected to dominations and violence in the labour markets and are deprived of the rights as citizens. Systems of professional relationships have developed out of situations in which workers cannot access social rights, situations which are organised upon the basis of institutional arrangements and the strength of social relationships. In situations in which French researchers talk of uncertain loyalties, Chinese sociologists talk of institutional arrangements subtended by guanxis (interpersonal relationships)3. It is indeed difficult to understand the inability of migrant workers to claim their rights without integrating the function of the guanxis (interpersonal relationships) linked to the old system of organising traditional relationships of family and geographical identity. However, the strength of the guanxi of migrants within Chinese labour markets reveals networks which are constructed from the transfer or exchange of economic, symbolic and commercial resources. These exchanges of resources are constructed upon the basis of loyalties arising out of group membership and relationships of trust within the framework of inter-acquaintance and family networks which play a fundamental role in accessing Chinese labour markets. Nevertheless, the strength of these guanxi does not favour solidarities for resisting situations of domination in the employment world. These guanxi can create a relationship of dependence, even captivity between the worker and 3 “The guanxi play a major role in Chinese society. Indeed, possessed relational capital constitutes a criterion of identification of individuals as members of society. It reveals their competences, underlines their capacity for action and attests to their dignity in the public space. To possess a wide-reaching network of relationships, whether it is founded upon family links [which are] by definition irreversible or upon long-term tried and tested trust, and to be able to maintain this [network] over time and space thus procures ‘face’, that is social consideration… Thus this term only partially covers the issue of interpersonal relationships in China, and conceals, by means of its instrumental dimension, a process [which is] necessary but difficult today: the forming of links of trust – both generalized and particular” (Thireau in Sanjuan, 2006).

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the employer or foreman, a relationship which prevents collective action and shatters solidarities (Shen Yuan, 2011). A group of researchers (Shen Yuan, Guo Yuhua, Lu Huilin, Fang Yi, 2010) from the universities of Peking and Tsinghua studied around one hundred migrants working in Shenzhen on pneumatic drills who had contracted cancer because of a lack of appropriate protection. In this survey, three elements were provided to analyse this “lethal” situation: the absence of employment documentation and consequently no indemnification for health care and no obligation to pay hospital fees; a weak relationship of trust between the nongmingong and the entrepreneurs, who hired them by means of the guanxis, leading to unbridled exploitation of workers who are completely dependent upon the foremen; and the complicity of local governments and employers in the non-respect of legislation governing conditions of work. Whenever the nongmingong from one village refuse to do this work for fear of their lives, workers from another village take over despite being fully aware of the situation. The researchers used the phrase “lethal relay race” and the notions of hegemony and despotism to analyse professional relationships in Chinese labour markets, especially relationships between employers and nongmingong, and to account for a context of ever-increasing flexibility producing situations of social disqualification out of very strong forms of control and violence in labour markets. It is known that, in both the European and Chinese contexts, precarious migrant populations are subjected to dominations, symbolic and identitythreatening violence, and discrimination even racism in their respective labour markets. Symbolic violence is constructed in professional relationships by means of phenomena of horizontal and vertical social disqualification, alienation of identities, contempt and humiliation. It is worth noting that Chinese and European sociologists converge in their analyses of disqualified or subordinate work as can be exemplified by studies focusing on construction workers. In France, Nicolas Jounin (2009) has demonstrated the impact in the construction sector of the presence of sub-contractors and intermediaries who often have fewer rights than the workers of the principal contractor: this presence provokes the hierarchical shattering of the worker collective. The presence of nongmingong in Chinese labour markets can be considered to be a similar phenomenon. Both construction workers in the French labour market and nongmingong in the same sector of Chinese labour markets can be dismissed at any moment. In both cases, a denial of the worker masked by the amount of work he sells can be observed. Nicolas Jounin has also demonstrated that, in parallel to the market mechanisms, the construction sector has developed punctual, local and informal protections which create uncertain loyalties and

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which go beyond the employment contract. Other research, such as that undertaken by Sébastien Chauvin (2009) has combined the analyses of the rise of flexibility, day labour and the ethnicisation of labour markets. 4

Youth Confronted with the “Risk Society”

In both contexts, new capitalist models centred on flexibility and job insecurity are in the making. These new models have fostered employment systems which strengthen social inequalities and commonly exclude the less qualified forcing them into disqualified and disqualifying jobs. In these models, ethnic and social segmentation is stronger and more visible than ever. In China as in Europe, new generations of the working classes are most likely to have to cope with this new phenomenon. Ethnic and class discriminations are distancing young people of foreign descent from labour markets. In France a 2004 CEREQ survey showed that 70% of young workers start their professional life with a short-term temporary contract. This 2004 study revealed that 54% of young people had been unemployed at least once during their first three years of professional activity: 33% were unemployed for more than six months. There is an over-representation of young men of foreign descent in certain disqualified segments of the labour markets. Young men of North African descent start their professional activity in the service sector, in contrast with their elders who used to work in industry or construction. Women work as salespeople, check-out clerks, in cleaning services… In the first three years of their active professional life, the young people of the 2010 Generation spent two months less in employment that their counterparts from the 2004 Generation. On average, those without diplomas experienced 14 months of unemployment, that is, twice as long as the average for the entire population of young people from every level. Time spent in employment decreased (five months less than Generation 2004) resulting in an increased risk of distantiation from the labour market. Thus, the diplomaless members of this generation spent as much time in as out of employment (Taken from Bref n° 319). The initial results of the 2013 survey of Generation 2010 show that in 2013, that is, three years after leaving the educational system, 22% are seeking employment. This is the highest level ever observed in CEREQ surveys of insertion into active life. However, first employment is neither more precarious nor less well paid (Barret, Ryk, Volle, 2014). In China, for some fifteen years, the hukou policy, a system of registering the place of residence, has weakened thus favouring wide-ranging and open mobility while reinforcing social inequalities in which less qualified young

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people, notably migrants, are regularly excluded and relegated to disqualified and disqualifying jobs against a background of increasingly marked economic seg­mentation processes. This economic and social phenomenon severely affects young migrants and young poorly qualified urban populations in China. The 2011 Chinese Social Survey indicates a progression in the number of young diploma-holders from 1.07 million in 2000 to 4.13 million in 2006, that is, each year 13% of an age group. However, there is a continual degradation of the work conditions of young diploma-holders. Until the late 1990s, they were considered as the elites of society and had access to stable employment in State enterprises and public institutions. This is no longer the case. Young diploma-holders have to accept informal employment or unemployment. In 2010 Li Chunling and Wang Boqing (2010) undertook and published a survey of 445,000 young diploma-holders who graduated in 2007 from 2,113 high schools and universities in 31 provinces, six months after obtaining their diploma. This study found that: 12% were seeking employment; 55.1% had a job related to their training; 28.6% had a job unrelated to their training; and 1.2% had created their own employment. The authors showed that access to both stable and precarious employment was more and more difficult, and that the number of young job-seekers had increased. According to the national survey undertaken by the MyCOS Institute in 2010, six months after leaving university approximately 32% of new diploma-holders work in the public sector (41% after 4 years of university study, 23% after 3 years). In this Chinese context of restructuring and economic growth, the flexibility and stability of work in the public sector attracts young diploma-holders whereas ten years before they preferred work in a foreign corporation. Three years after leaving university, 69% of the 2007 graduates had changed job at least once (59% of those who left after 4 years of successful study and 78% who left after 3). Around 11% had been dismissed. These situations of change mostly indicate migrations. Li Youmei (2012) analysed these phenomena of professional mobility and resignations as the result of a disadjustment with the training system as well as a combination of the employment system, the effects of the hukou upon the modes of accessing employment, the transformations of social policies and the effects of monopoly on certain segments of the labour market. The least academically endowed young migrants run the risk of not accessing a place in Chinese society while the most academically endowed often only access spaces of employment in which the content is poor regarding professional socialisation. The last ten years in China have been marked by increased competition, the devaluation of academic achievement, a decreased return on academic investment and a simultaneous continual rise in the social aspirations of young people. In China, this phenomenon of

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structural disqualification has affected the young belonging to the new middle classes while also making for increased fragility among young people of peasant or working class origins, particularly young poorly qualified migrants. In China the young unemployed aged 16 to 29 outnumber the xiagang. In 2004, the Social Protection and Labour Bureau conducted a survey of young people and employment which showed that the unemployment rate for young people aged 15 to 29 was 9%, far higher than the national average of 6.1%. Among these young people, some have an urban hukou, but are not qualified (some do not even have a high school diploma). The hukou can be used to discriminate, especially in local government, since a young graduate with the incorrect hukou may not be able to easily access employment in a city. Even university graduates may still face unemployment, the work conditions of young graduates have continually deteriorated. Until the late 1990s, they were supposed to be the elite of society and were granted a secure job when they graduated, usually in State companies and public institutions (Zheng Jie, 2004; Zhou Jianming, 2005). Young graduates now have to face casual labour and unemployment (Liu Yuzhao,Tian Qing, 2009). In China and in Europe, sociologists have clearly shown that young people are frequently faced with social risks: the less qualified may not find a “position”, those who are better qualified often have to make do with youth-labelled employment areas in which they cannot really start their professional socialisation. Young people are clearly in danger of never gaining access to a position in their own society. Competition has become more severe; diplomas have lost their value while social desires and ambitions have continued to soar – over the last thirty years for young Europeans and the last ten years for Chinese youth. Such systemic disqualification has been attenuated in the middle and upper classes, but it has greatly impacted the lower classes, especially young unqualified migrants in China and young people of foreign descent in France. French sociologists describe it as structural poverty or structural social exile (Castel, 2009) and they analyse how it moulds employment access trajectories, quantitatively as well as qualitatively (Nicole-Drancourt, Roulleau-Berger, 2006). Chinese sociologists are more concerned about the structural processes which are producing these new social phenomena. 5

The Relationship to Work and Generational Effects

The relationship to work, particularly that of young people, that is, the way in which they engage in economic activities is a major societal issue which has been much studied in Europe – particularly in France – and is increasingly important for Chinese sociologists.

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Young Chinese people are increasingly confronted with intensified competition for academic titles which accentuates structural discrepancies between their aspirations and the possibilities of accessing labour markets. The social differentiations inherent in the process of social stratification will be increasingly marked with the phenomenon of academic inflation. The global deforming of relationships between the academic and labour markets results in a widening discrepancy between the nominal value of diplomas and their value as measured in the real transactions of the labour market. (Passeron, 1982). Present generations of young Chinese workers invoke morality in work, obedience and the importance of the quality of human relationships. They display a quasi-total commitment to work and seek maximum efficiency, a commitment which is reinforced by forms of recognition within the enterprise which are supported by hierarchical superiors and the possibilities of internal promotion. Commitment to work and interest shown in it increase with the level of the position held within the enterprise’s hierarchy: the workers at the bottom are less involved, all the more so as they are perpetually seeking to access a better position by means of geographical mobility. However, the generation of young workers entering the Chinese labour market clearly differs from the generations of their parents who spent their entire professional lives in the same places of work with stability of employment. Before the Reforms, work was experienced as an obligation and a duty to society. Today, however, work is represented more as a means of earning a living as well as the main factor for independence and the construction of social identities. Nevertheless, the instrumental dimension of the relationship to work seems to be dominant amongst the most poorly qualified young workers: above all, work appears to be a factor of economic emancipation and young people still seem to adhere to an ethos of duty founded upon work as a moral obligation. However, they all concede the importance of finding the tasks and responsibilities interesting, the perspective of social independence and the system of encouragement in the enterprises. Everyone, especially the young people of peasant origin, aims to achieve a higher socio-economic level than their parents. The chances of achieving ascending professional mobility are high in present day Chinese society; however, young migrants with low levels of academic achievement obviously do not have the same resources as young diploma-holders for the development of this type of itinerary. Work is overinvested as the place of potential social success and young people place salary and job satisfaction on the same plane. The higher the amount of academic capital the more job satisfaction appears to be determining. Family experience in employment acts upon the relationship to work of young people as well as upon the idea of social success or failure. Parents – in most cases of an only child – over-invest the period their children spend in study with hopes of them

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achieving an elevated social status. All of these only children have strong parental support linked to strong family solidarities. However, family support is sometimes reduced to affective support given the low level of social and economic resources of the family. In fact, economic support is inverted for numerous young people from very poor families since they send a part of their income home every month. A category of young Chinese workers clearly expresses that the stability of employment experienced and demanded by their parents does not correspond to what they seek. Nevertheless a proportion of those young men who have experienced disqualification aspire to a stable and regular life. Parents who have spent their entire lives in State enterprises cannot understand how young people can bear the rhythms, pressures and pace in foreign corporations. When the pressure becomes too much young people respond by resigning – a response which is envisaged given the short term of their contracts. The generations of today and yesterday have integrated differentiated models of work: work models based upon either a globalised market economy or the planification of the economy. Today’s generations express requirements for recognition, creativity, participation and self-realisation and if these aspirations are not met they leave their jobs. The least qualified young people often leave their jobs since they have greater difficulties in satisfying their desire for recognition and creativity. In China and Europe alike, sociologists have observed that young people refuse disqualification and loss of social status. Since the end of the 1970s in France, young people have experienced employment as the place of disappointment and disillusionment which manifests the increasing divide between their aspirations and opportunities in the labour market. From the late 1970s, work has lost its value as an all-embracing force, that is, an element which harmoniously arranges the social, symbolic and instrumental dimensions of work (Roulleau-Berger, 1999). Consequently, the employment crisis has engendered a feeling of collective disillusionment with work among young people. In Europe, the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1978) certainly advanced the understanding of this phenomenon. The intensification of competition for academic diplomas has created increasing distortions between diplomas and jobs by transforming the relationship between social classes and the teaching system. The main victims of the devaluation of academic diplomas have been – and still are – the academically less well endowed. The phenomenon of mass youth unemployment and loss of social status has created a sort of collective disillusionment resulting in a structural discrepancy between aspirations and chances, between the social identity which the teaching system seems to promise and the social identity offered by the labour market. The gulf

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separating the aspirations produced by the teaching system and the chances which it actually provides has been constantly widening, thus provoking revolt and hatred among poorly qualified young people of working-class origin. The first forms of social relegation experienced by young people of workingclass origin started to appear in France in 1975 and in China in the middle of the first decade of the 21st century. These forms of revolt have engendered a relationship to work characterised by disgust at the jobs offered and this phenomenon has been increasingly accentuated by the ever-diminishing access of these same young people to stable employment (Beaux, Pialoux, 1999). Young people of working-class origin, particularly children of immigrants, expressed a double refusal of work, particularly the “dirty work” inflicted upon their fathers: factory work, the production line and clocking on, specialised skilled work in the major industries and the “donkey” work (packer, courier, salesperson…) implying being highly dependent upon a small boss. The devaluing of the workers’ condition, the intensified pressure of work conditions, the increased precariousness of status and the rise of unemployment transformed the factory into a repellent for the fathers working there and their children who would do everything in their power to avoid working there. This same phenomenon has recently become observable in China among the children of migrants who only accept the “dirty work” with great difficulty since they have seen their parents exhausted and even killed by work. The least qualified – often condemned to becoming unskilled workers – thus refuse to engage in work which disqualifies them and situate themselves in a distanced relationship to factory work. This disenchantment takes objectively and subjectively different shapes according to social class with the phenomenon progressively affecting academically better endowed young people (Bourdieu, 1978). In both China and Europe, young people’s aspirations have become progressively blurred, restricted yet more firmly entrenched while employment increasingly provokes the fear of never achieving stability in the labour market and never accessing a qualified and qualifying job. For these poorly qualified children of immigrants in Europe and of migrants in China – destitute, exploited and revolted at their working conditions – work appears to be a cause of suffering and revolt. Chinese sociologists focus on the subjective experiences of second generation migrants who bear the suffering and humiliation of the first generation. They are highly incensed and have developed competences for resisting and combating situations of oppression and injustice. In France, the phenomenon of social disqualification first produced disillusionment before actively contributing to blurring the aspirations of young people and shaping situations of double constraint in the relationship to work. Young people entering the labour market therefore produce a relationship to work

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based upon the principle of hesitation, ambivalence and reversibility (NicoleDrancourt, Roulleau-Berger, 2006). In both societal contexts, the ethos of personal fulfilment tends to mask the ethos of duty. Although the ethos of duty no longer seems to be valid in postindustrial European and Chinese societies, this does not mean, however, that work has lost all meaning and value. Today the expression of this care for the self should be considered in a context of social disqualification (Zoll, 1992).

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Migrations, Inequalities and Individuation International migrations in Europe and internal migrations in China reveal the dynamics of social, political and economic change that are at work in our increasingly complex, pluralistic and diversified contemporary societies, which are now feeling the effects of a threefold trend towards the acceleration, globalisation and regionalisation of migratory circulations (Withol de Wenden, 2010). Migratory patterns have diversified and become more complex, revealing how access to labour markets seem to be truly hierarchically organised in Europe and in China and how various forms of segmentation linked to economic dominance and social inequalities have emerged. So we have to define new located social stratification systems. In Europe and in China new migrants are taking part in the construction of labour markets that are both situated and multipolar. Within these markets there emerge: productive microstructures such as ethnic niches; economic institutions, such as international companies; and intermediate structures linked to trade or entrepreneurship. Thus in Europe and in China work has become increasingly individualised taking place in a multiplicity of different locations; structural trends have given rise to employment systems that reinforce social inequalities and in which the least skilled migrants are marginalised. 1

Migration Policies and Panoptical Measures

International migrations enable us to understand how globalisations tell the stories of political and economic institutions, the Nation-States as well as the collective and individual social practices of the migrants and vice-versa, and finally how they are redefined in global frames. The diversity of migrations demands that migration policies, diaspora dynamics, and the production of social and economic transnational spaces should be conceived as a whole (Mazella, 2014). We must emphasise the way structural processes impinge on migration forms: for instance, the multiplication of control areas within national borders, the monitoring of migratory barriers, the reinforcement of regional security orders. In inbound migration countries after the tragic events of 9/11 and terrorist attacks in Europe in the last years, the tightening of security policies, the reinforcement of regulatory barriers and the militarising of

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borders (Simon, 2008) were the most acute within the intensified and redefined panoptical measures1 of the European migration policies. These migration policies-linked panoptical measures, set up migratory routes and itineraries, but also sometimes generate and block them in very unlikely ways. They define differentiated accesses to a judicial status and consequently pre-define processes of access to employment on segmented labour markets. Migrants with low social capital and few economic and symbolic resources suffer the full strength of panoptical measures and some may face physical or social death. Those with social and economic resources can rely on trust-networks and community solidarities and are consequently able to elaborate diversion strategies to circumvent these measures and attain social and spatial integration (Ambrosini, 2014). But panoptical measures produce disciplines and spread multi-localised powers: indeed, migrants are subjected to different pressures – not always continuously – in the States of origin, transit and settlement. Each country, each society, constantly reconstructs its own conception of integration. That process impinges differently on the migrants’ destiny. The outcome of the residence permit application and the type of permit granted greatly determine the conditions of access to a job, and to a place in the different member-States. In China, rapid transitions have provoked an intensification of internal migrations. According to the “2012 national monitoring survey of migrant workers” released by the National Bureau of Statistics, in 2012 the number of migrant workers totalled 263 million through China, accounting for nearly 20% of the total population. Since 1985, migration movements have sky-rocketed. The hukou or household registration system has weakened, it varies from one local government to another. This weakening has fostered broad and open mobilities which have contributed to creating relationships between increasingly globalised rural and urban labour-markets. Among these migrants, one can distinguish between peasant-workers (nongmingong) and service-provider migrants (laowugong). The nongmingong population is an increasingly young and male one. It is also more qualified with regards to school curricula than the populations of the place of origin, that is to say most reached at least a middleschool diploma (zhongxue) (Li Peilin, 2003 ; Li Chunling, 2005). These migrants engage in transcontinental multi-mobilities, that is to say successive mobilities from rural labour-markets towards urban ones and reciprocally. Among these migrants, a significant number is described as “illegal”, meaning they hold no temporary residence permit, which puts them in a situation of great social and 1 We have adopted “panoptical” (panoptique) from the work of M. Foucault (1975): Surveiller et punir, Paris, Gallimard.

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economic vulnerability. Even if the State has attempted to rein-in the rural exodus while simultaneously attempting to accelerate the agricultural exodus by creating “towns” in order to fix populations, migration from inland-provinces to the Chinese megalopolises have continually intensified. Chinese and European sociologists have demonstrated that acquiring a residence permit and its type in Europe, or an urban hukou in China, plays a major role in determining the conditions of access to employment and to a place in the different States. Chinese and European sociologists converge in saying that migrants with low social capital and few economic and symbolic resources will have to face to social disaffiliation. Migrants with social and economic resources will be involved in the social integration process. 2

New Inequalities and Plurality of Migration Routes

One can talk of inequalities on the migration routes in the sense that migrants must develop survival strategies, especially for the less qualified, and simultaneously deal with uncertain and random destinies. But qualified migrants are also confronted with inequalities linked to economic crisis and unemployment in their place of origin. If one can talk of ethnic, social and economic inequalities, one can also talk of political inequalities. Depending on the contexts of origin, migrants may have developed reflexive skills which are different in nature and enable an understanding of the reasons of the migration. For example, young generation migrants who live in the former Eastern-European countries or post-Maoism in continental China have built migration skills based on stepping away from political legacies. In the context of a world producing international inequalities and the intensification of internal migrations in China, the complexity and heterogeneity of migration routes taken by international and internal migrants in China must be underlined. Classic oppositions between a labor and population migration or between an economic and political migration can no longer account for the complexification of migration routes2. We have established the main distinction between (Roulleau-Berger, 2010):

•  international or internal mono-migrations built along linear migration routes between one province and another in China, or between one country and another. These migrations can be pendular.

2 A. Réa, M. Tripier (2008): Sociologie de l’immigration, La Découverte, coll.Repères, Paris.

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•  transnational multi-migrations relating to the crossing of many places,

cities and/or countries before arriving in another place, city, country. These can also be pendular.

In both cases, they can pertain to constrained or organised migrations, or to migrations elaborated by individuals. Constrained migrations have been initiated by direct recruitment by companies, governments, employment agencies or traffickers. 2.1 Mono-migrations and Linear Routes Mono-migrations are built along linear routes of migration between two regions or countries; they concern any category of migrant. These monomigrations may appear as constrained when departure contexts are that of war; they may appear as falsely chosen when the migrants leave contexts of poverty or violence. The higher the professional skill acquired in the context of origin, the more controlled and negotiated mono-migration appears to be. Mono-migrations can be defined according to their degree of discretion. The most discreet mono-migrations are likely to be clandestine migrations, while visible mono-migrations are more likely to be those of qualified populations circulating with the required documents. Visible mono-migrations can be organised via direct recruitment processes by companies, governments, employment agencies or the choice of migration. Women leave countries which are increasingly penetrated by rising risks, uncertainty, and inequalities. If mono-migrations can be visible or discreet, they can also be pendular. Nevertheless, pendularity can be organised around fluctuating migration projects in a same migration career according to social, economic and cultural capital. 2.2 Pluri-migrations and Spatial Capital In Europe as in China migration routes, migrants produce spatial capital (Lévy, Lussault, 2003) which will appear as positive or negative in the arrival contexts. The extent and size of networks appears to play a decisive part in the production of spatial capital on migration routes. The more extended the professional or social networks, the more positive spatial capital becomes on migration routes. But if spatial capital seems positively correlated to the extension of social networks, it may also become a less positive capital when the individual accesses a less qualifying status in another country. If social capital is built differently depending on departure contexts, economic practices, the value of circulating goods, and the nature of know-how, qualifications, and skills on

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migration routes, multi-migration produces “positive” spatial capital when, migrants on migration routes accumulate new social and economic resources, thus enabling them to access a non-disqualifying stable or unstable job with regards to their initial situation (Roulleau-Berger, 2009). In Europe complex and cosmopolitan migration forms consequently appear, based on poly-centred, multi-polarised spaces corresponding to the development of ethnic networks. But these mobilities also produce diasporic forms, circularities and roaming (Tarrius, Missaoui, 2000). We have therefore distinguished three forms of transnational multi-migration: diasporic, circular and roaming. The diasporic multi-migration is characterised by the multi-polarity of migration and the inter-polarity of relationships with one’s own kin between places of rooting and by collective competences which have to be set up in economic, social and political apparatuses in the receiving society. Circular multi-migration can be defined from the outline of circulatory routes going from one point and coming back to the same point after repeated passing through the same places. This means that multi-migration may be sometimes punctuated with moments of pendularity. In this case, entrepreneur migrants are the most common. They put into circulation differentiated goods and resources within transnational exchange and negotiation networks. Migrants always remain strongly linked to their countries of origin while circulating on large transnational spaces dis-jointed from economic and political local apparatuses, and producing “atopical circulatory knowledge”. They accumulate economic, social and cultural experiences and resources in a variety of places from skills to seize a diversity of opportunities. Roaming multi-migration refers to the weakness of bonds with the place of origin, the multi-centrality of identity-building places during the course of migration, and a distant position concerning the receving society. Today, if one can distinguish a plurality of migration forms in the migrant careers along increasingly diversified routes, one can see that international mono-migrations, or pendular migrations and transnational multi-migrations are intertwining or succeeding each other, and are increasing in complexity and individualisation in an international context of the intensification and feminisation of migration movements. 3

Gender, Economic Activities and Migrations

For a long time, the issue of gender in international migrations remained a blind-spot. Since the publication in 1984 of an issue of International Migration

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Review devoted to female migrants, containing an article by Myriam Morokvasic “Birds of passage are also women”, numerous books and articles have been devoted to female migrants. The first surveys on European female migrations were carried-out at the beginning of the 1970’s. The figure of the workingfemale-migrant emerged during the 1980’s, and from the 1990’s, researches have focused on care work and domestic work in its economic and cultural dimension, modelled on traditional domesticity as a producer of dominations in the global space (Miranda, 2013). The staging of differences and similarities between male and female migrations has enabled the conception of autonomy processes within migration (Sassen 2003). In the main, migrant women at work had notably been made invisible but progressively became especially visible in domestic work, care-work, prostitution and women’s trades. The issue of the (international) transfer of reproduction work created a chain reaction and has produced the global care chain (Ehrenreich, A.R., Hochschild, 2004) which has been the subject of several studies. Conversely, we only have a few studies of the careers of qualified women in international migrations, or internal migrations in China. Progressively, the term “women” has been replaced by “gender” so as to displace attention towards gender differences. Consequently, women have increasingly appeared as actresses of their own migration careers. Indeed, over the last 20 years, the migration of individual women has appeared as an important factor of change in international mobilities as well as internal migrations in China (Lieber, 2012; Li Shuang, 2012). Women leaving their region or country alone for economic reasons yearn for work that provides them with financial resources they can use to the benefit of their families in their country of origin. Those who leave to meet their husbands rarely find work in host societies. A new category of migrants has appeared in Europe: refugee women, forced to invisible labour (Tcholakova, 2009). Female migrants, in China as in Europe, appear to be a very vulnerable category when faced with work flexibility and demands for illegal labour. Some of them are forced to engage in the informal economy. Indeed, they are very present in insecure jobs, subcontracting, out-sourced jobs, door-to-door selling and domestic work. The economic situation of female migrants expresses forms of domination between men and women in the labour markets. Lastly a proportion of those who yearned for a job in the tourism industry or the service sector is violently forced into the sex industry or women’s trades.

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Migration and Urban Integration

The assimilation approach which characterised the Chicago School’s studies of immigration (Park, Burgess, McKenzie, 1925) described how migrants could use adaptation strategies to settle in urban enclaves, before usually leaving these places, becoming involved in competition for space with other social groups and developing their own social trajectory. Park and Burgess dealt with the concept of urban integration and segregation. The issue of upward social mobility among the second generation of migrant communities was approached using assimilation theory which initially showed how the children and grandchildren of migrants gradually acceded to the social statuses of the host society and that this process had an element of irreversibility about it. Later, for Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton (1993), the urban segregation proc­ess was portrayed as not being limited only to the residential situation and the social differentiation on labour markets, but also as being influenced by individual and collective resources. In China this approach still makes sense for the understanding of not only the process of the integration and exclusion of Chinese migrant workers but also new immigrants in large cities, for example successive waves of Arab and sub-Saharan traders in Guangzhou. In European cities the theory of the Chicago School theory might still be mobilised to analyse some ascendant social trajectories of Chinese migrants, for example new entrepreneurs. Over the last thirty years, the Chinese economy has experienced rapid growth with migrant workers constituting a major driving force (Li Peilin, 2012) in the cities. With the decline of socialist institutions migrants also experience situations of insecurity and great vulnerability, which means they oscillate between urban integration, segregation and marginalisation. Migrant workers have to face to a real deprivation of social rights which signifies new forms of poverty, injustice and marginalisation. The less skilled migrants also work in traditional manufacturing industries (textiles and heavy industries), construction, transportation, industrial cleaning… They are also present in unskilled service sector jobs in tourism, hotels and restaurants. They occupy segments that can be termed “economic niches” due to their majority presence in certain segments of Chinese labour markets. In Europe the process of segregation of migrants on the labour markets means ethnic segmentation that is to say hierarchical proliferation of “ethnic niches” (Waldinger 1994, Waldinger, Bozorgmehr, 1996). The segmentation proc­ess of European labour markets may be defined as sited and differentiated by country and geographical origin of migrants; for example, Poland is a recent immigration country and labour market is more and more segmented. From

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the presence of migrant workers segments appear more or less numerous on an economic sector, producing more or less strong segregation. For example, in Austria the majority of migrant workers are concentrated in agriculture, cleaning, textiles and tourism in sectors with low wages. In Bulgaria, due to the recent accession of the country to the EU, migrant workers are fully integrated into the labour market and have quite the same employment conditions as Bulgarian nationals (Ambrosini, 2007). In increasingly polarized European cities, migrants are integrated into networks that are clearly based on highly structured forms of economic organisation; their activities are organised around the principles of free trade and community affiliation. The least skilled migrants are operating in an ethnic economy that is both local and global and organised around sectors of economic activity such as restaurants, food retailing, small-scale distribution, the clothing industry, trade, and, more recently, electronics, computer services (Roulleau-Berger, 2010). Individuals’ positions in the ethnic enclave seems to be linked to social capital, language skills and professional qualifications; depending on the strength of their position, individuals will be more or less visible and enjoy a greater or lesser degree of social recognition. Ethnic niches are becoming increasingly less dominated by one ethnic group and more pluriethnic, as successive waves of migrants from different continents find work in them. The restaurant industry, particularly the fast-food sector, and the hotel trade are emerging as true pluriethnic niches, in which migrants from China, Africa, the Maghreb and, more recently, Eastern Europe work alongside each other. They are faced to situations characterised by harsh treatment linked to identity where solidarity might be expected. In the traditional urban enclaves (Zhou, 1992, 1997), hierarchies are constructed on the basis of place of origin and length of stay in the host country. Today, different studies in Europe and in China show that the process whereby the new second and the third generation of migrants- for example after 80 generation in China- enter the urban labour market is reversible. Intergenerational mobility seems to be increasingly less linear and may give rise to a new segmented integration that reflects the irregular, non-mechanistic, unexpected, multidimensional and differentiated aspects of the process of labour market integration. Fewer and fewer young migrants, particularly the academically least well endowed, are obtaining access to wage work. Consequently, they are finding it increasingly difficult to acquire a status in society, a place in the social space; they see themselves being socially marginalised. From this perspective, international migration and internal migration in China are seen more as an amplifier of social inequalities. In local economies based around ethnic and economic niches, which are defined as alternatives

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to the secondary labour market, migrant workers are mobilised, leading to the hierarchisation and stratification of occupational status. This in turn gives rise to discrimination, domination and inequality among migrant populations and other citizens. The process of social integration for migrants in Europe was transformed producing urban tensions and conflicts, discriminations, microsegregations (Mingione, 2012). In China migrant workers produce collective action to protest again segregation and social inequalities. And now in Chinese cities because the new presence of migrants in China, for example African migrants, interethnic competition and conflict between African traders and the ordinary Chinese citizens does influence the production of new microsegregations and redefinition of social identities in the public space between Chinese citizens and new immigrants (Xu Tao, 2013). 5

Migration, Employment and Flexibility

The issue of access to employment for migrants on the European labour markets is primarily linked to that of obtaining a work permit. Obviously the most disadvantaged populations are those without work permit. In 2006, the activity rate of non-national workers in European countries was 2.7% higher than that of the national workers in the 27 European countries, between 8.3 and 12.5% in the Czech Republic, in Greece, Portugal and Spain. Obtaining a work contract then plays a decisive role in the migrants’ situation. A majority of migrants are not registered in the sectors of agriculture, construction, tourism, catering, domestic services and the cleaning sector in all the EU countries but there are variations from a country to another. In the EU countries we can speak of a double process of insecurity and ethnic discrimination that also combine to produce situations of unemployment faced by migrants. In Europe unemployment and segregations of migrant workers in labour markets generate a market of “underemployment”. In most countries of the European Union ethnic discrimination, insecurity and proliferation of precarious forms of employment contribute today to “pulverize the conditions of the work contract” (Beck, 1992) due to the plurality and flexibility of transitional employments, and to specific forms of work more or less official. This dual process clearly reflects the development of a market of under-employment – at the heart of which stands the figure of the migrant forced by global labour market. We can clearly see how the workforce standards are de-standardized and how the salaried full-time work multiplies into forms of under-skilled work: insecure work, temporary work, seasonal work...

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In the insecurity and ethnic discrimination, employment statuses keep diversifying and hierarchising by marking the divisions between European workers and foreign workers or workers of foreign origin, divisions that participate in the over-visibilisation of an ethnic membership and the invisibilising of a professional identity. The hierarchies between the new forms of work contracts give rise to processes of overexposure, designation, social stigmatising of migrants on economic apparatuses. The modes of access to employment are gendered, racialized. The lower the school levels are, the more migrants are exposed to low legitimized contracts, whenever they have access to these contracts. The cultural background, combined with the social origin, the sex and the generational position, participates actively in defining forms of differentiated and prioritized accessibility to labour markets. These forms of accessibility are built through “systemic discrimination” (De Ruder, Poiret, Vourch’, 2000) which is reflected by a lower treatment than their native counterparts despite comparable or even higher education, qualifications and experience. Migrants are employed in unfavorable conditions for the same qualification, usually on precarious contracts, promotion opportunities and career mobility remain limited, appalling working conditions. In China migrant workers also experience situations of incecurity and great vulnerability. With the decline of socialist institutions, we are witnessing a proc­ess of decollectivising and individuation which is depriving certain categories of workers, including the nongmingong, of social, legal and economic rights. The second generation of migrants in China appears as a very vulnerable group in the access to employment in the context of transition of the labour markets. Some Chinese companies are paid on piece rate. The duration of daily work can reach up to fourteen hours in some private companies. The non-payment of overtime hours at current prices is commonplace. Moreover, the wages of migrants are below those of urban residents (Li Peilin, 2013); for example in Beijing, the monthly salary of provincials is equivalent to half that of Beijingers. In some sectors, in particular the construction sector, nongmingong may be paid annually but the absence of work contract may deprive them from any remedies in case of non-payment of their salary or bonus. Moreover, in some sectors like that of construction, when the nongmingong are paid each month or each season, they usually only receive a portion of their salary and the total at the end of work or at the time of New Year. Shen Yuan (2006) is speaking about hegemonic regimes of work. Flexibility appears as a dominant standard in the regulation of Chinese and European labour markets. In both contexts migrant workers appear both invisibilized and overvisibilized, a paradoxical process at the heart of which arises the concept of discrimination which means in the European case ethnic

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discrimination and in the Chinese case social distancing. More generally rises the question of the modes of access to employment and citizenship of lowskilled migrants. 6

Social Capital and Migratory Circulations

Social networks is used by Chinese colleagues as an explicative source to understand the migrations. Nan Lin’s (2001) theory of social capital focuses on the resources embedded in on’s social network and how access to and use of such resources benefit the individual’s action. Thomas Faist (2004) defined transnational social spaces as the product of combinations of non-static ties and positions in networks and organisations that can be found in at least two geographically and internationally distinct spaces ; he has introduced various forms of capital, the volume thereof and their mode of transferability. Some migratory trajectories are constructed on the basis of networks and norms of trust and reciprocity that facilitate coordination and cooperation in order to produce social capital (Putnam, 2000). Spatial capital (Lévy, Lussault, 2003) also plays a part in the reciprocal exchanges with other resources, but these interactions are fluid, depending on the incentives offered by the social or societal context. When spatial and social capital increases in diasporic and transnational spaces, it has a strong activating effect on entrepreneurial strategies. The professional experience and competences of Chinese migrants indeed proliferated in the course of their two-way or multipath transnational migrations that have facilitated the circulation of knowledge and expertise. Success in the forms of entrepreneurship adopted by these migrants depends on the forms of solidarity on which they are based. While activities based either on strong solidarity (moral economy) or weak solidarity (opportunism) do not always seem able to guarantee economic success, limited solidarity seems to confer advantages over competitors by virtue of the trust relations it engenders while at the same time limiting the obligations that accompany solidarity (Steiner, 1999). The “prestigious” careers of migrants are organised around the superimposition of different economies and cultures. These migrants highlight new forms of economic capital accumulation that are leading to the extension of transnational networks into the various sectors of manufacturing industry, the arts, international tourism, the fashion and cosmetics industries, etc. In Europe as in China some migrants develop strong individual and collective strategies and business and entrepreneurial dynamics based on networks of solidarities and family and community exchange in contexts

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of opportunities. In Europe, trade and entrepreneurship among migrants increased as a percentage of total self-employment, especially in the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Norway, Sweden and the UK. The process of ethnic discrimination on European labour markets also produces resistance expressed in the creation of self-employment. Entrepreneurs and traders of diverse cultural backgrounds then trace the outline of new global markets in transnational movements in which globalisings “from below” and “from the top” intersect (Bredeloup, 2013). These movements are organised based on diasporic rationale and ethnic, or even inter-ethnic solidarities, economic systems based on principles of economic and moral associations, long networks of coordination in which material, social and symbolic resources circulate during migration experiences. For example men and women migrants of African origin are involved in trade like stores of African objects or jewelry, food, clothing.... Chinese migrants create travel agencies, computer firms, ready-to-wear clothes shops in major European cities... which also further the intensification of new economic exchanges. The presence of migrants in international trade is widely invisibilized, as this example of Senegalese migrants who take transnational migration routes in order to trade jewelry, clothing... that they go and get from Saudi Arabia and Italy and sell in France and Senegal. This is also true of migrants from Central and Eastern Europe, Central and North Africa who are actively involved in economic exchanges across borders and ensure a strong presence in this context of internationalising of trade. We may also consider forms of ethnic entrepreneurship related to services of a different nature, catering, hairdressing... and which arise from situations of strong solidarity. We see how the spatial movements become embedded in social relations specific to the society of origin, how migrants rely on resources acquired or inherited in their society of origin by manipulating spatial capital that enable them to integrate transnational networks. Forms of entrepreneurship are also built around the production of intangible goods in the artistic, cultural, high tech fields. In China we met migrant traders who opened their shops and also small entrepreneurs who were establishing intermediate agencies for employment, new urban services, hair salons, shops and restaurants.... Once they have reached the status of employers, they hire migrants from their provinces that they incorporate into their economic networks. These migrants develop commercial and entrepreneurial dynamics in a context of general economic development (Roulleau-Berger, Shi, 2004) by activating family or interacquaintance networks on a collective level. The feeling of belonging to the same village and the chain of trust that underlies it provides the conditions for successful economic activity through commercial or entrepreneurial activities. These entrepreneurs create their own rules, conventions and standards

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on market segments that they invest, develop new skills in the creation of new channels, display great ability to develop networks of economic and social cooperation which link local markets based on movements on the Chinese mainland. In both cases the conditions for successful forms of business and entrepreneurship depend on situations of strong or weak solidarity that do not always appear as a guarantee for economic success; situations of limited solidarity provide advantages over competitors due to relationships of trust within the group while limiting the obligations of solidarity (Steiner,1999). The apparatuses of judgment and confidence play a decisive role on the market of local reputations and conditions of commitment of traders and entrepreneurs in international economic activities. Finally in the European and Chinese contexts the less graduated migrants may also become street vendors, build up small shops or develop mostly informal economic activities practiced in the street, such as in China the sale of noodles, of steamed bread, hot sweet potatoes, shoe repair, key making or delivery of drinking water at home.... These migrants then adjust the spaces where they create the “small urban production” around a variety of individual experiences built in situations of poverty and collective skills developed in managing situations of emergencies and uncertainty (Roulleau-Berger, 2007b). Transnationalism has given rise to a proliferation of complex inequalities because of the diversity of social, economic and symbolic resources acquired or developed in different societal contexts. In Europe, inequalities facing migrant populations may be doubled or tripled depending on the distribution and volume of resources and the extent to which they can be transferred, as well as on age and gender. Inequalities are likely to be amplified or reduced depending on the various economic, social, ethnic and symbolic resources individuals have at their disposal (Roulleau-Berger, 2010). Migrants in particular tend to move along horizontal networks in the world market for domestic workers. Inequalities in migratory trajectories are not only multi-sited but also gendered (Kofman, Phizacklea, Raghuram, Sales, 2000) in the new global economy. And recently, a few new Chinese investors and businessmen adventured into inner land of some African countries. Finally in late 1990s, appear new international migratory circulations from Africa and from North Africa through the Muslim ties to China. Another most important category of Africans in China is traders, bigger or smaller, in terms of their capitals, financial and social. African traders weave ties between Dubaï, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Hong Kong and Guangzhou to reinforce their networks and contribute to the building of market places in Asia (Liu Haifang, 2013; Gois, Reis Oliveira, Marques, 2013).

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Migratory Experiences and Bifurcations

In a context of economic uncertainty and increasing migrations biographical trajectories then continue to diversify by producing complex itineraries. Foremost this process of individuation is characterized by a proliferation of biographical bifurcations (Grossetti, 2006) and reversibilities of situations. Indeed, the careers of migrants are constructed from bifurcations that correspond to the conjunction of migration steps, that is to say changes in space systems in the form of geographical mobility, and changes in economic regimes, in the form of professional mobility. In the biographical process these bifurcations can become affiliation in the sense that they multiply the contact points with the host societies, or poorly integrated when they produce accumulations of differences with the host societies. At each bifurcation sites, events influence the repertoires of individual resources which rearrange to reconstitute the statuses, places and social identities of individuals (Roulleau-Berger, 2010). But reflexive skills influence the modes and forms of recomposition of repertoire of resources, that is to say about the degree of predictability of situations of change.When the bifurcations are unexpected, when there are emergencies, reflexive skills are developed to manage the effects of interference or identity shocks. Here appear “archaeological inequalities” (Scardigli, Mercier, 1978) which are built on the experience of migration based on the ratio between biographical bifurcations, social and personal resources and reflexive skills. In China, Chinese migrants’ careers are organised around a diversity of professional experiences in State-owned or private companies, either Chinese or joint-ventures, in the services or small retail’s sector, or even in entrepreneurship (Li Chunling, 2013). Reversibilities and uncertainties of economic situations are often structured around “bifurcations” that are more or less rapidly linked in the professional biographies, there is seldom time out in the trajectories of these migrants who engage in trajectories of low pluriactivity or high pluriactivity depending on their level of qualification (Roulleau-Berger, 2010). This sequence of bifurcations reflects the structural processes at work in Chinese society, including changes in migration policies and the dynamics of competition in labour markets that also keep causing bifurcations in the professional biographies. Bifurcations mean professional and social mobilities, they also do express capabilities of action and reflexivity form migrants. The less qualified are submitted to a double-bind constraint, on the one hand by geographical mobilities, and on the other hand by professional mobilities, and their trajectories appear to be often built around a strong multiactivity and a multiplicity of successive bifurcations. The frequency of bifurcations in migrants’ biographies is a principle of social differentiation that gives an

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account of the discontinuities of work experiences; a high frequency expresses a discontinuity between experiences in very different jobs. A short mandatory experience of formal or informal work, does not let any time to find his own place and to capitalize new social or symbolic resources. Migrants are forced to a horizontal mobility made up with a series of “invisible” but continuous experiences. On the contrary, a longer experience in different types of work allows some time to settle and produces continuities with regard to professional experiences. Chinese migrants’ discontinuities in work experiences gives a good account at the same time of structural processes linked to the development of a Chinese-style flexible economy and of individual aspirations to upward social mobility. For qualified migrants, biographical trajectories are organised around spatial discontinuities which do not necessarily suggest professional discontinuities. That is to say they leave a city for another by accessing to a job in the same sector and by finding a position of the same status. In Europe, international migrants’ careers are built from bifurcations that may become sources of affiliation, if they multiply contact points with host societies, or on the contrary not very integrative when they produce accumulations of discrepancies with the same host societies. The less-qualified ethnic enclaves and niches forms of economic inscription express biographic trajectories made of strong bifurcations and are not much integrative in nature. Here less-qualified migrants are assigned to locations in low economic legitimacy spaces which produce low integration socialisings and situations of great unpredictability and social insecurity. Migrants with low social, linguistic and economic resources quickly internalize this effect of assignation to situations of captivity and consequently develop weak competences of reconstruction of their repertoires and resources for action. Nevertheless, when they develop resistance skills to these situations, they can induce upward mobility trajectories into ethnic enclaves and bifurcations may then become actual sources of affiliation. In ethnic trade or entrepreneurship, biographic bifurcations induce a strong affiliation into transnational networks of economic, social and symbolic resources’ circulation. In that case, bifurcations produces partially predictable situations because the entrepreneurs or traders always remain at least partially “authors” of their migration. At each step, individual resources’s repertoires rearrange. The status, positions, and social identities are reorganised based on each individual’s capacity for personal and collective action. In that case, bifurcation may be more anticipated than in ethnic enclaves or niches. Migrants use their resources in these biographic changes’ sequences during which individuals step from one space to another, from one economic regime to another.

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The strong mobilising of resources also gives an account of the capabilities’ spreading. Within each migration step, migrants position themselves or are positioned in a social space or in a recognition order which are built differently depending on the societal contexts. Men and women migrating change their position at each step in societies, spaces, and places which are stratified differently depending on each country’s political, social and economic histories So we are compelled to think archeologic inequalities within multiple societal contexts, and also to think them as non-static, multi-situated, and then complex and dynamic. Keeping in mind that between these inequalities hierarchies are built which are linked to a new economic, political, and cultural order. Multi-situated inequalities also appear as reversible because a same migrant may very well live a situation of inequality amplified with regard to the previous one at a certain point, but that situation may very well decrease later in another context. A same individual may appear as “great” in a given context and as “small” in another. In contemporary migrations, the amplification, or reduction of social inequalities consequently appears as a discontinuous process while it could be defined as more linear in previous migrations. In the passing from one context to another, more or less strong discrepancies are produced between varying social positions according to societal contexts and individual trajectories. Either inequalities add to each other, or they decrease by the effect of compensation between weak positions in a given societal context or strong positions in another. Capital related to social and family legacies influence the effects of bio­ graphical discontinuity and are revealed in the mode of organisation of resource repertoires; the broader the resource repertoires are, the more organised they are and the more people can manage the effects of biographical discon­tinuity. Social capital are strengthened today in a context of increased migration and development of flexible capitalism. In Europe, Ulrick Beck (2006) speaks of “cosmopolitisation of biographies” and “geographic poly­gamy” that are ­organised around cultural differences, social and gender inequalities by producing what we call the global individuation (Roulleau-Berger, 2010), by revealing a process of formation of “partially denationalized classes” in the European case (Sassen, 2006). In both contexts the bifurcations are structured in the conjunction of professional mobility and geographic mobility.But their proliferation and frequency vary depending on the repertoires of social, economic and symbolic resources; the most low-skilled individuals are doubly constrained to geographic and professional mobilities and their trajectories are often built around a strong pluri-activity or poly-activity and a multiplicity of close bifurcations.The

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frequency of bifurcation points in the biographical trajectories is lower for qualified women who develop skills of predictability associated with changing situations in the migration experience. Then appears a principle of social differentiation that accounts for the discontinuity of experiences related to different economic systems. A fast frequency of bifurcation situations means that there is discontinuity between the experiences in very different jobs. Indeed a short presence required in a formal or informal employment, does not leave time to build new social and symbolic resources and to order them on order to reconstruct individual repertoires. 8

Migration, Local and Global Stratification

In that context of an implementation of a pluralising of economies, the diversification of migrants’ biographies highlights the apparition of “partially denationalized classes” (Sassen, 2006), especially with the formation of transnational elites, new middle-classes and disqualified or poor migrants. The richest and the poorest are particularly visible in that process of construction of a globalized social stratification. In China, Shen Yuan, Wen Xiang (2014), show how the new working-class is forming. For the first generation of migrant workers, internal migration produces trajectories of professional mobility where migrants change their position without moving on a vertical axis passing from a hierarchy to another, it is thus an horizontal mobility organised around a linear sequence of turning points which means a sequence of movements in professional hierarchies built around a single activity (such as construction, for example) or around activities completely disjointed in which professional contents have no connection between them. On the other hand young migrants aged 16–25 who are entering the labour markets are for the major part “only child” who are subject of the whole parental investment, the only holders of the social economic and emotional capital of their family. The parents imagine their children as occupying high social positions in the Chinese society and the children also yearn for trajectories of “social excellence”. The whole generation entering labour markets, due to the status of only child, are positionned in the cult of performance, this phenomenon is specifically Chinese. The more graduated they are, the more these young migrants aged 16–25 develop trajectories of upward social mobility. The migration trajectories related to commercial or entrepreneurial dynamics may be qualified as trajectories of upward mobility that build in the continuous accumulation of personal and social resources.

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Finally, internal migrations also reveal today a figure of hobo (Anderson, 1993) who moves on a random mode on the Chinese mainland between different jobs and activities in order to try to achieve upward social mobility in Chinese society. In this movement of intensification of internal migrations in China and economic transformation, unskilled young people from rural areas travel on migration routes in search of employment, subject to the constraints and flexibility of the development of a Chinese style capitalism. In Europe, since the end of the 1980’s, global trade, investments abroad, circulation of capital are all accelerating, and migration dynamics never stop multiplying and diversifying. Economic, scientific and technical elites’ migrations highlight the renewal forms of these new mobilities. “Top-down globa­lising” shows how a fraction of the new cosmopolitan bourgeoisie, residing for a part in Europe and made-up of highly-skilled and qualified migrants from continental China, Eastern and Central Europe, Maghreb and the MiddleEast, is forming. In Europe, in the formation process of new cosmopolitan bourgeoisies (Wagner, 2008), migrants with a high social and spatial capital access to positions of cadres in international companies and to “Top-down” social statuses. Migrants engaged in international ethnic trade also access to mid-scale positions by provoking the apparition of a new middle-class. But communities of the country of origin funnel the less-qualified migrants, the most destitute ones, towards sector where they are subject to a real exploitation. Middle-classes internationalize but remain within a national frame while the upper-class and the underclass may firstly be defined as denationalized (Le Galès, 2015). In Europe and in China among the population of migrants living high social and economic insecurity situations, a new figure of the hobo appears: they are the “leftovers/remnants/left-behinds of globalising”, or new supernumeraries, objects of invisibility and public and social non-recognition, forced into “lost lives”. The “leftovers/remnants/left-behinds of globalising”, voiceless, placeless, without any positive recognition, remain forced to be themselves against and despite dominations, sound and powerful racisms, assignations to invisibility, and marginalising into spaces of no-rights.

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State, Social Conflict and Collective Action In Western European societies, the question of the state and democracy is a central issue, directly connected as it is to the construction of inequalities and the decline of the institutions that produce social rights. After all, inequalities of access to social rights have proliferated in recent years, leading to the gradual emergence of the individual “without rights or entitlements” and thereby challenging the very principles of democracy. In Chinese sociology, the issue of the State/society relationship has a very important status. It is raised in different forms, inscribed in various theoretical approaches; sometimes it is linked to the question of power, sometimes to that of governance modes, public space construction, and access to social rights. Here, we will analyse the way in which Chinese and European sociologists conceive social conflicts, collective actions and societal violence. After examining the relationship between State and citizenship, we will look into collective action and violence in a dissociated manner in each context given the very contrasted societal forms and different processes that produce them. 1

State and Citizenship

In European societies, the transition to the market economy has lead to economic decline and a “collapse of equality”. Solidarity is less evident than conflict, particularly the symbolic and ethnic conflicts running though the post-socialist societies of Central Europe. While social conflicts exist, they are not conceived as playing a central role (Krasteva, 2012). This raises the question of the moral insecurity and mistrust that have insinuated themselves into social interactions, particularly between those with and without access to employment. The “crisis of trust” exists as an issue in both Europe and China (Sun Liping, 2006), leading us to re-conceptualise the issue of the social construction of conflict and trust in capitalist and post-socialist societies. This in turn raises the question of the new economy of legality and of the process of legitimation in contemporary societies as well as emphasing the mobilisation of law and justice as an expression of a new regime of topdown regulation focused on the rights of minorities and vulnerable populations; from this point of view, justice plays an increasingly important role in political regulation in European societies and contributes to the production of new

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forms of governance in the production of “transnational economies of legality”( Commaille, 2012). In Chinese sociology, the question of the relationship between State and society is assuming considerable importance. It is posed in various forms, with researchers adopting a variety of theoretical approaches: some linked to the question of power, others to that of modes of governance, the construction of the public space and access to social rights. In China, the right to own property has been reformed several times, and as far as access to social rights is concerned, the system of social protection can indeed be said to be in crisis, particularly in terms of welfare cover, unemployment insurance, health care and pensions. Even though the government has introduced reforms, there are very pronounced inequalities of access to social rights between rural and urban populations. At the central level, the Chinese State lays down the forms of governance to be adopted in tackling these social questions. Local government is also involved in developing instruments of social solidarity. Li Youmei (2012, 2007) raises the question of the governance of communities and neighbourhoods as the bases of Chinese civil society; she shows how the repercussions of the economic reforms on city administration and the decentralisation of governmental competences have led to the emergence of new modes of governance that are being jointly constructed by different interest groups at neigh­bourhood level, by state representatives and city dwellers as well as the fight against corruption (Wang Shuixiong, 2014). Economic and political actors mobilise in order to manage structural tensions between the old and new systems by implementing innovative policies; peasants protect themselves by drawing on ancient local knowledge. These different categories of actors located in different parts of the urban space and institutions produce new forms of collective action in the production of cicil society. Guo Yuhua (2012) theorises the governance issue by developing an approach that is both “bottom-up” and “top-down”, based on an analysis of state rituals as techniques for maintaining power implementeded as part of the micromanagement of relations between state and peasants. She analyses the way in which ordinary peasants allowed themselves to be persuaded by the revolutionary ideal and enforced involvement in Chinese political life; state rituals became a substitute for governance and were based on the rituals of everyday peasant life in order to produce action norms that were manifest in the movements. Drawing on an analysis of the power of the “weak”, we can see how individuals’ reflexive capacity is deployed in interactive situations and the various contexts of everyday social activity. This gives rise in turn to what Patrick Pharo (2012) describes as an everyday civic spirit, which denotes the day-to-day management of unequal, asymmetric social relations and raises the question

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of how to assess the legitimacy of a social and political order in Europe. While he demonstrates the extent to which this concept is closer to a vision of the legitimacy that served to guide “struggles for recognition”, he insists that it remains ambiguous if it is not linked to the question of legitimate rights and democracy at a time when individual and human rights are being sanctified. In a context in which multiple sources of vulnerability and dependency are emerging in European societies, Patrick Pharo raises the question of experiences of humiliation within the relative democratic “good fortune” of European societies by proposing to examine “the democratic clear conscience as a source of totalitarianism”. Recognition is a coveted good in these societies, new rights – for users of institutions, minorities and groups suffering discrimination – become established by opening up areas of recognition while at the same time this helps to reinforce processes of segregation and discrimination. A semantics of recognition is sweeping through the public, political and legal space (Payet, Battegay, 2008), while at the same producing increasingly strong and discrete hierarchies between different orders of recognition with varying degrees of legitimacy. In European societies, the state is a supplier of recognition, but one has to take into account a diversity of sources of legitimation in spaces with varying degrees of legitimacy. Processes of continuous establishment of State control and surveillance devices have been analysed in both Chinese and European contexts with sociologists showing how they are based on different disciplinary techniques, being implemented through direct surveillance on one side, and through indirect surveillance on the other. In China, the process of establishing of State control is referred to as control measures which produce physical and symbolic violence. It is also conceived from the perspective of State rituals as power techniques implemented in the context of miniaturised management of the relationships between the State and its citizens. State-rituals are constitute devices of moral and political management of bodies and minds, disciplinary micro-devices (Foucault, 1975) – the works of Foucault are frequently used in Chinese sociology. Although this approach may appear to be very specific and localised, one can nevertheless see contact points with pragmatic analysis which draws attention to the practical activities of citizens through which different categories of actors, both individual and collective, define situations. In Chinese political sociology, a pragmatism of symbolic actions and activities of interpretation is used in which the forms of individual and collective experiences fall within courses of action, where the narrative texture of action is accessible through the analysis of situations. These analyses can be related to those developed by French sociologists on the formation of public arenas (Cefaï, Joseph, 2002) which emerge from discord and controversies and which

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define public orders from multiple interactions and engagements (Thévenot, 2005) so as to examine contexts of “interactional citizenship” (Colomy, Brown, 1996, quoted by Cefaï, 2007) organised around ordeals of right and duty. 2

Bio-political Apparatuses and Self-government

In the democratic European states, individualisation is the new watchword of public policies which are supported by the injunction to be oneself in local justice frameworks. Individuals in precarious situations, such as the unemployed, refugees and migrants, are assigned to spaces of weak legitimacy. In order to obtain the recognition of social rights such as employment and housing, these individuals have to exhibit themselves before the State or its representatives, to relate their lives including intimate details likely to create emotions and, sometimes, they even have to exhibit their bodies. This means allowing the weakest and the most vulnerable people to enter the mainstream of competition and maintain themselves in it (Ehrenberg 2010). Today, in the societies of Western Europe, expressing the injunction to be oneself means that the telling of one’s life story has imposed itself as a norm both in the employment markets and within the framework of the implementation of public policies of employment, housing and social protection. Bio-political apparatuses are set up and control the intentions and actions of individuals who are expected to produce narrative identities in accordance with the norms of institutions (Memmi, 2003). As Didier Fassin (2005) has suggested, this double process of injunction to be oneself and of submission to the State could be described as a “double process of subjectification and subjection”. In European and Chinese societies, globalised capitalism produces forms of government which rely upon moral economies and apparatuses for the domination and domestication of bodies and selves. These bio-political apparatuses are constructed from moral economies of suspicion, contempt, compassion, and hospitality which are based in institutional configurations and differentiated forms of self-government. The moral economy of suspicion relies upon the principles of discrimination, stigmatisation and non-recognition of the Other suspected of being able to divert public provision. The moral economy of contempt relies upon the principles of denial, moral and physical violence and the non recognition of the social and moral competences of the Other.

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The moral economy of compassion relies upon a weak consideration and a false-recognition of the concerned publics as well as moral intentions referred to forms of social domination or internal colonialism in the European instance. The moral economy of hospitality mobilises public actors and citizens through the use of adjustments, agreements, consideration, and full recognition of the social, moral, economic and civic competences of populations without rights, employment or social status. In both contexts, public actors manufacture moral economies in differentiated social spaces concerning different populations. European democracies are characterised by a pluralism of institutions and a diversity of bio-political apparatuses. For example in France, those concerned include the unemployed, the young jobless, migrants and refugees who are taken in by economic and social insertion structures or associations. In China, the bio-political apparatuses are directly referred to the State and concern migrant workers, the unemployed, “displaced” populations, AIDS victims, etc; the “voice” of these populations can be heard in the complaints offices in which the ordeals and injustices encountered by citizens are made public. These apparatuses have no equivalent in Europe. Chinese populations can also be taken care of within the framework of government associations. The demand to be a Subject appears as a bio-political norm present in European and Chinese societies. Harnessing bodies and subjectivities is a cornerstone for moral economies in China and in Western Europe. Thus, subjectivity has been domesticated and socially, politically and economically instrumentalised. Different kinds of social groups struggle and compete to gain access to a moral autonomy which is controlled by others. Individuals have to show a sense of autonomy, being able to act and think reflexively on different social scenes. These scenes provide self-esteem restoration in a way that will allow the harnessing of subjectivities and the domesticating of the individuals’ selves. Those who are ascribed to these situations have to enter a regime of inter-individual competition to be granted access to legitimate moral economies. In China, individuals must increasingly demonstrate their capacity for autonomy and enterprise in a context of great economic development. For example, the injunction to be oneself appears clearly to be the norm with the deterioration of the working conditions of the recently qualified young people. Until the end of the 1990s, they were considered to be the elites of society, and, once qualified, they found stable employment in State enterprises and public institutions. This is no longer the case today. We can also see how the figure of the entrepreneur appears as a new hero of socialism capable of personal development and self-achievement (Guiheux, 2012). In a socialist market economy where competition is increasingly harsher and

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inequalities constantly growing, those without resources are submitted to a strong injunction to autonomy and flexibility, which means an injunction to submission. Moral boundaries are enforced to ensure the harnessing of bodies. The injunctions to be oneself produced by these bio-political apparatuses leads to double-bind situations as well as to fragmentations and discrepancies between identities for the self and identities for others, even to the loss of the self. However, according to their nature, moral economies will act upon the intensity of these double-bind situations and the conditions of access to the selves of individuals and populations. Economies of suspicion and contempt produce strong double-bind situations and highly marked losses of the self. Groups and individuals, who have already been made vulnerable, feel and perceive that they are not recognised since they cannot obtain access to a place in the society concerned. The economies of hospitality and compassion tend to encourage reconciliation between identities for the self and identities for others. 3

Social Conflicts and Mobilisations in China

Certain forms of complaint used to exist in the “collective visitation” mode at the time of the warring States, and have been resurgently recurrent in the political history of China. Over the last sixty years, Chinese sociologists have analysed this space of complaint and its transformation through the construction of individual and collective actors who publicise the ordeals of injustice with which they are confronted and who express demands for recognition to instituted powers. Isabelle Thireau and Hua Linshan (2010) have shown that: In China, as soon as the Chinese communist party took over, in 1949, men and women indeed turned towards local or national authorities to make suggestions, ask for assistance, denounce class enemies, or look for lost kin. In 1951, a specialised administration was set up, known as “letter and visitations”, charged with receiving, classifying, and dispatching towards the proper recipients these testimonies and requests. Not only has this administration been maintained up until today, but it has increasingly spread and institutionalised, thereby legitimising the existence of a space of direct address to deeply intertwined political and administrative powers…A space for speaking-out has thus been authorised, and it has but ceased to redeploy and modify itself (page 13).

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These spaces of complaint precede spaces of revolt and collective action. In China however, we can see that different social groups are mobilising in the public space in order to give voice to strong demands for recognition. New forms of workers’ collective action are being invented to face the privatisation of public companies which engenders political and economic conflicts of interests. Workers had integrated the idea of strong mutual links between them, the company and the State (danwei). The Reform broke this unwritten agreement and the workers felt betrayed and left to face inequalities and injustices (Tong Xin, 2008). Shared socialist culture and class consciousness have shaped the struggle of a subjugated underclass in these post-reform workers’ mobilisations. Collective action from traditional state sector workers is specific to China, especially the demands concerning property regimes. Class consciousness also rose amongst migrant workers to fight for workers’ rights and against foreign capitalistic takeovers. These migrants combat local government and global capital. Since the beginning of the 1990s, strikes, protests and revolts repeatedly occur amongst migrant workers, especially in Southern China. The more China becomes involved in the global production system, the more it has to face protests. A formerly socialist context and current political events mix to produce new working class cultures based on solidarities and relations built in the local communities individuals come from. More and more export-focused companies have closed and their workers, most of them migrants, have been laid off. Migrants have protested and faced the police, in particular in the Pearl and Yangtse delta cities, such as Shenzhen, Dongguan, Huizhou. Now, riots and urban social movements occur in all Chinese provinces. Second-generation and the third generation of migrants bear the sufferings and humiliations of their parents and, while outraged, have developed a set of skills to resist and fight oppression and injustice. They are also increasingly conscious of their social rights and their level of aspirations is higher and higher (Cai He, Liu Linping, Wang Xiangdong, 2009). Qin Cong (2013) describes peasants fighting with rationality and legality for rights – protection activities and resistance in daily life, a resistance which had its roots in rural culture and the tension arising out of the authority of central government and the local government desire for economic achievements. Workers, often from the same communities, are lodged in factory dormitories, giving them the possibility to set up collective actions (Pun Ngai,2005) to fight for their rights and express strong resentment against the involvement of foreign capital. These workers fight their local government and global capitalism, while migrants develop new working-class cultures of resistance on the basis of ties and solidarities brought from home communities. As a result, class consciousness is being developed and new creative skills are being forged in actions and

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struggles in the workplace. A specific process of proletarianisation amongst migrant workers has lead to these labour revolts Conflicts concerning recognition are expressed in controlled forms, particularly the resistance movements among peasants, workers and city dwellers linked to the middle classes. Social conflicts and collective struggles in China are centred around property rights. Property rights constitute a conflict-laden issue in cases of farmland eviction, demolition causing eviction and leading to people moving out and cases of insecure access to private property in cities. New forms of collective action lead the way in these conflicts against the State, local government and private actors. These new forms also contribute to the shaping of civil society. Property rights issues are a good example of how conflicts and competition happen between social groups, those who own political, social and economic goods and those who are deprived of them. Shen Yuan (2012) also shows how a citizens’ movement linked to the right of ownership has been formed in order to give voice to the demand of the urban middle classes in China for civil and political rights. The emergence of owners’ movements has revealed tensions and social conflicts in the public space that have lead city dwellers linked to the emerging middle classes to mobilise in increasingly organised ways. An emerging middle class of city-dwellers is becoming involved in more organised mobilisations because of social conflicts and tensions, as can be seen in cities with homeowners’ movements. The development among city-dwellers of the skills required to mobilise for the purpose of resistance around the right of ownership issue reflects the way in which new forms of accessibility to the public space and new demands for public recognition are being constructed. Shen Yuan uses the theories of Gramsci and Habermas’ public space approach to raise the question of the production of a civil society. The dramatisation of homeowners’ movements reveals in the public space situations of tension and social conflicts which produce increasingly organised collective actions of urban dwellers linked to an emerging middle-class. Zhu Jiangang (2011) considers that these social movements propelled by the middle classes result from the co-presence of different categories of actors, from the necessity for a more balanced daily life, and from the popular discourse linked to the political legacy of mobilisation campaigns. The issue of urban propriety rights allows one to see how competitions and struggles are organised between different categories of urban owners of economic, social and political goods and other less advantaged urban dwellers. But most importantly, urban dwellers linked to the middle class appear as producers of collective competences in situations of resistance linked to new forms of economic and political domination. Other sociologists (Zhou Xiaohong, 2012) do not think of political awareness as the driving force behind collective action of the middle classes, but rather observe a form of political

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conservatism and complicities with civil servants as the sources of their mobilisation. Chinese sociologists (Chen Yingfang, 2008), consider social movements as political processes which produce innovation in terms of political participation and rely on the theory of resource mobilisation to link collective action, individual action, and the effects of the structures. Zhao Dingxin (2008) defines a social movement using change, social and State structures, discourse via political awareness, forms of identification to the movement, discursive tactics and slogans. He shows the effects of the Chinese political context on the way researchers take into consideration discursive tactics. Other Chinese sociologists insist on hatred and the feeling of dispossession of the self which play a role in the construction of collective action competences (Liu Neng, 2004, 2009 a, b). Chen Yingfang (2008) advances the hypothesis that beside the degree of power of State control, political awareness and power of action are the two fundamental ingredients which define the choices when it comes to action and the results of the actions of the urban dwellers. The emphasis is placed on the role of political opportunities in terms of the appearance of social movements. How is this power of action of the middle classes expressed? Homeowners’ committees, teams defending rights and “white collar” internet platforms are mobilising to defend collective interests and social rights. In the public space since the 1990s, besides the mobilisation of homeowners because of the housing reform, other forms of protests linked to housing have emerged: protests against the destructions of entire neighbourhoods and the violent eviction of their residents; the creation of homeowners’ committees as “intermediate actors” in neighbourhood communities (Merle, 2014). Evictions, especially those of the “private ownership apartment tenants” – that is to say long-term tenants and migrants – have set off strong mobilisations which rely on the claim for a “right to the city” (Gransow, 2014) in the sense of Henri Lefebvre, which is the right to indemnification, to maintaining one’s social insertion in neighbourhood networks and a neighbourhood identity endowed with a history and a memory. 4

New Social Protests in China

More recently sociologists have focused on three new forms of collective action: against health insecurity; against environmental risks; and via Internet.

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Yu Zhiyuan (2012) has analysed three cases: the hepatitis B carriers’ antidiscrimination campaign, the haemophilia patients’ collective action seeking compensation for being infected with HIV/AIDS through contaminated blood products, and the policy campaign seeking compensation for HIV /AIDS contracted through hospital transfusion initiated by the patients who were thus infected. This author has shown how collective actors and open government actors have the capacities to produce together social improvement through various tactics and how collective protest action can be blocked through a lack of favourable political opportunities and media coverage. Investigating resistance of residents of the AIDS villages in the HIV-ridden areas in Hubei province and Henan province, Wang Hongwei (2010) has defined the right to commit suicide as “to die for the fight”, as “a weapon of the weak status” and as an attribute to the explanatory framework of “individualistic resistance” relying on “rule-based resistance”; he shows how very vulnerable populations, such as AIDS-carryng peasants populations in some provinces, use their bodies as individual weapons in order to claim health compensations from the local authorities which have flouted them. Chinese scholars show that the most vulnerable groups tend to act in a rather individual way to defend their interests. They do not seem to be capable of using collective action repertories. In recent environmental sociology much research has focused on the collective action of citizens, the conflicts, negotiations and arrangements with government, media, experts and NGOs. More generally, researchers suggest a risk society and have introduced the concepts of environmental justice and political equality, as well as the tension between the citizens’ social growth and structural limitation ( Gong Wenjuan, 2013; Zhou Zhijia, 2011). The question raised here is that of the allocation of positive and negative resources within public arrangements linked to public policies. Several protests have occurred concerning air and water pollution and landslides. Sabotage and the sequestering of executives have taken place in the countryside in protest against this environmental crisis. Sometimes, local authorities acknowledge these demands, as was the case with the Three Gorges dam. These growing protests against environmental risks reveal the emerging of collective consciousness and the acknowledgement of being an interested party. Collective mobilisations in China are at the crossroads between familial rural solidarity and local government failures. Most of the time the crux of the matter is centred less on obtaining protection from environmental risks than on demanding social justice before these risks (Jun Jing, 2010). We also have to mention the forms of collective action via Internet as an important channel of non-institutionalised political participation and as a public sphere promoting the development of China’s civil society. Very recently

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new social movements have appeared through “street art” by activists – especially Chinese women – who wanted to make their voices heard and their concerns understood by both the authorities and the public (Wei Wei, 2014). Within collective action analysis in China, the boundaries between collective and individual resources are blurred. Research studies suggest that Western theories by scholars such as Mancur Olson are not appropriate; instead they show that within peasants’ collective actions, different categories of leaders appear: leaders within a daily resistance, leaders within a resistance to institutions, leaders involved in defending individuals’ rights (Yu Jianrong, 2007). Wu Changqing (2013), talks of the “hero ethic” and how it influences the continuity of protest action; he considers that the “hero ethic” produces mutual cooperation, connections, status differentiation and friendship between rural protest activists and retains them in the collective action. Collective action sociology is also conceived from the perspective of a sociology of emotions. Ying Xing (2009), for instance, proposes the concept of “field of qi” to analyse the issue of collective action in China in a theoretical perspective freed from Western paradigms. This typically Chinese concept contains both the effects of structural processes that produce collective actions and the relations or influences between mass movements, which react on each other. Chen Qi and Wu Qi (2014) also consider that the emotional perspective is very important in order to understand mass disturbances in present day China. They consider that emotional factors play a far more important role in collective action in China than in Western social movements because of the lack of public space to express anger, and because of the injunction to remain silent and patient; they make a distinction between emotion release and emotion management or emotional self-control. Chen Qi and Wu Qi consider that this is especially fundamental to understanding the meaning of the collective actions that the Chinese State faces. Finally, Xia Ying (2014) has raised a very important question: How do cultural contexts affect the formation and development of mobilising frames in collective actions? This question calls for an analysis of the relationships between frames of action and the macro-cultural context taking into account the people’s daily life. 5

Collective Action, Violences and Riots in Europe

What is a collective action, and what is a social movement? Here we will use French sociologist Daniel Cefaï’s definition (2007):

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The concept of collective action refers to any attempt to constitute a collective, more or less formal and institutionalised, formed by individuals seeking a common objective within contexts of cooperation and competition with other collectives (page 8). A social movement is a collective action oriented by an attention to a common-good to promote or a common-wrong to rule-out; a social movement sets itself enemies to fight so as to make possible processes of participation, redistribution or recognition (page 15). The great French and Italian sociologists Alain Touraine and Alberto Melucci have played a fundamental role in social movement sociology in Europe. Indeed, studies of the workers’ movement, Solidarnosc, as well as ecologist and feminist groups undertaken in France by Touraine’s researchers, or of autonomist or spiritualist groups in Milan’s suburbs undertaken by Melucci’s researchers, have become classics. They have been joined by German sociologist Claus Offe in their specific approach to new social movements. In Europe, recent years have been dotted with numerous protests expressing tensions, paradoxes, and the anguish of an eroding wage-labour system: the protest marches by the unemployed, high school student protests, movements in defence of undocumented migrants and retirement rights… In recent years, unions and associations have been deeply involved in these calls for mobilisation and protest: unions close to the leftwing social-democrat parties, parent-teacher’ associations, anti-racism associations, associations supporting international causes. With the rise of the extreme-right and racism in Europe, especially in France, racist crimes have occurred and silent marches organised with the victims’ families, their friends, and people engaged in anti-racism movements, either as an individual commitment or as part of a group. The decline of stable forms of employment and the destabilisation of wage-earner status have lead to the appearance of new collective movements. These express a process of social deforming and transformation. These movements appear as the solidification of movements which are developing in labour-markets and in strong areas of economic, social, and ethnic discrimination; they take shape around social conflicts and are built from the refusal to adapt to the crisis, to failure. Numerous qualified young people who are either unemployed or living in instability have responded to this call to protest against massive unemployment through civil disobedience – the protestors sporadically and peacefully occupied the main squares in the cities. In 1981 in France, in working-class suburbs like the Minguettes, near Lyon, “rodeos” took place and cars were burned in the middle of the streets. In the

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1990’s, in other French and British suburbs, riots took place and were widely covered by the media. These unprecedented events are analysed as being the result of the conjunction of different factors: a high unemployment rate, deteriorated environment and accommodation conditions, a captive population, a feeling of inequality and helplessness, racial discrimination, the relationship to the police, education dropouts, and family difficulties. In Western European cities, such as those of France or Spain, social conflicts originate in different political, social and economic spaces. If different forms of collective action are born out of these conflicts (unionism and strikes, social leagues and clubs, urban riots, etc) (Béroud, Bouffartigue, 2009), internal boundaries have hardened over the last thirty years; collective action has diversified and occurred in spaces with different political legitimacies. As they create more inequalities and injustice, Western European democracies also foster social movements, non-partisan activism and sit-ins in urban public spaces. For example, the “Indignants” movement started in Spain in May 2011 following a call for action in 58 Spanish cities. Institutional and socio-economic violence create eviction and stigmatisation, especially against young unemployed people from working class housing projects and migrants who feel vulnerable to racism, unemployment and a society which does not give them any room. Rioting is then a way to enter the political space. Urban riots express a demand for justice and citizenship and they can be seen as the exacerbation of local micro-mobilisations, or as revolts against being ascribed to irrelevant, inaccurate or unwanted roles. These riots cannot be reduced to being infra-political, they illustrate the fragility and vulnerability of political representation and the failure of former social regulations. They are not only the consequences of a crisis, they could be the turmoil accompanying the birth of a new society. Between 1980 and 2000, mediation policies were implemented to attempt to establish a new link with those “the (French) Republic had forgotten” and who increasingly live as if, indeed, they have been forgotten. In recent years, acts of urban violence have been on the rise again while the economic situation has deteriorated in working class neighbourhoods. This sater of urban riots in France shows that vulnerable, stigmatised, scorned and forgotten populations demand a new social and public recognition. Riots are a moment in which new forms of collective action are built on the margins of the con­ ventional political field, and in which feelings of injustice combine with demands for respect (Boubeker, 2003; Roulleau-Berger, 2004 a,b; Kokoreff, 2008). Democracies are slowly crumbling under the assaults of unemployment, labour insecurity and discriminations. Public space has become the main place to express individual and collective fears and uncertainties but also social contempt. Risk is produced and dealt with while involvements and

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un-involvements regarding main norms give public space a renewed diversity as it includes expressed vulnerability and social disintegration and shows the boundaries between those who are “included” and those who are “excluded within”. With the end of industrial capitalism, we have entered a new capitalist regime, in which the wage-earning societies have undergone a dramatic change as the inequalities between social positions have increased. Access to resources and goods is becoming decreasingly common, while there are more and more people who lack resources and face the risk of material poverty, while being decreasingly protected and cared for by the welfare system. Mass unemployment, growing uncertainties in work relations and labour, the decline of institutions and the recomposition of new institutional forms, all concur to demonstrate that “modernity is not about the strong grip of the system on the subjectivities, modernity is mostly about the wavering of an actor relentlessly forced to define again and again his place and his identity” (Dubet 2009). On the one hand, social, economic and ethnical inequalities keep growing, along with new forms of exploitation, rejection, stigmatisation and even destitution of the “weakest”. On the other hand, cultural domination, recognition-denial and disrespect create situations of injustice. Exploited workers, young people facing high uncertainties, migrants, and ethnic minorities subject to racial discrimination, are all prime examples of these processes. Demands for recognition thus increase with the rising number of conflicting socialisation and recognition situations, as the actors have to keep redefining their place and identities. As violence and sufferings become more common in public space, demands for recognition are voiced disclosing structural emergencies and anomie areas – all symptoms of social, cultural and economic breaching. Many recognition policies were established to respond to these demands, paradoxically producing micro-segregations (Payet, Battegay, 2008) as the different forms which socially confirm or support the individuals are thoroughly tested. Demands for recognition are indeed expressed in many different ways. Less qualified young people living in segregated neighbourhoods, the long-term unemployed, unauthorised migrants all express different demands for recognition and are more or less visible or quiet in the public space. These demands arise from social, economic and ethnical inequalities and the experience of disrespect, social domination and recognition-denial. Sociologists from Western Europe, especially France, have increasingly been led to think of collective action, social movements and riots as representing a whole n the present day societal context. The analysis of riots has been at the centre of political sociology for the last decade. In order to explain these riots, three determinants have been stressed: social causes (Beaud, Pialoux, 2006),

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injustices and racism (Lapeyronnie, 2008), and institutional violence (Oberti, Lagrange, 2006; Muchielli, 2012). The issue of urban violence has consequently appeared in French sociology. Indeed, in the 1980s, sociologists started to talk of urban violence in working-class suburbs in France where alarm situations and violence multiplied, thus making visible the sufferings, inequalities, injustices and unease of these neighbourhoods. The so-called “sensitive” neighbourhoods were and still are analysed as containing structural emergency situations, as being anomie areas in society, that is to say places where the rules of solidarity are weakening. This violence creates anguish and feelings of insecurity for the ordinary citizen, who consequently rejects the Other, marginalising and excluding him. These situations reveal the strong conflict between “ruthless” centres where everybody has “his place” and peripheries in which the absence of work, discrimination and social and psychological isolation have caused others to lose their place. Demands for justice and recognition, also constitute an increasingly important issue in China, treated through the issue of trust and feelings of injustice by Chinese sociologists. If, in European sociology, the term of “violence” has appeared relatively recently in academic language, in Chinese sociology, institutional violence and symbolic violence are very timidly conceived. But on the basis of Chinese and French sociologists, one can perceive that today’s societal violence can account for the fact that political systems, starting on very different historical trajectories, are becoming more and more separated and independent from the democratic sources of their legitimacy (Ladrière, 1992), that they increasingly discard spaces of citizenship, therefore shrinking areas of exchange and negotiation. This violence thus appears as an indicator of a crisis in society rituals, dominated by centripetal forces, that must resolve more or less profound disagreements (Rémy, 1981). Indeed, a society, taken as a whole, may very well refuse to perceive as violent some conduct that another society will consider as such; the perception of recognised violence constantly oscillates between excess and lack (Wieviorka, 1999). These are the symptoms of many social conflicts involving the breaching of the implicit rules of mutual recognition, situations in which individuals are deprived of their rights and denied the intersubjective recognition of their capacities and doings. These conflicts between normative orders arise from institutional violence, inequalities and ethnical discrimination, all of which are built up through different access to social, economic and symbolic resources. Demands for recognition can break into public space at any time as social movements, riots, rebellions (for example in workers’ neighbourhoods). In such instances, they force a redistribution of social and public recognition

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and redefine the hierarchy of identities. Conflicting normative orders produce a strong increase of demands for recognition by questioning what is “common decency” in a given society (Margalit 1999). 6

Social Conflict and Care Policies

In Western Europe, working to care for others is a growing activity in a moral economy based on micro-managing social risks. As internal boundaries become more visible, there is a process of mobilisation to help those who are stigmatised and cast out. Such work with others has to rely on moral economies in which the autonomy norm forces the weakest, poorest and most vulnerable to enter and maintain themselves in a state of competition to access social, moral and economic resources. Care and recognition policies have been implemented in such a context. Care-work is growing and taking on a central role in the production of moral economies in which caring for others is put into action though differentiated forms. In Europe, till recent years, urban social policies and integration systems have been implemented along a framework of a “new economy of social cohesion”. Different “moral entrepreneurs” (Becker, 1985) have lobbied to establish such recognition systems. These systems push and even urge individuals to over-express their experiences and subjectivities while they are required to adhere to an “autonomy discipline” (Ehrenberg, 2007). Such a normative proc­ ess shows how neo-liberal societies are implementing apparatuses aimed at harnessing and taming bodies and subjectivities. Professionals working in these fields are becoming involved in different ways in the building of harnessing processes and means of dealing with social risk situations. Social, employment and education policies are now all centred around giving a wide array of skills so that individuals can face biographic disruption and be autonomous. These policies work according to a proximity ethic based on working with and caring for others (Astier, 2007). As democratic societies must protect the most vulnerable, care policies are growing and it is now possible to describe how “care” was implemented in four stages (Tronto, 2009): caring about someone or something, caring for someone, care giving, care receiving. Paradoxically, the autonomy injunction felt in contemporary societies has lead to rising concern about caring for oneself and caring for others. Still there is a diversity in how this concern has been put to work. Institutions and organisations have a say, of course, but it mostly results from the arrangements of involvement regimes and the skills of both the professionals and the users.

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There is a whole process of translating and granting legitimacy to the experiences and skills acquired in vulnerability situations. Being able to cross internal boundaries is at stake, the possibility to go from low legitimacy social and economic spaces towards spaces of high legitimacy and high recognition. One can therefore distinguish between different forms of translation: “accurate translation”, “false translation” and “partial translation” (Roulleau-Berger, 2000). In an accurate translation, public and economic actors are involved with solidarity towards the users who accept part of the autonomy injunction. A reframing of skills is negotiated back and forth and it becomes possible to cross the boundaries towards high recognition spaces. In the false translation, public and economic actors are involved in a casual, informal, almost compassionate, way in relations laden with mistrust and misunderstandings. They do not recognise the legitimacy of experiences and skills of the vulnerable groups, who feel they are treated like problems who need to be calmed (Goffman, 1989) and are not recognised as being autonomous. Crossing boundaries towards more recognised spaces is hindered and populations are often ascribed to lowly ranked and undervalued activities. In a partial translation, public and economic actors are involved – while being reserved and distanced – in an unstable relation in which mutual recognition of skills does not run its full course. Internal boundaries may be crossed at some points, but not always. Such work with others requires mutual involvement and coordinating professionals with the vulnerable groups to ensure a mutual recognition of skills. Involvement regimes are built on the way actions are driven by all those who attend to these situations. Caring for others is a growing concern not only in European democracies but also in China, as it has always been in the Confucian tradition and in socialism. Thus, as social and economic inequalities grow and highlight new internal boundaries, caring for others in a market economy is becoming a real issue in Chinese society (Luo Hongguang, 2009). Working with others is becoming more common in China, it takes place in “neighbourhood communities” ( shequ) , in NGOs fighting against poverty or AIDS or for professional training for migrants. It is a meaningful indication of the extension of Chinese citizenship. Care appeared very clearly in the humanitarian rhetoric which expanded after the earthquake in Sichuan. Humanitarian action was quickly set up and thousands of volunteers mobilised. Internal boundaries in China do not follow the same lines as in Europe, and working for others has assumed a different, very context-dependent path. Humanitarian actions against poverty in China followed the Sichuan disaster and cannot be

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compared to what has happened in Western democracies. Faced with a new urban poverty, Chinese government is now promoting an ideology of refounded solidarity and praises the dedication and involvement of professionals and volunteers. Working with others in China is also part of a continuous state action, it is a way to manage social conflict by promoting government-supported NGOs. There is a diversity of monitoring and recognition systems which can form the basis of care-working. For example, the working unit and the residence are no longer in the same location but the “neighbourhood community” still plays a major role in maintaining public order and in supporting care-work: inhabitants organise to take care of the elderly, children and unemployed… Care policies are also on the rise, and the government is promoting solidarity as governmental and non-governmental organisations promote citizenship responsibility. An NGO created in 1996 in Beijing to help migrant women access professional education was able, in 2002, to provide legal aid for migrant women, a support network for women servants and a writers’ workshop to allow women to talk and write about their personal experiences. Public government health policies provide another illustration of this evolution towards care-work. Recently Chinese central government has started enticing those who have contracted AIDS to take a part in the struggle against the epidemic. Chinese organisations fighting against AIDS are integrating as their own the democratic demands usually linked with international aid. Some activist actors of the fight against AIDS have become well-known militant faces and play a major role in creating moral economies which are supported by systems aimed at harnessing bodies. But these organisations are still very fragile and their very existence is always questioned. These new Chinese moral economies are barely established whereas in France, for example, they have a long history, rooted in a tradition of social work. Main actors are on the frontline and their over-involvement in the public space can create difficult situations for them. New moral economies in China only exist because of the possibility of care-work through the endangering of professionals and volunteers. In both contexts, care entices individuals to adhere to an “autonomy discipline” but with a very different political meaning. In both cases, care is about producing solidarities and keeping public order but not in the same way; carework aims at reducing inequalities by bridging the gap between material economies and moral economies. Social conflict and collective action do not share the same characteristics in China and in Europe. Social conflicts also produce symbolic violence: exploitation, economic marginalisation and utter destitution (Frazer, 2005). Symbolic

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violence follows the lines of cultural domination, stigmatisation and contempt. All these forms of violence are growing in diversity while overlapping and reaching a hierarchy based on ranked inequalities, social alienation, segregations and exclusions. There is a constant interaction between them, as they overlap depending on situations and temporalities. Mobilisations and contextual collective actions can rise in reaction to these violences. These bodies of French and Chinese research which can be discussed together produce the cartography of a politics of transnational protesting in which “public contagions” are featured. They incite us to adopt another definition of the “political” “as the horizon of a coexisting, a coordination of actors existing as citizens only by the law they give themselves to share, in conflict more than in consensus, as a collective experience” (Cefaï, 2007). In sociology of action in China and Europe, micro-sociologies of public engagement and collective action have progressively been developed in which the dramatic dimension of action is advanced so as to understand that collectives emerge as organisations whose construction is in progress. In China, new generations of sociologists use a sociology of emotions to deal with their cognitive range and their practical rationality and with rituals of political life in an authoritarian context in which spaces of social emancipation hardly appear.

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Chapter 8

Ecological Risks and Environmental Sociology in Europe and China1 In a global context of ecological risks, environmental sociology is now highly developed in both Europe and China. An increasingly important place is given to new risks: health, food, flooding, drought, environmental and ecological disasters such as climate change and pollution (fumes, effluent, organic and chemical waste etc.. New ecological risks produce uncertain situations, new inequalities, new solidarities and new public spaces in both Europe and Asia. Risks and disasters are social constructions rather than natural events striking societies from the outside; and, as such, they are caused by social and economic vulnerabilities. Although we should not confuse risk society and catastrophe society, we can observe some quite similar processes affecting social vulnerability, inequalities and individual and collective capabilities. For Chinese sociologists, social inequality and natural inequality are fusing into “compressed modernities” (Han Sang Jin, 2010; Chang, 2010) linked to spatial and historical processes of urban ecological change. Natural catastrophes especially reflect the social vulnerability of certain countries and social groups; disaster is to be understood as a specific moment within social and societal processes and will be viewed as a socio-historical process of production and distribution of social fragility. In both Europe and Asia, although urban ecologies assume the presence of multiple and different representations of the nature-urban culture interface, these same urban ecologies may also be studied for inequalities and environmental injustice, multi-governance and bio-political order, regimes of action and the citizen’s competencies, and collective mobilisations. In each place it is impossible to consider ecological risks and disasters as being solely local; quite the opposite, we have to realise that a very deep and active process of dislocation is present everywhere in each country. Although the political, economic and social organisation might shatter, we should nevertheless consider that societies are always more or less unstable. Disaster is thus a matter of degree, the point at which fragile social equilibrium makes way for stringent turmoil within societies, and at which the social and political ability 1 This chapter is a modified version of the introduction of Laurence Roulleau-Berger Ecological risks and disasters. New experiences in China and in Europe. Edited by Li, Peilin, RoulleauBerger, L. New York: Routledge Publishers, 2016.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/9789004309982_010

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to control these continuous processes of dislocation is badly altered by this tremendous shock. Since they produce paroxysmal figures of physical and social destruction, ecological disasters for Chinese sociologists also open up spaces for new figures of social restoration and for new processes of reconstruction of societies, and regimes of action. 1

Social-ecological Change, Inequalities and Environmental Injustice

Environmental sociology began in the 1980s and 1990s with the emergence of environmental problems. In Europe, the reflexive modernisation theories of Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck inspired the notion of ecological modernisation which may be defined by Arthur P.J. Mol, Gert Spaargaren and David A. Sonnenfeld (Mol, Spaargaren, 2000; Mol Sonnnefeld, 2000) as “the social scientific interpretation of environmental processes at multiple scales in the contemporary world”. This signifies analysing how various institutions and social actors deal with the environment and the crisis of trust especially in the field of sustainable consumption and disaster contexts (Oosterveer, 2007). Over the last thirty years, we have been confronted with ecological irreversibilities in capitalist societies as well as a de-synchronisation between social activities, places of decision-making and collective action (Faburel, 2012); on the one hand a renewed conception of the environment is more and more “fractal” and active, on the other hand the environment involves citizens in new experiences of unequal situations. In the 1970s and 1980s, research in the social sciences and humanities was devoted primarily to major technological and natural risks. The hidden side of risk proposes the articulation of what happens in “discrete spaces” and what appears spectacular in public and political space (Gilbert and Henry, 2012). Thus, political modernisation was used to conceptualise the multiplicity of actors, multi-level governance and contribute to the understanding of environmental policymaking (van Tatenhove, Arts, Leroy; 2000, van Tatenhove, Pieter 2003). Risks are not uniformly distributed throughout a given space, Valérie November (2008) has distinguished: “spaces of accumulated risks” in which several different categories of risk can be found, “places of risk transfer”, “spatial differentiation” and “temporal differentiation” in the sense that some risks take a long time to identify while others can be identified immediately. In both European and Chinese environmental sociology the concepts of knowledge, risk perception, acceptance and public attitudes are still central. He Guangxi, Zhao Yandong, Zhang Wen-Xia and Xue Pin (2014) demonstrate that the degree of people’s acceptance of GMF is influenced by knowledge

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(government, experts (scientists) and mass media); they consider that the application of a new technology leads to a potential “manufactured risk” producing “constructive risks” and “subjective risks”. These authors explain that, faced with a new technology such as transgenic technology, individuals can only make a “bounded rational choice” due to their limited knowledge. Guo Yuhua (2004) has introduced a specific and very pertinent Chinese concept “knowledge power” to define political and scientific authority and the interplay between new internet-based media and traditional media. Employing “knowledge power” is a way of dealing with the social construction of trust and distrust. Chinese sociologists also deal with environmental inequalities in emphasising the issue of the reconstruction of trust, especially in post-disaster contexts; for them distrust, more fundamentally, is one of the great challenges in Chinese society. Zhao Yandong and Shi Changhui (2015), distinguish:

• Interpersonal trust including the trust in both acquaintances and strangers • Institutional trust including the trust in both governments and social institutions

These authors consider that institutional trust is the key to the maintenance of the social system and individuals’ “ontological security”. They demonstrate how interpersonal trust and institutional trust produce a social trust structure as a dynamic, unstable and reversible process in which different kinds of trusts change before, during and after the disaster. To understand this process, scholars propose an analysis of the trust among affected people, the trust between the affected people and government (Chen, Yunsong ; Bian, Yanjie. 2015), the trust between government and NGOs and the trust between affected people and NGOs (Luo Jiade, Sun Yu, 2013). Communities with higher levels of trust will recover more rapidly and better, which means that the variations of degrees of trust will influence the process of recreating society after a disaster. Social participation, the performance of government and institutions, norms and values as well as personality are defined as social determinants of trust. Chinese sociologists consider trust as a social and political process which influences normative orders and individual identities in risk or disaster societies (He Guangxi, Shi Changhui., Zhang Wenxia, Ma Ying, Zhao Yandong, 2012 ; Shen Hong, Sun Xueping, Su Jun, 2012 ; Su Guiwu and alii.,, 2013). More recently the concept of environmental justice, which emerged in the United States in the 1980s when African American, Latino and Native American communities protested against environmental racism (Bullard, 1993), has become increasingly central (Nygren, 2014) in European sociology

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of environment. If in academic and activist literature “environmental justice” refers to inequalities in the spatial distribution of risks, some authors propose that we should consider the interaction between environmental justice and vulnerability (Walker, 2009), along socially structured lines (Oliver-Smith, 2014). The issue of environmental inequalities used to be invisible in social theory but has emerged in a reflection aiming to capture the interpenetration or inseparability of the social and the natural-co-evolution, co-constitution, methodological symmetry, etc (Lockie, Sonnefeld, Dan R. Fischer, 2014). Facing new ecological risks or disasters reveals the maintaining of previous inequalities, the production of new ones and the breaking away from previous ones. European and Chinese sociologists are revising the way of defining inequalities and to conceive their plurality around social and ecological change; they are using the theory of Susan Fainstein (2010) who has defined The Just City around the principles of equity, diversity, and democracy. Individuals and social groups compete for material and social goods. They produce new social and economic frontiers, new social and moral orders in which individuals and groups have to occupy new positions and statuses. We have observed intersectionality and fractality between different inequalities: economic, social, ethnic, moral, cultural and environmental inequalities. Environmental inequalities and injustices could generate a new perspective for both social and spatial justice referring to a “global right to the city” (Purcell, 2003): the right to the appropriation and production of urban space on ecological scales and in historical places (Faburel, 2012), the capability to create participative governmentality (Sennett, 2003), the political and moral connections between inhabitance, social provision and social justice (Ong, 1999) within a cosmo-political perspective. Chinese sociologists and anthropologists (Luo Hongguang and Liu Zhengai, 2015), simultaneously take into consideration structural inequalities and community reconstruction, the recreation of society, the “emergency rescue” and “recovery”. They articulate social structures in pre- and post-disaster situations with cultural creativity; they have studied in a post-disaster context the continuity of traditional social support networks after a disaster as well as new social relations, the issue of subjectivity and the role of folk religious practices (Liu Zhenghai, 2009) and changes of meaning in labour spaces and life spaces (Zhao Yandong, 2007). Xun Lili (2008) examines the change of resource use patterns within a historical framework emphasising changes in the interactions among social, economic, political, and environmental factors; she then indicates the social causes of drought risk and explains the forming of vulnerability in social contexts. Following on from the theory of Nancy Frazer (2005) and integrating the notion of environmental injustice, we see how environmental injustice and

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socio-economic injustice – as destitution or marginalisation – and social injustice combine and how institutions construct grammars of contempt (Roulleau-Berger, 2007a) out of ordeals of environmental, economic, social and moral injustice. These grammars of contempt for environmental injustice multiply into plural forms according to societal contexts – climatic, political and cultural – according to cultural and religious traditions and institutional orders. Reproduction theories and theories of transformation could be combined to understand the complexity of the social construction of risks and disasters. If, according to Ulrich Beck (2013), reproduction theories (Atkinson, 2007; Bourdieu, 1979) produce a “narrative of continuity” concerning the unequal distributions of goods and miss the cosmo-politicisation of the poor, their multi-ethnic, multi-religious, transnational life-forms and identities, we have nevertheless combined critical sociology and pragmatist sociology (Boltanski, 2010) to apprehend the continuities and discontinuities in the reproduction and production of social inequalities in local and global risk societies (Roulleau-Berger, 2015). 2

Risks, Multi-governance and Bio-political Order

How are states and institutions, individuals and social groups involved in risk management when they are confronted with health, food or flood risks, climate change or ecological disasters? How are new forms of citizenship emerging in the assemblages of institutional actors, individuals and social groups? The differences between the various institutional paths taken for risk management in the past, the different roles of citizens are discussed; the model of path dependent development caused by new urban activities, the responsibility of the State and the construction of public knowledge are more pregnant (Meijerink, Huitema, 2008). For Li Peilin and Wang Xiaoyi (2016) in a context of an “ecological civilisation construction” multi-governance is constructed around ecological migration organised by local and central governments. New migrant communities are close to cities with convenient transportation and a smooth flow of information, enjoy better public services and human intervention; it means migrants are involved in public affairs and a major change in their social interactions. In Europe the emergence of institutional arenas is produced by the involvement of plural local, national and international actors who struggle to develop governance patterns while facing situations of extreme uncertainty. Within a broader perspective, the forming of emergent “public arenas” raises the issue of their democratic nature, as assessed by the modes of participation and the

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nature of democratic processes involved in the reconstruction period. In uncertain and risky contexts the status of controversies about environmental and health risks is decisive in the forming of “public arenas”. The issue of whistle-blowers has become a specific public problem (Chateauraynaud, Torny, 1999). New horizons of coexistence and coordination unfold and public arenas are opened by different types of institutional actors involved in a process of restoration and re-fabrication of public orders. Public orders are redefined with practical arrangements between institutional actors and local populations; we analyse the conditions for reproducing uncertainties and ignorance of risks (Gramaglia, 2008): for example, pollution noxiousness, on the one hand, has been actively negated by industrialists and elected representatives who maintain a high degree of confusion, and, on the other hand, has provoked among citizens strategies to distance themselves from risks. But public orders are also reconfigured in disjunction and rupture between institutional actors and local populations. For example in China centralisation of state power in the decision-making process of water resources development ignored the interests and discourse rights of the local community, the local herders and farmers lost the right to use natural resources in this process; this intensifies the trend of local ecological deterioration, people from the grass-root level of local community have become those who obtain the least benefit but suffer most injury (Xun Lili, 2015). The process of emergence of “public arenas” and of different commitment regimes pertains to distinct institutional actors, their forms of mobilisation and coordination to produce “interactional citizenship” (Colomy and Brown 1996) and forms of acknowledgment of human suffering. As a result, new and old forms of social coordination are embedded and dissociated in a diversity of institutional and non-institutional places while individual and collective actors are faced with the huge task of confronting the ordeal. This takes a central role in the production of moral economies, when, in times of great emergency, caring for Others is put into action through differentiated forms. Moral boundaries are constructed between the different categories of institutional actors and the populations which produce the situated competences based on the mobilisation, selection and aggregation of resources within differentiated repertories of norms (Swidler, 2001) linked to the recognition of the ordeal of the victims. Regimes of action – equity, peace or abandonment of the victims, or abdication of institutional actors – in risky or post-disaster contexts never exist in the pure state or statically. According to the times, places and political and economic configurations, institutional actors pass from one regime to another but do so according to the competences and regimes of action of the victims.

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In China the “voice” of populations can be heard in the complaints offices in which the ordeals and injustices confronted by citizens are made public. These bodies have no equivalent in Europe. Chinese populations can also be taken care of within the framework of government associations. Disasters produce collective and individual traumas, as humans, towns and places are engulfed in earthquakes and tsunamis… Collective life, social ties, social agreements, social contracts need to be reconstructed and social groups have to rebuild moral conventions and norms in a new context in order to make sense of the emergent society they live in. Social groups are traumatised in their collective existence and “moral entrepreneurs” (Becker, 1963) are involved in care-work to redefine frontiers of collective identities. In risk societies the moral economies in European and Chinese contexts produce highly marked inequalities in the access to self-government yet the processes producing these inequalities remain situated in and linked to specific political, historical and cultural trajectories. 3

Geographies of Care and Communities of Destiny

In disaster situations, how are “humanitarian governments” (Fassin, 2010) set up? The care geographies produce new social inequalities; social, economic and symbolic resources influence a “division of labour” between care giving and care receiving. Thus, we should consider two extreme tendencies: those who are less endowed with economic, social and symbolic resources tend to receive new moral and material capital and those who are most endowed with economic, social and symbolic resources give. In this respect, the care economy reveals social divisions internal to moral economies, and sustains new forms of social autonomy and domination. Disasters, earthquakes and tsunamis provoke disruptions in normative, social and moral frameworks. Initially, in emergency situations, individuals develop collective competences in order to face the catastrophe through relationships of proximity, co-operation, mobilisation and public support. The work of aligning commitments ensures the partial re-emergence of the precatastrophe normative, social and moral frameworks which will appear to be transformed and will produce forms of agreement, alliance and exchange between different categories of actors which did not necessarily “see eye to eye” before the disaster. Finally, humanitarian governments can be defined firstly as national and local and also in some cases international. They are materially manifested in the organisation of assistance, the installation of tents for temporary housing, the distribution of water and meals, the

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implementation of medical assistance, the re-establishment of circuits of communication, information, transport… In the geographies of care social hierarchies and positions momentarily disappear to the advantage of mutual aid and rescue operations during the earthquake. They reveal how, in a disaster situation, individuals create unusual relationships which spontaneously produce previously unknown forms of mobilisation. In China “communities of destiny” (Pollak, 1998; Barbot, Dodier, 2010) are formed in disaster situations, communities which produce ways of beingtogether which will continue during the process of reconstructing the towns and villages. In different geographical and political contexts, these “communities of destiny” form upon the basis of the ordeals of life and shared norms for the reconstruction of a shared world. Facing bereavement and visiting tombs are strong components in the definition of these communities of destiny. However communities of destiny are formed from social links upon which the political and religious context and the local cultures have a partial effect. 4

Conciliation, Negotiation and Disputes

These moral economies combine using different modes according to the overall contexts and the places and contexts of the situations of conciliation, negotiation, dispute and exit. Ecological risk situations pose a fundamental question: who is the owner of the social problems which follow disasters? Several answers are constructed around disputed meanings, answers which are based upon profane knowledge and expert knowledge in the management of ecological-disaster-linked social problems. This gives rise to different schematic figures between institutions and citizens within different contexts based upon the regimes of action which combine differently according to overall contexts, places and the contexts of the situations of conciliation, negotiation and dispute between institutional actors and victims (Roulleau-Berger, 2016). In the schematic figure of conciliation institutional actors function more within the regime of equity and victims within the mode of complaint or consent. Institutions and citizens are in agreement about the necessity of reciprocal recognition of profane knowledge and expert knowledge in the management of ecological life. The closer the proximity in social position of the citizens and the experts becomes, the more rapidly the schematic figure of agreement is constructed; the more it is distant, the more it imposes an effort of mutual commitment which favours the alignment of the commitments of the institutional actors towards the citizens and that of the citizens

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towards the institutional actors. In this case, institutions and citizens all appear to be owners of the social problems and appear to act together to produce answers. In the schematic figure of negotiation the institutional actors function more within the regime of equity and the victims in the mode of complaint, consent or even indignation. Institutions and citizens debate the legitimisation of profane knowledge in the understanding of ecological and post-disaster situations as well as expert knowledge which imposes the definition of shared norms. In this case also the proximity of social positions has a bearing upon the capacities to define shared frameworks of experience: the negotiation competences arise from shared knowledge about the disasters gained by similar experiences lived through in different modes. In the schematic figure of dispute the institutional actors function more according to the “regime of peace” and the victims in the mode of indignation. In this case there is conflict around the significations attributed to the ecological-disaster-linked social problems. The possessors of profane knowledge consider themselves competent in the understanding of the ecological and post-disaster situations and do not recognize the possessors of expert knowledge and vice versa. Conflicts arise out of the processes of requesting the legitimisation of profane knowledge and the over-legitimisation of expert knowledge. In this case the institutions appear to be the owners of the social problems and so the citizens fight to win the case and to appear to be the owners of these social problems. In the schematic figure of suspicion the institutional actors function more according to the regime of scorn and the victims in the mode of complaint or indignation. Suspicion is constructed out of the mistrust of the citizens regarding institutions which do not consider them as having know-how and knowledge likely to manage ecological-disaster-linked social problems (Zhao Yandong, Shi Changhui, 2015). Suspicion is also based upon the non-consideration even the scorn of institutions regarding victims. In Europa and in China this schematic figure of suspicion appears to be very present and gives rise to fears and worries concerning a future which seems uncertain. In this case the institutions appear to be the owners of the disaster-linked social problems and the citizens appear to be non-owners. There is thus no collective capacity to find shared answers. Finally, in the schematic figure of exit, which manifests itself in this case in ecological migrations, the citizens’ knowledge becomes invisible in the population displacements thus depriving the institutions of bridgeheads from which to revise local and national policies. These schematic figures all cohabit in China and in Europe however, according to the situations, one schematic figure will dominate another in different places, situations temporalities and configurations.

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Regimes of Action, Capabilities and Re-socialisation

Individual and collective capabilities can either reinforce or compensate for inequalities depending on the choices made when facing a given risk. This signifies the mobilisation of economic, social, symbolic and cultural resources to produce regimes of action. Citizens facing risks and post-disaster consequences develop economies of political judgement by producing regimes of action from the responses of the institutions managing the post-disaster situation; these regimes of action of the victims mark out other moral boundaries linked to citizen spaces which arise out of silence, complaint, consent, indignation or the distantiation of institutions ( Roulleau-Berger, 2015) According to the times, places and political and economic configurations, the citizens pass from one regime to another and do so according to the competences and regimes of action of the institutional actors. In China regimes of action are quite different in urban and rural environments. Institutions play an important role in maintaining and supporting the mobility of pastoral communities in different ways. In Asia (Chen, Sugiman, 2010), at each encounter with a large-scale disaster, citizens learn something new and adapt themselves to a similar disaster. Adaptive learning means re-socialisation and the production of new identities. Individuals have no choice but to be involved in the recreation of Society. The recreation of society could mean maintaining previous forms of socialisation, inventing new ones, breaking with previous ones or finding compromises between previous and present social, economic and moral forms. Social groups are unequal in the process of recreating society. When confronted with different types of risks or disasters, individuals have to develop capabilities within a re-socialisation process. Some scholars have defined different kind of capabilities: change of living space, change of living mode, restoration of traditional resources, cooperation with local government, reconstruction of trust, the production of folk religious practices… (Luo Hongguang and Liu Zhenghai 2015). And because of ecological migration, for example after the Sichuan earthquake, mountain villagers have become migrants and have had to redefine their social relationships, to adapt themselves to a new working space, new labour content, new labour composition and recover a labour routine. But if capabilities mean being able to mobilize social, economic and symbolic resources in different situations, some populations are producing capabilities to face risks and disasters; the poorest are loosing resources and competences to produce capabilities. Li Peilin and Wang Xiaoyi (2015) have shown how – because of the unbalanced distribution of natural resources – ecological migration in Ningxia plays an active role in the improvement of a situation of poverty and the restoration of a fragile ecological environment. On the one

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hand ecological migrants have recovered an economic life and, on the other hand, they have lost social capital and knowledge; if migrants initially possessed small areas of land, then they have to adapt their farming practices to intensive agriculture, they also have to struggle to obtain social recognition in new communities In the production of “interactional citizenship” ( Ong, 1999) and forms of acknowledgment of human suffering, new and old forms of social coordination are embedded and dissociated in a diversity of institutional and non-institutional places, as individual and collective actors are faced with the huge task in hand. A moral economy emerges out of disaster when people develop a collective interpretation of the quake and develop collective capabilities with the revitalisation of traditional values (Bastide, 2015). From the perspective of the social embedding of natural disasters, the disaster is more or less integrated and socialised as an expected event within the course of collective and/or individual life. Individuals’ psychological lives and subjectivities are partially or totally fragmented. Ruptures between their lives before and after the disaster may produce gaps within identities but individuals are also able to develop capabilities. For social groups and individuals the question of the production of a collective memory also becomes vital in the process of the reconstruction of individual and collective identities. Concerning present day East Asia, Ulrich Beck (2013) spoke of a cosmopolitan risk community (or “Cosmo-Climate”). He distinguished “cosmopolitan empathy” and the subpolitics of “cosmopolitanism from below”. Furthermore, in Europe, a new moral economy – with the humanitarian reason, so to speak, as its heart – was constituted during the last decades of the 20th century to produce humanitarian governments (Fassin, 2010) for “weak” actors, as well as the “poor”, individuals in precarious situations, migrants… Does the humanitarian reason occupy the same place in the moral order of European and Chinese societies? If, since 1990, numerous research studies in Europe have been produced dealing with ordeals, exclusion, poverty, complaints, etc, this is not the case in China. If in Europe one can speak of the entry of suffering and compassion into politics linked to Christian history, one can say that the positioning of moral sentiments has emerged in the public space for only a few years in China with the emergence of the issues of social justice and the struggle for recognition.

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Introduction to Part 3

In this the third and final part of this work we will employ the intervals and proximities between European and Chinese sociologies to co-produce a PostWestern space. This means examining those forms of knowledge that appear to be specific, those that seem to be the product of re-appropriation, reinterpretation, borrowing and hybridisation and those that seem to be have been produced in areas of non-translatability, that is in spaces in which research practices and sociological knowledge in Europe and Asia do or not correspond to each other. Thus, in this part, we deal with the continuities and discontinuities of sociological knowledge, the singular and common concepts of major theoretical issues in European and Chinese sociologies.

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Continuities of Knowledge and Common Concepts In this chapter, we deal with the continuities of sociological knowledge and common concepts of major theoretical issues in European and Chinese sociologies. This approach while not exhaustive is rather eloquent regarding what remains of common knowledge. We have identified the following topics as illustrations of shared theoretical spaces: structural processes, dominations and resistances; social stratification and inequalities; mobility and contemporary societies; social network and social capital; autonomy and subjectivity; boundaries of we and me. 1

Structural Processes, Dominations and Resistances

The issue of domination processes in contemporary societies remains a fundamental issue in sociology around the world. Whilst in French sociology the issue of domination refers to inequalities, in Chinese sociology it tends also to refer to power. In French sociology, although domination was mainly dealt with by the Pierre Bourdieu and his followers, it is today present in various theoretical approaches but with a status which can vary according to trend. It is thought of as singular in structuralist-functionalist paradigms and as plural in constructivist and interactionnist paradigms. In a context in which inequalities, wage insecurities and moral insecurities increasingly combine, domination is increasingly conceived as being plural. Dubet (2009) advances that polarity spreads in a multiplicity of registers corresponding to courses of action such as social control, the distribution of resources, and cultural representations of the Subject which develop in school life, work life, and urban life ... This author believes that domination mechanisms dilute, diffract, and reconstruct themselves. We thus understand plural dominations through experiences and individual and collective ordeals in order to report on modes of organisation between social structures and individuals, between constraints and capacities for action. Danilo Martuccelli (2004, 2006) purposed two analytical approaches: in the first one forms of domination that are perceived more and more openly as insurmountable constraints; in the second one he considers paradoxical expressions of domination, where domination is maintained through strange types of critical consent. So in combining

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these two theoritical lines this author distinguished four main ideal-typical experiences of domination: inculcation, implosion, injunction, devolution. In French sociology, while it is no longer possible to consider the issue of domination as being singular, which would presuppose the existence of a unified social system, we are largely invited to think about plural dominations: both ordinary (Martuccelli, 2001) and less ordinary, both visible and less visible. Moreover, ethnic, social, and economic dominations must be distinguished from each other. They develop both on a vertical axis by following hierarchical orders and on a horizontal axis by following the dynamics which block or maintain access to recognised “places” in the social space. Modes of domination which can be qualified as complexes are always associated with the sustainable maintenance of one or multiple profound asymmetries (Boltanski, 2009). They diversify by building on the processes linking them through convergent effects between actors distributed in space, exercising varied activities, and occupying various positions compared to institutional authorities. On a horizontal level these modes of domination can be linked in a continuous and discontinuous mode. For example, new global “elites” rely on these processes originating in actions that are sometimes linked and sometimes disjointed. These modes of domination are organised upon networks that crisscross social, economic, and cultural spaces at a local and global level. Domination is increasingly represented as not having a central place. Moreover, we have used the term reticular dominations to define dominations which are built in arrangements between places, temporalities, and situations and produce multi-situated inequalities at a local and global level (Roulleau-Berger, 2010). While dominations multiply and diversify, resistances follow the same movement and appear visible, less visible, uncertain, reticular. Therefore, since we speak about the plurality of dominations we will also discuss the plurality of resistances. We have to distinguish individual and collective resistances and which depend on the repertory of economic, social and moral resources. The conception of the simultaneous coexistence of dominations and resistances was explored in France through works on individual and collective mobilisations in working class French suburbs (Kokoreff, 2003; Laé, Murard, 1985). In this research, populations in precarious situations confronted with unemployment, segregation, and discrimination are seen to develop economic, social, and cultural resistance strategies through a “collective intelligence” and reflexive competencies (Roulleau-Berger, 1991). In European sociology, we consider that each group has relative autonomy and that the “weak” groups are capable of making their voices heard by the stronger groups through the use of relationships of conflict, combat and distantiation as well as relationships of negotiation and exchange. When individuals,

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especially the most disqualified, appear autonomous, they act without being compelled by others and, above all, they develop competences for action and can transform established normative orders. However these autonomies and competences are never stabilised and are incessantly subjected to redefinition according to situations, temporalities and societal contexts. This therefore raises the issue of the redefinition of moral boundaries. Thus dominated and restrained individuals, that is the “weakest”, use scattered creativities and asymmetric tactics against the “strongest”. They build social, economic and political micro-organisations by gathering material, that is, social and symbolic resources, by means of the production of shared norms through struggles for social and public recognition. The abilities and reflexivity of individuals are claimed by different groups and reviewed in public space, enabling these groups to shift from individual abilities to societal abilities (Ricoeur, 2004) in resilience spaces where one struggles for moral, economic and social recognition, where individual and collective involvements are reworked by distancing them from economic, social and political domestication spaces. The notion of resilience spaces allow us to think the empowerment of active minorities and populations previously rendered invisible; they can claim self-government as well as develop abilities which are both social and societal and which will allow them to re-conquer and re-take their subjectivities. This need to consider the simultaneity of processes of domination and resistance has imposed the idea of combining effects of social constraint and the forces which weigh on individuals and collectives. Moreover, it requires creativity and interpretive capacities to be considered; from Boltanksi’s (2009) work onwards, more and more sociologists have increasingly considered that the organisation of social worlds is anchored in the activities of competent actors, situated in time and space, and makes use of rules and resources in a diversity of contexts of constraint and action. The reflexive capacity of individuals is bound in situations of interaction and various contexts of everyday social activity. Individuals have a capacity for daily self-reflexivity which operates partly at a discursive level (Giddens, 1987). Today individuals are considered as being more capable of understanding what they are doing whilst they are doing it. Their competencies structure social life and vice versa. In a period in which structuralist-functionalist thought has weakened, European sociologists increasingly consider the way in which individuals, in the incessant work which they do to create meaning, produce norms and conventions. As co-producers of the social worlds that they live in and traverse, they always have a capacity to interpret and invent roles in various situations. An individual’s competency has been defined as his/her capacity to recognise the plurality of normative fields and to identify their respective contents, the ability to identify

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the characteristics of a situation, and the power to slip into the tiny gaps that the universe of norms leaves between them (Lepetit, 1995). The actor is inscribed and inscribes him/herself in a diversity of spaces and temporalities, competency asserting itself in the capacity to use repertories of various roles and to combine experiences and resources of different natures in a more or less original way. When did we test the limits of the concept of habitus defined by Pierre Bourdieu in French sociology? Why did we promote the concept of resources and not that of capital or habitus to reflect upon the simultaneity of dominations and resistances? We began to take a certain theoretical distance when we wanted to note that subaltern groups were capable of producing “weapons of the weak”. Michael Pollak (1990) responded as follows: Certain concepts that were forged to take into account the link between psychic and social, between the individual and the collective, as much in sociology as in social psychology, came from analysing processes and phe­ nomena endowed with a relatively high degree of stability. This applies to literature on socialisation, to the concepts of habitus and capital, which essentially study the reciprocal adjustment between individual tendencies and social structure. These conceptualisations in no way exclude studying times of crisis, or phenomena of imbalance and transition from one state to another. All the same, too global and too attached to the conception of the unity of the person, they do not necessarily facilitate the analysis of extreme situations, different from standard transition crises, and which return the individual to improvisation, to trickery, to spontaneously decoding unforeseen and uncertain situations (L’expé­rience concentrationnaire, page 190). From the moment that European, and particularly French, sociologists started to work on phenomena of unemployment, precariousness, poverty, and migration, a majority of them backed Michael Pollak’s position. In the Chinese context, sociologists are introducing the issue of domination in an approach in which social domination is anchored in social structures and social relations of production. Sociologists place an emphasis on class domination which appears to be violently produced in a context of augmentation that is always greater than social inequalities. Here political power, economic power, and domination merge. Regimes of social domination are also regimes of social control. In Chinese sociology researchers also explore political domination which is not thought of as continued and permanent between

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ordinary situations in civilian life and the State. The State forms and informs policy frameworks and practical processes in civilian life in collaboration with other local and contextual elements. Political and symbolic power is thought of as exercised through “situation constructions” and “situation constraints” knowing that, in each situation, members reconstruct the meaning and the modalities of their actions (Guo Yuhua, Sun Liping, 2002). Thus the complexity between “strong” and “weak”, the resistance capacities of workers, unemployed youth, and peasants over and above large collective movements, is seized on. Daily individuals faced with a strong State here use adaptive strategies which rely on the guanxis and thus produce spaces of social resistance. The reflexive capacity of individuals is thought of as engaged in situations of interaction and various contexts of everyday social activity. In China, the works of Scott (1990) were heavily promoted for working on daily forms of peasant resistance, these occult discourses or occult practices (hidden transcripts) which express ways of revolting against situations of contempt, humiliation, and disrepute. However, they also resemble the ideas of M. De Certeau (1980) that were promoted when he spoke of the “arts of the weak”, meaning the ordinary practices – more tactical than strategic – the dominated employ to adjust to their circumstances. Some Chinese sociologists focus on the way the dominated produce speech (Guo Yuhua, 2012; Liu Neng, 2009b) in an authoritarian context in which forms of collective mobilisation and “public discourses” of revolt are not authorised. In their way of thinking about power, Chinese sociologists also emphasise forms of domination linked to economic exploitation and lack of rights; they briefly take individual experiences and ordeals into consideration whilst dealing with collective ordeals. While the emergence of the Subject is inherent in certain modern Western regimes it is also known that the democratic contexts of Western Europe can favour individual or collective capacities to fight against domination whereas authoritarian systems produce allocated places, roles, and statuses. In both China and Europe, individuals – often unemployed people, precarious workers, migrant workers, etc. – are assigned to places in areas of low legitimacy and low integrative socialisation; they are confronted with situations of high unpredictability and social insecurity and take up the “weapons of the weak” (Scott, 2008; Sun Liping and Guo Yuhua, 2002) to develop techniques of self-government, strategies of local and global economies of survival and resistance. These individuals and groups develop strategies and tactics for the re-appropriation of their identities to escape from governances of the selves. They develop moral economies of resistance in intermediate, interstitial, discrete spaces (Roulleau-Berger, 2007). For example She Xiaoye (2008) shows how peasants adopt “tenacious weapons” of non-confrontational resistance

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and develop strategies for coping with the various pressures from local nonagricultural processes, the violence of urbanisation, local developmental imperatives and privatisation. This author has analysed the circumstances in which farmers undertake regular dispersed daily protests, organise collective action. Peasants adopt a form of resistance that is non-confrontational but they use collective power to publicise their concerns and gain legitimacy for their actions. In their grassroots practices farmers are constrained to build a moderate grassroots political space and to delineate the boundaries of government power. She Xiaoye has used Scott’s theory to understand the relationship between the informal and formal systems. Dong Haijun(2008, 2011) has shown how, on an every day basis, peasants with “weak identities” produce “subaltern politics” to defend their rights, protest against situations of social injustice and develop a survival ethic. The “weak identity” is defined as a moral resource which peasants are able to mobilize with medias, to produce social power and enjoy institutional or policy asylum. Dong Haijun used the concepts of the sense of social justice and survival ethics to understand the peasants’ capabilities to produce moral economies of resistance in Chinese society. Some researchers, including Lu Dewen (2012), have shown how using the “weapons of the weak” could lead to extreme situations such as self-immolation, a phenomenon that had not previously been seen in China when peasants tried to stop the demolition of their houses and various collective actions such as petitions failed. Lü Dewen has improved the concept of “weapons of the weak” considering that they are parochial, local-specific and bifurcated. He also considers self-immolation as a cosmopolitan, modular and autonomous social event. In France, François Dubet (2009) has challenged the idea that social domination could be conceived as a group of forces exterior to the self, exterior to one’s intentions and interactions. For Chinese sociologists the general tendency is to consider whether power remains exterior to individuals to some extent because it is largely concentrated at the State level and identified by domination. As much as in European democracies domination can be defined as not having a central place, in China it can be considered that there is a centre and peripheral areas in terms of power. Similarly while domination cannot be reduced to social inequalities in Western Europe, it can in China. In both contexts, sociologists reflect on dominations and resistances utilising moral economies, and mainly converge in their consideration of the status of moral economies in societies inhabited by strong fights for public and social recognition. In both contexts, the drawings of moral boundaries are distinct. Drawing moral boundaries is a way of confronting the new social conflicts which can occur at any time along these boundaries, in both Chinese and

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European societies. Moral boundaries are seen as places of crystallisation of alliances and conflicts between different social groups. At the individual level, constraints, dominations and action mean more loss of self. Moral boundaries appear as crossing points, but also, places of domination, social conflict and competition for access to moral goods and places of access to self-government. In European and Chinese societies today, dominations produce a visibility of new moral boundaries that signifies assignments, separations, and stigmatisation. 2

Social Stratification and Inequalities

European sociologists agree that Europe has left industrial capitalism (Beck, 1992) and entered a new regime of capitalism in which labour societies have been truly transformed by a reinforcement in the inequalities of social positions. Individuals with the most goods and resources have declined in numbers and the least affluent have become more numerous and decreasingly sheltered by the protection system. Mass unemployment, job insecurity, and the decline and recomposition of institutions demonstrate that in the contemporary age actors are constantly obliged to redefine their place and identity in uncertain contexts. Social, economic, and ethnic inequalities incessantly multiply with new forms of exploitation linked to the flexibility of work, forms of distancing and stigmatisation – even destitution – of “the weakest”. In France, Robert Castel (1995) has examined social polarisation defining three zones of social cohesion in French society: the integration zone characterised by the solid stable-insertion relational association; the disaffiliation zone where absence of participation in any productive activity and relational isolation meet; and the increasingly broad vulnerability zone which combines job insecurity with the fragility of nearby supports. Robert Castel did not consider the existence of the included and the excluded, but rather a continuum which stretches from the disaffiliation zone to that of professional integration on which the “fight for places” is organised (de Gaulejac and Taboada-Leonetti, 1994). Like Robert Castel, in China Sun Liping seems to consider that it is not within socalled “excluded” populations that a unit is formed but outside of them, in global social perception. While these two theories overlap without completely meeting each other due to the different societal contexts, they both revolve around a society’s tolerance threshold for social invalidation. Compared to European societies, inequalities in China are seen as inscribed in a context of political and economic transition. However, before the reforms, inequalities between social classes were less pronounced with the evolution

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of class positions influenced by State policy. Since the reforms, demarcation lines have appeared between the different social classes, new social classes have formed and levels of social stratification have become clearly visible. That being said, pre-1978 economic elites in rural areas have an elite position in contemporary China (Wu Yuxiao, 2011). The issue of social stratification has always been central to sociology. For Chinese sociologists, it cannot be dissociated from the issue of the market economy. Since the economic reforms, Chinese society has become increasingly stratified and with growing diversification in terms of the constitution of socio-occupational categories. Socio­logists at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (Beijing) have identified 10 social categories that can be allocated to one of four social classes (Lu Xueyi, 2001; Li Peilin, 2002; Li Chunling, 2005): the upper, middle and working classes and individuals who are economically inactive, unemployed or on short time. This emphasises how the social structure has become more complex, social groups more differentiated, social trajectories more diverse and access to social mobility unequal. Income inequalities between the various social classes are widening. Sun Liping (2003) advances the notion of the “fractured society”, emphasising the speed of the process of social polarisation that has developed over the last ten years. Thus the structure of Chinese society has changed radically since the economic reforms began. The new underclass which is being formed in China is mainly made up of migrant workers who, following upward mobilities in urban areas, have encountered a succession of downward mobilities. In a society in the midst of great transformations, dominant forms of integration pass through inscription in a market economy, where a section of the population is economically and socially disconnected. Li Lulu (2008) described the double social reproduction process arising out of power instituted by the State and institutions, on the one hand, and the imposition of a social and symbolic domination by dominant groups that produce the interiorisation of social relationships of domination, on the other. This theory echoes the Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of genetic structuralism but, however, the forms of reproduction and social domination are still situated in a socialist context in which instituted power and symbolic domination are constructed from cultural, social, institutional, and political orders linked to the history of Chinese society. Li Lulu (2008) advances the hypothesis that social heritage is a determining factor in the restructuring of social relations, in the development of the market economy and in the weakening of the state through the construction of redistributive systems that produce highly active and permanent processes of social reproduction in labour markets and in the wider society. The emergence of the middle class in a society in the process of modernising and moving towards the market economy very closely reflects the structural evolution of society:

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how the middle classes have very quickly become stratified as part of the general process of stratification in Chinese society and how an awareness of belonging to the middle classes is developing. Li Lulu explicitly refers to Pierre Bourdieu and poses the hypothesis of the universality of social reproduction processes in which the form varies according to societal contexts. Convergences clearly appear with Bourdieu’s (1979, 1992) theory of reconversion strategies: reproduction strategies to maintain social positions constitute a system and any change to them consitutes restructuring signifying the reconversion of a capital held as a particular type into another type. This shows how reconversions can take place through vertical or transversal displacement from one field to another. How are these processes of double social reproduction assured in Chinese society? These analyses also interact with those of Baudelot / Establet (2000) and Beaud / Pialoux (1999) who studied how the devaluation of working conditions, the intensification of working conditions and the precarious nature of statuses produce new social inequalities and keep the richest in terms of economic and social education in high positions and statuses (Chauvel, 1998). The nature of these points of contact between Chinese and French theory have yet to be explored. In order to grasp the fundamental issue in Chinese sociology, namely the relationship between the transition to a market economy and social stratification, other sociologists have opened a space for debate. For example, Liu Xin (2005) has joined previous authors by insisting on the difficulty in responding to various questions such as: how do the elites maintain their power in the passage from the planned economy to the market economy? How can mechanisms of power unique to the public sector exist in a market economy? This does not occult the awareness that the Chinese transition cannot be assimilated to that of Eastern European nations because it is first and foremost defined as a progressive process where the socialist system continues to act on the Market, while the “old elites” still occupy high positions in Chinese society. The circumstances of the emergence of the middle classes in China induce us to once again examine the nature of the social and symbolic inter-class boundaries. Research into the middle classes in France, in contrast, reveals that it is not so much the homogenisation of lifestyles that explains the process leading to the constitution of a much expanded middle class, but rather the proliferation of and changes to modes of differentiation and the consequent strengthening of the position of the elites and dominant classes in French society (Bidou, 2003). We know how representations and definitions of the middle classes were formed and how they have been abandoned and then reclaimed in recent years (Chauvel, 2006). The burgeoning middle classes developed

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“usurpation” strategies (Bidou, 2003) that have been thwarted to some extent by the dominant classes, who have reinforced the collective, social and institutional barriers in order to maintain their own position, this has been called reproduction “from the top” (Peugny, 2013). Chinese sociologists emphasise the multiplication and hierarchy of social groups rich in social, economic, and symbolic resources, differentiated in the social stratification process in which wealth, power, and social prestige come together. The issue of constructing social inequalities is explored from the necessity of combining various registers which merge on differentiated stratification scales where the borders between different social groups appear uncertain. These sociological approaches partly join those of François Dubet on “multiplied inequalities” (2000) which indicate that modernity in French society adds to social differentiation and multiplies the registers of inequalities. He also shows that while the industrial society might have lead one to think that class identity typified all others, this is no longer the case. In China it can be seen that structuring and fragmenting processes have taken place simultaneously and also produced multiplied inequalities. French sociologists have also seized upon the issue of inequalities due to race. In “De la question sociale à la question raciale” (Fassin, E. and D., 2006) [“From the social question to the race question”] the authors demonstrate that the racial issue is also a social issue. They do this by showing how racial discrimination in employment, housing, schools, the police, and the judiciary structure social inequalities. The authors start from the idea that class issues are hidden by race issues, and that it is important to think about them simultaneously by calling upon notions of nation, religion, colonisation, immigration, gender and sexuality. In effect, we they suggest that we have gone from refusing to denying racial discrimination. Although French sociologists had not ignored racism, it has only been a major subject of reflection since the 1990s. Philippe Bataille (1999) shows that immigrants and migrants can be subjected to three types of racial violence: political racism, cultural racism and institutional racism. In political racism, immigrants and migrants are overtly rejected from social structures due to their cultural origin; social actors display their racist positions. Cultural racism appears when individuals are given low statuses. Institutional racism is the product of a general system which covers the be­haviour of individual actors, by accepting not their racist intention, but the banality of their actions and behaviour. Institutional racism often takes the form of vague and less vague practices such as humiliation, suspicion, interior colonialism and violence (Giraudo, 2014). Institutional violence also takes the form of discrimination, disqualification and declining social status. Chinese sociologists do not consider the racial issue in the production of inequalities.

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Finally in Europe, particularly in France, the issue of gender inequalities and male dominance was introduced during the 1980s in the wake of the feminist movements of the 1970s. Initially the Marxist tradition and feminist studies maintained close relations, and labour sociologists worked on the division of labour and gender relations linked to class relations. Then, French feminist research progressively evolved through contact with Anglo-American Gender Studies, particularly the work of Anne Oakley who was a pioneer in proposing changing from an approach centred on sex, that is biological differences, to an approach centred on gender, to consider the social construction of male and female, before Judith Butler proposed a radical deconstruction of genders (Corcuff, 2007). Pierre Bourdieu (1998) and many other French sociologists came back to the issue of male domination in the 1990s. In France the gender difference is a very important element in the structuring of society and has produced a gendered comprehension of the social world (Laufer, Marry, Maruani, 2003). In Europe from the year 2000 an abundance of sociological literature has been produced around theories of intersectionality which lump together confusions between social inequalities, racial inequalities, and gender equalities. Here the category of gender allows the effects of repetition and amplifies social, ethnic, political, and religious phenomena. Nacira Guénif and Eric Macé (2004) defend another point of view by proposing a post-feminist post-colonial critique of sexist discrimination and post-colonial discrimination. This point of view has provoked tense debates throughout France. In China, the racial issue has still not been considered in the sociology of inequalities. On the other hand, Chinese sociologists “jumped over” the feminist studies period and in the last twelve or so years Chinese Gender Studies have been developed, supported by Tong Xin (2008). She emphasises gender inequalities in Maoist and contemporary China, particularly by insisting on the differences between the conditions of rural and urban Chinese women. In rural areas, women mostly work in the fields, find it difficult to move from agricultural work to factory work, and are often deprived of material goods and social recognition. This shows the weight of Chinese traditions, the imposition of subordinate roles in the family space and how the issue of production and reproduction in gender relations is dealt with in relation to the State, the Market and the family. In the context of collectivisation women were instrumentalised under cover of emancipation and were subjects of alienation. Socialist ideology has a way of alienating women assigned to places that are always inferior to those of men in the labour market. In labour markets in transition, women experience physical and moral pressure and become subjects of disqualification linked to relations of social domination and within the family,

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but they have developed resistance strategies and have conquered autonomous spaces. Theories of intersectionality have not really been deployed but the field is being established and increasingly invested by women, particularly the young generation of sociologists. 3

Mobility and Contemporary Societies

Mobility is a characteristic of changes in contemporary societies, particularly Chinese society. French sociologists distinguish residential, professional, and social mobilities and think of migrations in a disjointed way. Chinese sociologists grant an important status to space when analysing social, economic, and cultural processes due to the importance of internal migrations constructed from social, professional, and spatial mobilities. The devaluation (Maurin, 2009) and increasing precariousness (Chauvel, 2012) of the middle classes has become a major issue for European sociologists. European sociologists study residential mobilities wheras Chinese sociolo­gists mostly focus on spatial and professional mobilities. Differences in spatial scale can help explain these differences in the reasoning of Chinese and European sociologists. Both European and Chinese sociologists envisage the overlapping of various forms of mobility, but residential and professional mobilities are more important for the former, whilst the latter think more about social and geographic mobilities than professional and residential mobilities. In Chinese sociology the analysis of social relations is primarily inscribed in a sociology of social classes in which they are thought of in terms of the issue of social differentiation with the effect of positioning assuming a major role. Quantitative analyses of social mobility have been favoured for investigating the great post-1978 societal transformations and social stratification phenomena. Since the reforms, the concept of intragenerational mobility seems more efficient than the concept of intergenerational mobility. Li Chunling (2008) shows how social mobility pathways were to diversify from 1978 and the structural barriers to mobility were redefined. She also shows how economic capital played a crucial role in social mobility prior to 1949 but became a negative factor between 1949 and 1980 and how cultural and economic capital have come to play a decisive role in contemporary modes of constructing social mobility. She explains the paradox of the reforms, which have increased the opportunities for mobility and at the same time made the boundaries between social groups clearer, for example elites maintain their position. This paradox appears unique to Chinese society and at the theoretical level requires simultaneous work on the processes of differentiation and social fragmentation. On the

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other hand, in France, and more broadly European sociology, these are considered successively. In the course of the transition from the planned to the market economy, the social structure has been reconfigured as a result of changes to the economic system and institutions and to the relationship between the state and the market. Economic, social, cultural, and political capital is combined differently to produce a diversity of differentiated trajectories and non-linear mobilities which testify to the affirmation of a classed society. Social mobility is defined as being characterised by little displacements in social space and progressive passages from one place to another rather than by very marked changes. This approach to social mobility in China can be linked to European analyses which show how forms of ascending or descending mobility vary according to historic circumstances. In addition, this shows how statuses of economic, social, and cultural capital may have varying effects on the construction of social identities. This also demonstrates how volumes of economic, social, and cultural capital, their structure and the evolution over time of these properties define what Pierre Bourdieu called “a three-dimensional space” (1979) except that one must also take into consideration the global volume of political capital which combines with resources and powers linked to the very decisive political position in China. He shows in the social stratification proc­ ess in Chinese society, the trajectories diversify from the combination of the inculcation effect, directly practiced by the family by the original conditions of existence and the social trajectory effect itself. The latter refers to the effect resulting from the experience of climbing or descending the social ladder. More recently, in France and China, we have shown that in an uncertain context, individual biographies are constructed from bifurcations which correspond to changes in the space regime in the form of geographical mobility, and changes in economic regimes in the form of professional mobilities. In journeys of precarious, discriminated, and segregated populations, migration appears on the “biographical crossroads” in a repetitive mode. At each bifurcation places, events etc influence the repertories of individual resources which are recreated to reconstruct the statuses, places, and social identities of individuals. The succession of bifurcations and the formation of biographical crossroads result from structural processes occurring in societies and capacities for action, mobilisation, and circulation of various categories of social and individual groups all at the same time (Roulleau-Berger, 2014).

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Social Networks and Social Capital

According to Degenne and Forsé (1994) the notion of the network of interpersonal relationships has had an important status in European sociology at some point or other, the majority of French sociologists have adopted the concept of social capital. However, according to Pierre Mercklé (2004) the Pierre Bourdieu approach’s popularised the concept of social capital without giving it a central status, unlike the concepts of cultural and economic capital (Bourdieu, 1980). It is only recognised as a “multiplier effect” in this theory. In Europe and in France the influence of Pierre Bourdieu was dominant until the introduction of interactionist theories during the 1980s. Hence, starting from critical positions towards genetic structuralism, the notion of personal and relational resources also became increasingly important in French sociology through American urban anthropology. This notion gathered momentum in the 1980s and 1990s following the introduction of the works of the Chicago School. For example, Ulf Hannerz (1983) considered the notion of networks useful for exploring the ways individuals used their roles in social practices which play on institutional limits and confirm them in complex urban societies. The notion of cooperative networks proposed in 1982 by Howard S. Becker in “Art Worlds” was also the subject of numerous appropriations by European sociologists and favoured alternative theoretical positions over those derived from structural-functionalist paradigms; alternatives which met with a certain success. He thus developed a theory of social worlds beginning with worlds of art defining them as networks of cooperative chains around which differentiated activities necessary for the collective production of material and immaterial goods are managed through shared conventions. Here, the notion of a cooperative network signifies distancing a sociology of structures or organisations in which the concepts of social, cultural, and economic capital are no longer promoted but those of social, economic, moral, and symbolic resources are. This pragmatist approach prolonged that of classical philosophers such as William James, John Dewey, Georges Herbert Mead, and Robert Erza Park, who defined sociology as a science of association in which society is always in the making and the framework of reciprocal action ensures the coordination of experiences and social activities. Anselm Strauss (1963) introduced the concept of “the social arena” as a universe of reciprocal responses, conjoined, coordinated, or concerted actions and conflicts, given that these universes are constructed from cooperative networks. The construction of networks and weak or strong social ties is always linked to social capital. Which theories on social capital do Chinese sociologists retain? They have not really retained Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of social

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capital which is part of a theory of reproduction that has recently been promoted in China. In China as in Europe, the approaches of Coleman (1990), Ronald Burt (1992) and Nan Lin (2001) to social capital have been increasingly used. Coleman established a relationship between social capital and trusting relationships, and produced an approach which would be seized upon by Chinese sociologists in the 90s and then in France in the 2000s. As a theory on social structure and action Nan Lin (2001), who is very active in China, has developed the theory of social resources. This theory was inspired by the works of Simmel on network analysis, and social stratification challenging the theory of acquiring status. Nan Lin argues that social resources constitute the central element in social capital, concentrating on the way in which individuals benefit from access to and use of these resources. He distinguishes acquired resources (education, prestige, and authority) from inherited resources (ethnicity, sex, religion); these resources can be classified in two cate­gories: personal resources possessed by the individual and social resources used in their networks. Approaches in terms of networks and social links are mainly used in Chinese economic sociology to analyse the process of professional socialisation. Some sociologists such as Bian Yanjie (2010) and Zhang Wenhong (Bian Yanjie, Zhang Wenhong, Cheng Cheng, 2012) have studied the importance of social networks in accessing employment during the transition from the planned economy to the market economy. Familial and social networks are thought of as playing a central role in the processes of socialisation, de-socialisation, and re-socialisation. Network analysis in Chinese analyses indicates a particular type of abstraction and not a particular type of relationship, and groups together various American sociological approaches (Mitchell, 1973; Barnes, 1972). Chinese sociologists are more interested in individuals and the ways in which they use their roles than in roles and the way they are invested in individuals, practices which play on institutional limits. The use of the network concept leads to the concept of ties. Granovetter’s theory has been promoted in both France and China since the 1990s. This theory (Granovetter 1974, 1994) on the strength of weak ties, in direct relation with Fei Xiaotong’s chaxu geju theory, is discussed in China in numerous works on economic sociology. Granovetter poses the hypothesis – reflected in various French research projects – of the intricacy between social networks and markets by showing that the strength of weak ties, or access to multiple networks, allows the operation of employment markets to be understood through interactions. Chinese sociologists seem to retain the idea of the strength of ties and give a lesser status to the idea of weak ties. Ties cannot really be thought of as weak because in China the individual primarily exists through the network or group that he/she belongs to due to cultural and

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civilisational heritage. The theory of the strength of ties – defined as the combination of quantity of time, emotional intensity, intimacy (mutual trust) and reciprocal services – allows interactions and structural processes to be linked. Bian Yanjie (2012) has converted Granovetter’s concepts of weak and strong ties into weak and strong guanxi1. He has shown that Granovetter’s theory of weak ties is questionable in Chinese fields where the strength of the guanxi through familial and clan history outweighs weak ties. Zhong Yunhua (2007) has added the idea that strong ties play a major role in the public employment market, whereas the force of weak links allows access to private em­ployment. However,when it comes to hiring, the strength of strong ties can be clearly seen compared to the strength of weak ties. Luo Jiade (2014) has used quantitative and qualitative approaches to analyse the various types of networks taking into account the degree to which the network is self-centred. Zhai Xuewei has proposed the use of the notion of weak and strong trust instead of weak and strong ties. Some sociologists (Zhang Jie, 2004; Zhang Shun, Cheng Cheng, 2012) have used Pierre Bourdieu’s (1979) concepts of social capital, cultural capital, and economic capital to analyse inequalities in accessing employment. They have demonstrated that individuals in China with strong social, economic, and cultural capital access employment more rapidly. Networks are analysed in terms of transmitting information relative to job offers, individuals to be contacted, places to go, but more specifically in terms of the presentation of a close relative to an employer or, for example, when an employer asks a migrant to introduce him to a few trustworthy friends and relations. Relationships of trust vary in intensity according to a combination of ties and resources but they appear to be central to accessing employment. Whilst accessing employment is organised around exchange systems, offers and counter-offers, influence, and information, it also largely depends on capabilities for professional and geographical mobility. The relative case with which interpersonal ties link together despite the very large distances between Chinese provinces demonstrates the strength of familial links and the connection of places in a migratory space within which families circulate. Access to employment is thought of as being organised as a symbolic economy relying on oral history, trust, “face to face” exchanges as per Geertz (1996) – very often cited by Chinese sociologists – and the plasticity of roles beginning with forms of alternation between “strong ties” and “weak ties” according to market segments, qualifications, sectors of activity, and provinces of origin. The strength of ties in China also refers to clans, which can be defined as traditional networks of relationships, particularly relatives. Clans have always 1 Guanxi means interpersonal relationships.

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instilled a ritualisation into daily life. This ritualisation consists in a form of specific socialisation that has always existed in China and which is a structural element of Chinese society, both past and present. Tang Jun (2008) has shown how in 1949 the Chinese State abolished the clan system which was suspected of serving the interests of the dominant classes. Members of these clans had a strong sense of belonging to a given group and shared a common conscience which allowed them to maintain this clan organisation system, at first discretely and then more visibly. After the reforms, the governance of villages became more autonomous and progressively these traditional structures reemerged although in a less ritualised and more informal way, while very active in the socialisation process. Traditional structures have not disappeared against a historical context in which the State implemented political policies to replace these social structures with others. Here the strength of ties shows how, in a given society, visible forms of socialisation can become invisible and re-emerge once again as discrete but active forms of socialisation. We can see how this visibility/invisibility/visibility process varies according to historical periods, that it is constructed in a very contextualised way and above all that it is unique to Chinese society. 5

Autonomy and Subjectivity

The concept of autonomy has followed a different trajectory in Chinese and European contexts. First, however, we will question individuation as a broader narrative used to analyse some of the great ruptures in Western history (Martucelli, 2014). We will question this narrative which shows Western societies as a linear process in progressive individualisation. We refer back to Christian Le Bart (2010) who thought it necessary to speak of individualisations and forms of religious, economic, political, and cultural individualisation. Chinese sociologists now speak about the paradox of autonomy which characterises a process of individuation that cuts through Chinese society, in which the least well-equipped in social, economic, and symbolic capital lose a barely acquired autonomy. Li Youmei (2012b) has stressed the collision effect between individual autonomy and the autonomy of social groups which were formed after 1978. The notion of autonomy is seen as independence in terms of determination and self-government, and is thought of as individual but also capable of evolving into collective autonomy. Despite this, Chinese authors mainly refer to the theories of Jeremy Bentham, Norbert Elias, and Ulrich Beck retaining the idea that autonomy in the second modernity reminds one of social, economic, political, cultural, and individual resources as well as those offered

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through Social Welfare. However, Li Youmei insists on the idea that autonomy cannot be defined as a linear process but rather as complex and contradictory. She notably refers to Karl Popper’s notion of the “paradox of freedom” and adds that the notion of paradoxical autonomy means that losing and gaining autonomy exist in an interdependent relationship. Essentially, if certain individuals gain autonomy this means that others lose it. The concept of autonomy is almost immediately adjacent to that of inequalities whilst in European sociologies one could say that they are still thought of in a more disjointed way. Li Youmei goes on to say that while individuals have gained personal autonomy with regards to Chinese traditions during the processes of transition and modernisation, they have become hostages to market pressures. The development of the socialist market economy has lead to increasingly competitive relations between individuals to access a position. The very rapid transformations of Chinese society has produced relatively brutal points of conflict when individuation and belonging to a community boil down to cohabitation relationships. The concept of “collective individualism” produced by Alexis de Tocqueville is often used in Chinese sociology to understand how social groups with divergent interests form and how different types of social conflict are born. In Western European sociology, autonomy has been defined as a largely shared aspiration and a very binding norm before which individuals are unequal. For the past twenty years, particularly in France, sociology has taken on a subjectivist turn (Ehrenberg, 2010) which confirms the very socio-centred way European societies examine themselves, particularly with the process of “self-totemisation”. Issues of autonomy and subjectivity have assumed an important status in sociological research. This status varies according to paradigms, but has provided impetus to a certain number of researchers focusing on processes of individuation, or, more precisely, on the work of societies and work on oneself. On the European, and particularly French, sociological scene, the contemporary individual who appears uncertain, introspective, self-sufficient... is at the heart of sociological reflection. This phenomenon highlights commitment to the individuation process as a civilising process (Elias, 1991) that is characterised more by the rise of the autonomy norm than by a generalised decline in private space. While social structures previously concerned the individual, while the level of reflexiveness was coherent with the social structure, nowadays the individual is thought of as being unable to establish her/his limits in either reflexiveness, interiorised schemes or social roles (Kaufman, 2001, 2004). The idea of society in French sociology has declined with the progressive empowerment of hierarchies and class relations, forms of representation and

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collective action, and the weakening of institutions challenged by the individual. François Dubet (1994) proposed envisaging autonomy via the concept of experience, returning social experiences to society and including analysis of the ordeals that confront individuals and which make them act: here, analysis of ordeals is a way of conceiving the subjectivity of actors towards the objectivity of society. Following the same trend, M. Martuccelli (2006) has defined the notion of the ordeal as: “engaging a conception of the individual as an actor who faces problems and a representation of social life as being made up of a plurality of consistencies”. Ordeals help us to identify problems which form this historically specific mode of individuation in which structural proc­ esses to create the individual are formed. These tensions, specific to each ordeal, appear to be fundamental to the modern experience; this author considers that, in every society, the individual is confronted with a very large number of ordeals and they make up part of the perception that these individ­ uals have of their own lives. In the case of Chinese society, it is not possible to argue in these terms. The notions of ordeal are not used by Chinese sociologists to understand processes of individuation, which still appear to be rarely considered. While, in the case of European societies one can speak of the historical process of singularisation, in China individuation ordeals produce less singularisation. In France, as an extension of this reflection on ordeals and individuals, sociology, psychology and neurosciences were linked with issues of mental health and psychological and emotional suffering, underscored with the idea of weakening the social links and injunctions to autonomy for individuals. Autonomy thus became both a largely shared aspiration and a very constraining norm before which individuals are not equal. He proposes going from an individualist sociology to a sociology of individualism by showing how contemporary evolutions are organised from transformations of social rules and how the spirit of institutions gives rise to a new spirit of action in reference to autonomy as an interiorised value. Mental health and psychological suffering are part of a social life organised in reference to autonomy which tells individuals what to say and do. Chinese sociologists have introduced the issue of social suffering in various ways. For example, Guo Yuhua (2003) used a project on memories of the difficult times during collectivisation and the Great Leap Forward (1958–1960) in the North of the Shaanxi province to demonstrate that women suffered from the obligation to leave the domestic sphere and participate in collective production but remember their intense mobilisation and their revolutionary relation although they were engaged in a process of instrumentalisation. Other research on the children of first-generation Chinese migrants shows that through subjective experiences, particularly the pain and suffering of

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both their parents and themselves, they develop resistance and fighting strategies and discourse. These migrants, who are qualified as neither peasants (nongmin) nor workers but as nongmingong, are equipped with a social identity that is represented and perceived as negative. Other works analyse peasants’ loss of land and the need to leave their villages as sufferings and losses of self. Losing one’s land means losing face and creates identity wounds. Zhang Hai Bo (2006) analysed these wounds, beginning with identity gaps in peasants between “the actual self” and “the ideal self”, between “the actual self” and “the ought self” (Higgins, 1987, quoted by Zhang Hai Bo). Recently, Sun Feiyu (2013) in the exploration of the Suku – the practice of confessing individual suffering in a political context and in a collective public forum – has purposed a new theory of China’s modern identity – both cultural and political – confronted with an increasingly globalised world. The examination of Suku is not only a way to understand China’s revolution but also to understand the subjectivity of Chinese people. By means of the political confessional narrative, Sun Feiyu has combined power, identity and subjectivity to analyse the production of revolutionary truth, on the one hand, and social suffering, on the other. This constitutes a new theoretical sociological approach to understand subjective meaning through narratives of suffering from the perspective of political identity. 6

Frontiers of We and Me

Here we examine when and how the self is summoned in sociology. In Chinese sociology the self is not disassociated from the we whereas in French sociology, the self is primarily inscribed in a process of individuation before being linked to we. However, although the concept of subjectivity is barely developed in Chinese sociology, the issue of intersubjectivity is dealt with in terms of sociologies inspired by pragmatism and interactionism. For example, the issue of the guanxis has a very strong presence throughout the entire Chinese sociological field. Yang Yiyin (2008) poses the hypothesis of the fabrication of a double we in the construction of an order of interactions. She explains how, to define an interpersonal guanxi, the legacy of the kinship regime and relationships of trust and reciprocal obligation must be taken into consideration. The we is produced on the one hand by the guanxi that draw the particular boundaries of me; or more precisely what Fei Xiao Tong (1983) called the chaxu geju, and on the other hand through categories, identifications, and social memberships. In Chinese sociology the notion of guanxi distinguishes itself from concepts of social ties or social relations in the sense that it appears larger and combines

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with historical, familial, geographical, subjective and cultural dimensions. The guanxis have been chosen by Chinese sociologists to analyse the circulation of social and symbolic resources and the construction of social ties. Why does the notion of guanxi seem so strong in Chinese social sciences? Yang Yiyin (2009) discusses the influence of Chinese traditional life which signifies limited mobility, arrangements of close family relationships founded on trust, and the construction of a structured local order. She also discusses how interknowledge and face-to-face relations in familial space play on the delimitation of each individual’s sphere of action and autonomy. Here the guanxi becomes a concept which allows the issue of categorisation and social identification to be addressed. Western researchers are perceived as having a tendency to first reason in terms of categorisation, roles, and statuses and then in terms of differentiated modes of association beginning with the nature and intensity of relations and interactions. Chinese researchers tend to first reason in terms of relations of exchange, retribution, gratification (Bian Yanjie, Wang Wenbin, 2012; Wang Wenbin, Zhao Yandong, Hong Yanbi, 2012) and interactions, and then in terms of roles and categorisations. When a double we is constructed in Chinese sociology, European sociologists would first think of identities based on me and I as moments of construction in the process of self during which the individual meets others and can then become we. Yang Yiyin (2012) shows how we implies “being one of us” which is characterised by three traits:

• The permeability of the boundaries of we in the sense that those who are • •

not part of “being one of us” can become a part, and inversely “insiders” can become “outsiders”. The elasticity of the boundaries of we in which routes depend on contexts and circumstances. Individual autonomy in the sense that the individual places others within the precise borders of me.

However, the boundaries of the self in Chinese sociology are also conceived in relation to the guanxi. According to forms and types of guanxi, relationships with others will take up a different position and the me will not be situated in the same place. We insist on the importance of the guanxis in the construction of individual and collective identities by recalling that it is inherent in Chinese civilisation both past and present. It also explains that the individual/group relationship above all means the construction of a social relationship which can reduce itself neither to a social categorisation nor to a social role.

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If in Europe theories of me, the I and the Others appear as distinct moments in a discontinuous process of the self, they appear less significantly in a continuous process in Chinese works. They also signal the construction of dis­ continuous access to the narrative and reflexive selves. The capabilities (Sen, 1992) that is the moral competences act upon (1) the modes and forms of the recomposition of resource repertories, namely the capacity to control the degree of predictability of situations of change, (2) the way in which discontinuous narratives are rendered continuous and (3) the conditions of access to the narrative and reflexive selves. If the narrative self is fragmented, the reflexive self of the individual is put through an ordeal and recomposes itself differently according to the societal context. In France we have also focused on the alteration of the self. However, this signifies saturation thresholds beyond which individuals lose their reflexive capacity. Phenomena of repetition and intensification of situations of disqualification and/or humiliation can produce the irreversibility of the feeling of shame of their own self. More irreversibility means greater alteration of moral competences and greater blocking of narratives. Increased production of discontinuities in the narrative and reflexive selves leads to the situations to be managed appearing more contrasted and disjointed and to more retrospective losses (Sennett, 2006) and more discontinuous narratives, that is, phenomena of alteration to the self. When confronted with remodelling, readjustments and conflicts in identity, “weak” individuals experience increasing difficulties in adjusting their different selves and in saving face. They oscillate between social esteem and contempt, between esteem and shame of the self, according to the roles played in different social spaces. However, the narrativity issue compels us to “situate” the self which is constructed differently in the Chinese and European contexts. The Subject in Europe and the individual in China experience more and more difficulties in accessing the culture of the self and in saving face in situations of social suffering. The culture of the self and the concern for the self thus represent major intellectual stakes in both Chinese and European societies. The issue of accessing the culture of the self appeared in the human sciences at an early date. It appeared in the works of Plato in Greek philosophy and as early as the Han Dynasty in the history of Chinese civilisation. It was to be masked during the Maoist years when individuals had to repress their desire for the culture of the self. In China, concern for the self remains linked to the Confucian inheritance in the conception of the culture of the self, on the one hand, while it cannot be dissociated from the socialist inheritance, on the other hand. In the Confucian and Taoist doctrines, the individual is supposed to totally control her/his interior reality and be able to interiorise social norms and values

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through the reunion of the heart and the dimension of the spirit (shen) which animates the world. According to Romain Graziani (2009), in this instance, the culture of the self is constructed through the combination of the self, the spirit and the physical appearance which engenders a moral realisation, a cognitive blossoming and a long life. This culture of the self echoes the way in which Foucault – taking Plato as his starting point – spoke about the arts of oneself, the practices of the self and the technics of the self. Contrary to the ontological approach to the individual in the Western world, this culture of the self does not really signify the accession to any singularity or uniqueness of the individual. For example, the Wuxing tradition, which dates back to the 4th century, describes an interior process which relies upon five individual dispositions: the sense of humanity, justice, the vivacity of the spirit, the sense of ritual and wisdom, and the harmony of the body and the spirit (Graziani, 2009). Contrary to the Platonists, Aristotelians and Stoics, no logic of discourse, no argument or research for universal truth participate in the culture of the self in China. In this chapter, shared perspectives and theoretical continuities the following thematics have been clearly delineated: dominations and the arts of resistance of the weak; the multiplication of inequalities in both contexts; the central status of mobilities in contemporary societies; the very marked role of social networks and social capital even if this is a little more pronounced in Chinese sociology; the importance of the individuation issue in European sociology and the recent mobilisation of th concept of autonomy in Chinese sociology; the reflection upon the boundaries of the we and the self which is common to both European and Chinese contexts although it is treated differently.

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Chapter 10

Discontinuities of Knowledge and Singular Concepts In this chapter, we deal with the discontinuities between major theoretical issues in European and Chinese sociologies which reveal different conceptions of the world situated in unconnected spaces and temporalities. This approach while not exhaustive is rather eloquent regarding what remains of specific, singular, situated knowledge once the processes of knowledge circulation have encouraged inter-theory contacts, encounters, superpositions and intersections. Discontinuities will be studied using the link between public space and the pluralisation of norms, subjectivation and struggle for recognition, intermediate spaces mainly produced in Europe and the religious issue mainly produced in China. 1

Public Space and Pluralisation of Norms

In the European risk society (Beck, 1990), sociologists conceive public space as the first goods accessed by every citizen. In democracies damaged by un­em­ployment, poverties and racisms, public space is conceived as being the privileged place for the expression of social conflicts, inequalities, uncertainties and the non-recognition of the Other. Although the public space of European sociologists is defined as being fragmented by poverties and discriminations, although it is the object of multiple interventions, it is also conceived as showing how, today, plural forms of socialisation and de-socialisation overlap, co-exist and diverge revealing the vulnerability of a crumbling salaried society, an evolving urban society in which social, cultural, religious and other differences are continually aggravated. Public space appears to be a place of distance and proximity, civility and incivility, negotiation and exchange as well as a place for the production of both an individualism of situation (Balandier, 2001) and revolts. Public space demonstrates how the “excluded of the interior” and the “included” rub shoulders or avoid each other and how they do not inhabit completely separate universes. Thus, public space enables one to understand, at the micro-level, how recognition and contempt of the Other are reflected in a democracy which has been deformed by various forms of unemployment, poverty and discriminations.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/9789004309982_012

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This phenomenon reveals the increasing risk of not being able to access a position and be oneself. Public space therefore highlights new forms of inequality when confronted with social risks and the way in which they are increased in it. It shows how individuals owning economic, social and legal goods and their own selves co-exist alongside others who have fewer resources and less support and do not own their own selves to the same extent. Public space has been conceived as being a primitive stage for politics upon which identities and group memberships come into contact and tension with each other (Joseph, 1998). In European sociology, even if public space is represented as being traversed by inequalities with those individuals and groups ignored by democracies confronting those whose social identity has been recognised by them, it is defined as being increasingly punctuated by situations of alarm, violence and suffering which reveal situations of structural emergency and zones of anomie within the society. These are linked to economic, cultural and social disruptions which produce social contempt, self abandonment, solitude, silence and demands for meaning and recognition. Violence in the public space is partially engendered by the processes of social stigmatisation and it expresses social conflicts which are related to the non respect of implicit rules of mutual recognition, that is, depriving individuals of rights and inter-subjective recognition of their capabilities and performance. Since sociologists increasingly see public space as a place for the expression of contempt and recognition, those who have a place and social status are considered as attaining public recognition whereas those who do not have access to legitimised spaces of socialisation are seen as only attaining public recognition with greater difficulty – they feel “small” and despised. Life in the public space of today clearly illustrates that the renewed intensity of the struggle against social contempt and for access to material goods in contemporary democracies is characterised by the increased precariousness of salaried employment, an ever-increasingly individualized order of recognition and the rise of social risks (Roulleau-Berger, 2004). Public space is therefore dealt with as the place of political stakes and the object of investigations undertaken by those who directly manage social risks – giving orders, disciplining and moralising. This phenomenon characterises societies represented and experienced as risk societies in which the Other must be protected in order to protect the self. European sociologists thus analyse measures of public action advancing the idea of a multiplication, sharpening and miniaturisation of the forms of intervention and social and political instrumentalisation regarding those who appear “excluded from the interior” in the eyes of those who think of themselves as “included” (Fourquet, 1982). These measures are analysed as constituting increasingly numerous

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controls, supervisions and mediations which contribute to the crumbling of the boundaries between public and private. They reveal a process of the State continually taking control through the management of social risks. These measures of public action reveal new forms of subjection which enable individuals to retain their capacity for creativity, commitment and self control as well as avoiding the expression of forms of violence or revolt against a society indebted to them. Today, according to Jacques Donzelot (1999), these measures are based upon an immunological conception of public action in which, from the mid 19th century to the 1960s, public policies conformed to a prophylactic conception of the role of the State in relation to society: society must be made in such a way as to help its members to find for themselves the resources required for making society, so as to provide the means to support this will rather than replace it. These measures of public action are based upon a redefinition of the public/private relationship in which each and every one must become the actor of his own life provided that he has esteem for himself. This leads to the injonction to a “culture of the self” in which citizens do not all stand equal. This obligation of over-exposure of the self reveals the idea that subjectivity has become a collective issue. The public space issue is approached in rather different terms in China given the authoritarian political regime. Although Chinese sociologists often employ the risk society notion, the notion of public space is less used since there is very little research into the public space which is emerging in Chinese society. Whereas, in the past, public space and political space tended to flow together (Zhang Jing, 2012), the two spaces are now very slowly moving apart, leading to the gradual emergence of individuals with rights and entitlements and the ability to operate autonomously and take responsibility in a developing public space. In the course of producing public judgements, agreements and disagreements are being constructed around moral and social norms. Norms and orders of recognition are becoming differentiated as a result of the diversification of legitimisation criteria, actions, practices and discourses (Zhang Jing, 2006) and coming into conflict with each other around the distribution of the “common weal”. Taking as a starting point an analysis of property rights disputes, we are encouraged to re-examine one of the fundamental theoretical questions in sociology, namely social order, by introducing the notion of the dual integration of social order, composed of both “property rights” and “division of benefit”. The central question is the influence of the dual integration of social order on the interaction between the legitimisation of social identity and institutional structure. This public space appears to be very different to a democratic public space even if this controlled public space can be invested by rural and commercial associations and people’s organisations. In

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an analysis of the conditions for the forming of a public space, Zhang Jing (2012) invites us to revisit the fundamental sociological theoretical issues, such as domination, by introducing the notion of civic domination in opposition to authoritarian domination. She pursues her line of reasoning with citizenship referring to the public consciousness of the members of a society and their capacity for autonomy, solidarity and civility before posing the question of the policy of recognition of individual identities. It is also important to mention a body of research into the pluralisation of norms in a context of social transformation produced in the first years of this century by collaborative work involving French and Chinese sociologists such as Isabelle Thireau, Wang Hansheng, Guo Yuhua, Liu Shiding, Shen Yuan and Sun Liping (Thireau, Wang Hansheng, 2001). They investigated the “forms of the just and local re-compositions of normative orders” by studying: the restructuring of a rural market; the redistribution of village lands; provision for the needs of the elderly; tax collection; and the management of shared matters. Seen in conjunction with the work of Boltanski and Thévenot (1991), these different research studies of ordinary disputes have shown how a plurality of normative orders is constructed, how agreements and disagreements, conflicts and negotiations are organised around customs and feelings of right and wrong in situations of uncertainty and a context of transition in which norms appear to be increasingly polysemic. The strong hypothesis of a plurality of modes of action and differentiated processes of legitimisation of social norms has encouraged a broad reflection into the complexification of Chinese society (Thireau, Hua Linshan, 2001). More specifically, links could be established with studies of political arenas defined as pluralistic universes containing a plurality of ways of judging, believing and existing legitimised by hierarchies of constitutional principles, legal measures, institutional frameworks and the lives of ordinary citizens (Cefaï, 2007). Links have also appeared with the researchers of the Political and Moral Sociology Group (Groupe de sociologie politique et morale at the EHESS, Paris) who have widely investigated regimes of denunciation, compassion and indignation as well as regimes of criticism, opinion and sharing (Boltanski, Thévenot, 1987; Quéré, Ogien, 2006). 2

Subjectivation and the Struggle for Recognition

Over the past 20 years in Western Europe, sociology has taken a “subjectivist turn” – which has strengthened an already very socio-centric outlook of Euro­ pean societies, especially concerning the “totemisation of the self” (Ehrenberg, 2010). Such work focuses on reciprocal relationships between structural

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processes, collective and individual capabilities and the issue of subjectivities in local and global contexts. Drawing on reflection from outside, this context allows us to find new areas for theoretical invention and to reconfigure our conceptions by questioning former categories without being forced to abandon all of them. Through heterotopias, we have the possibility of identifying the blind spots of our thinking from within and thus of escaping from our usual theoretical legacies. Some scholars, such as F. Laplantine (2007), have urged us to question the Subject as it was developed historically, philosophically, sociologically and anthropologically in Europe. We have to ask ourselves if this European subject is similar to other subjects from other cultural or even civilisational contexts (Roulleau-Berger, 2011). Subjectivity is now a major issue in much sociological research. It fluctuates depending on the paradigm used, yet many researchers now focus on individuation. The contemporary individual lies at the heart of sociological thinking, whereas he is emerging on the Chinese sociological scene. This phenomenon highlights the asserting of the process of individuation as a process of civilisation – in Norbert Elias’s sense of the term – and shows that, although, in the past, social structures sustained the individual with the level of reflexivity being consistent with the social structure, today the production of an identity is a condition for action and the process of individuation is mediated through access to self-governance in various affiliation and activity spaces. Individuation and subjectivity form a very complex theoretical couple; subjectivity is a capacity for action, reflexivity and creativity of the modern individual in different situations, and also the incapacity to mobilize the self when depressed. Today, in different modernities, the Subjectivity of the Others is confronted with increasingly uncertain and risky situations as well as the injunction to be oneself; so the Subject produces different kinds of narratives to resist this injunction, to fight for collective and public recognition. Individuals must deal with this complexity and develop creative skills to define their identity and their own selves. Consequently, we could consider that new modernities produce multiple subjectivities of the Others. We will also consider how these subjectivities are influenced by cultural globalisation when the Others have to reconfigure, in various places, his narratives in transnational spaces. If, today, the Others is local and global, we have to deal with the process of reconfiguration of subjectivities in different spaces located on different scales. The subjectivity of the Others is increasingly complex and multi-situated in legitimate and less legitimate, visible and invisible, local and global spaces. In European sociology, the process of individuation as a process of civilisation is characterised more by the increasing power of the autonomy norm than by a global withdrawal to each individual’s private space. This means that each

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individual faces as many inspirations and opportunities as he/she faces potential failures. Increased freedom of choice goes hand in hand with higher risks in the social construction of the individual, especially since this construction absorbs a variety of schemes that come to light in different contexts. Social, sexual and ethnical inequalities have continually grown, while at the same time some specific population groups have more clearly appeared as being stigmatised and rendered invisible and therefore experience an increasing feeling of injustice. The topic of the Other’s subjectivity has thus been redefined, not so much according to individuation theories but according to recognition theories. When inequalities become unbearable, subjects eagerly mention the lack of recognition. This notion of recognition has thus slowly become the centre of a sociology of subjectivity, a sociology of social movements and a moral and critical sociology. Subjectivity was long neglected in sociology while many splits between individuals and the social world widened. Interactionist, constructivist and comprehensive thinking opened the way for a renewal of the topic of subjectivity which had formerly been buried by structuralism, functionalism, structural-functionalisms and Marxism. Nowadays, “be yourself” has become a social injunction, which, along with the increasingly trying situations linked to the processes of stigmatisation, rejection and social disaffiliation, forces sociologists to put subjectivity back under the spotlight, as it is now a public, collective, local and global topic. Subjectivity now appears to be constructed by each society and redefined in each local situation involving the Other, with the individual also reconfiguring her/his own subjectivity in the process. The more worlds an individual belongs to, the more subjectivities fluctuate, either negatively, when facing overwhelming hardships, or positively, when individuals gain access to a rewarding self-consciousness. We have mentioned how, in Western Europe, the subjectivity of the Other is a major element of the debate about justice, redistribution and recognition. Since the end of the 1990s the issue of recognition and the struggle for it have become fundamental on the German scene (Honneth 2000, 2006) and French sociological scene (Caillé, 2007; Payet & Battegay 2008; Roulleau-Berger, 2008). It has been widely used to expose new forms of relationship to the Other in contemporary societies in which normative orders increase in number, while new social fragmentations appear. Following the debate in America about multiculturalism, we had to rethink the ties between the recognition of individuals and the recognition of groups (Taylor 1998; Walzer 1997; Kymlicka 2001). Axel Honneth’s recognition theory was based on the reconfiguration of social struggles in contemporary societies. Following in his footsteps, German sociology opened a fundamental debate about the relationship between recognition and injustice. Initially, the topics of interest, exploitation and redistribution were

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overshadowed by identity, difference, cultural domination and recognition, but the debate became even more international when Nancy Frazer (2005) contributed to it by refocusing the arguments around the idea that justice requires redistribution and recognition. Through the notion of “parity of participation”, she delivered a new theoretical framework, built on the linking of the objective condition of the parity of participation – the distribution of material resources granting every citizen economic independence and the inter-subjective condition of the parity of participation – to the existence of institutionalised models of interpretation and evaluation granting an equal respect to all citizens. In Western Europe, the subjectivity of the Others is, in itself, an important part of this fundamental debate about justice, redistribution and recognition and was provided a synthetic framework which envisions recognition struggles through socioeconomic inequalities between classes, genders and ethnic groups, but also through cultural injustices as they appear in cultural domination, denial of recognition and disrespect. When it comes to conceiving the subjectivity of the Other in sociology, her position is now predominant. Some Chinese sociologists (Tong Xin 2012; Li Lulu 2012; Shen Yuan 2011) envisage struggles for recognition as being based primarily upon socioeconomic inequalities between social classes and only secondarily upon cultural injustice, denial of recognition and disrespect. The question of distributive justice and human society is referred to the construction of social institutions following principles of equal opportunity, equal distribution of benefits and obligations, rational distribution criteria and procedures, and rectification of injustices (Xiang Yuqiao, 2013). The perception of distributive justice, or people’s perception of the distribution status of valued resources, is particularly important in sociology; distributive justice is defined in a multidimensional way to deal with the public perception of justice in outcome and opportunity (Meng Tianguang, 2012). For instance, in today’s China, the question of property rights is essential, situated as it is at the intersection of state property, collective property and individual property. Since 1979 these rights have been re-arranged and now foster property ownership. Thus, in today’s Chinese society, a different kind of individual has arisen, an individual owning material and symbolic collective goods, social goods, but also recently privatised goods. This individual is gaining access to his own property, even if after a very different fashion to what has happened in Western Europe. Individuals who have managed to claim a place, a status and access to goods will benefit from social and public recognition. Those who have failed to fit in collective systems, or have been unable to gain protection from the collective body and are without many resources or support will not be able to attain property ownership and will not gain access to spaces of public recognition.

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Society and Intermediate Spaces in Europe

As contemporary Western European societies become more complex, there is a growing diversity of “alterity regimes” (Abeles, 2008). These regimes allow for different levels of legitimacy in the way recognition is handled – some regimes are more visible than others. Recognition is thus closely tied to visibility and invisibility. This notion of alterity regimes goes beyond the oppositions between the self and the Others, between Subject and object. Because of the plurality of the alterity regimes, different forms of alterity are visible beyond the “ordinary” subjectivity narrative. Recognition implies an alterity which is situationally constructed between individuals involved in roles within complex relationships in which a diversity of resources and involvement are made available. Three alterity regimes will be defined according to Roulleau-Berger (2012b):

• Social, economic and ethnical inequalities • Positively or negatively experienced forms of recognition • Strengthened or disjointed subjectivities in relation to the Others Weak alterity regimes occur when groups of populations with few resources or little protection provided by collective welfare systems experience social, economic or ethnical inequalities in low legitimacy social worlds and are unable to distribute much social or public recognition or social respect. In this case, individuals are involved in forced or conflicting socialisations, causing disjunctions in their subjectivities and a negatively based relationship to the Other. Repeated double bind situations in parallel with disjunction of subjectivities can lead to a loss of self and Others. Strong alterity regimes occur when groups of populations which are well endowed in resources and protected by collective welfare systems are engaged in social, economic and cultural affiliation processes in legitimate institutions distributing social and public recognition as well as social respect. Individuals are involved in different socialisations (familial, professional, etc.) in which their subjectivities are mutually strengthened within the relationship to the Other, thus producing respect towards the Others. Partially autonomous alterity regimes occur when groups of populations, which are rather poorly endowed in resources and identified as possessing only weak socially recognised abilities, manage to collectively and individually rally themselves, showing social creativity and even resistance by empowering themselves with the control of interstitial spaces. Intermediate spaces are then born, existing by more or less side-stepping the institutions in which double bind situations and conflicting recognition are dealt with. In these spaces,

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mutual recognition is slowly built based on shared norms, albeit norms which are different from those of the mainstream. Individual capacities are collectively claimed and submitted to public approval and evaluation. Intermediate spaces thus reveal how active minorities or invisibilised population groups can empower themselves and claim the “right to capacities” (Sen 2000), whether social or societal capacities. Alterity regimes are not completely independent of each other. It is possible to move from one to another and some of them are antagonistic because of the tensions linked to the processes of unequal differentiation. While developing along different paths, European modernities generate situated conflicts, instil competition between subjectivities concerning access to a “culture of the self” (Foucault 1975) but also foster the development of affinities and solidarities between some subjectivities. In Western Europe, individuals increasingly cross social spaces, each of which is subject to conflicting demands and requirements. Facing a diversity of normative orders, they have to deal with more and more double-bind situations (Bourdieu 1993; Castel 2009) in which the distinctions between recognition orders become blurred. Thus, the reflexive capacity of individuals to spot and frame social orders weakens. Those who face the most uncertainties, who are the most socially fragile and who most experience ethnic discrimination are caught in situations in which their socialisations conflict, in a double-bind situation in which they are deprived of control over the economic, social, material and symbolic dimensions of their lives. They are trapped in low legitimacy spaces, signifying a form of confinement in which the only recognition occurring is very circumstantial and invisible. Other population groups are forced to be mobile given their unstable status; this leads to economic injustices, sometimes coupled with cultural injustices. The double bind situations produce symbolic and material reversibilities in the biographies of the individuals who experience them. Material reversibility implies that social, economic and cultural situations can be turned upside down; for example, a young unemployed person is able to secure a job with a fixed-term contract at the end of which he is unemployed again, before being hired as a temporary employee. These reversibilities are subjectively experienced through a fluctuation between positive and negative forms of recognition, between social or self disrespect and social or self support. It is increasingly difficult for individuals to tune their different “selves”, to save face – a neverending activity, considering recognition is infinite in nature and the Other is less and less willing to grant recognition. These difficulties in recognising the Other bring to light conflicts between normative orders. These conflicts have a great influence on the capacity of individuals to keep control of the situation, to exert their motivations and resources and to deal with the situations

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resulting from the blurring of recognition grammars. Intermediate spaces are founded on certain specific alterity regimes, in which individuals become involved in producing positive reinforcement for each other’s subjectivities through shared norms concerning the distribution of symbolic goods. In some part of the social world, the ego-logical subject is thus carefully kept at bay. Intermediate space can be defined as a medium range concept (Passeron, 1991) at the point of intersection of a social order, an interactional order and a subjective order at a local and global level. Envisaging intermediate spaces requires one to begin with a conception of social organisation forged from the plurality of worlds and social orders governed by hierarchically organised norms. Intermediate spaces account for the complexity and above all the simultaneity of the phenomena of fragmentation and re-invention of things social and spatial by means of a frontal questioning of pairs such as inclusion/ exclusion within a conceptual space which is not binary but instead poly-centric and dynamic. Intermediate space enables issues to be envisaged: the porosity and non-porosity of material and symbolic boundaries between social worlds of unequal legitimacy. The concept of intermediate space is based upon a dynamic conception of the social domain which favours the joint appearance of the continuities and discontinuities of social reality, the irreversibilities and reversibilities of the Instituting eye, the distancing and deconstruction of social and intellectual categorisations concerning so-called places of deviance, marginality and social; economic and cultural relegation. This complete picture at the theoretical level of what was abridged or not conceived within a purely structuralist or normative conception can be attributed to the intention of studying the articulated plurality of the social domain and of breaking with a pseudo-coherence of this domain which condenses the places of connection and disconnection between social worlds (Roulleau-Berger, 2000). Envisaging intermediates spaces therefore involves a non-deterministic and dynamic theoretical position and requires the use of heterotopias (Foucault, 1967) and the distancing of the Instituter. It enables the re-apprehension of how actions, interactions and subjectivities intersect and combine with societal contexts taking varied forms of heterotopia as a starting point. Intermediate spaces multiply and are hierarchically organised according to the degrees of legitimacy in different societies. They enable an understanding of how societies work upon themselves by means of the interpretation of social, economic and spatial ordeals. Intermediate spaces are situated within societal contexts; however, they become global given the links and networks constructed by transnational circulations. The fundamental issue is thus the manufacturing of heterotopias in local and global contexts. The concept of intermediate space

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enables an understanding of how societies work upon themselves and interact with each other. Every contemporary society manufactures intermediate spaces but this is not envisaged in Chinese sociology. Intermediate space appears to be both local and global. Societal contexts have different effects upon the modes of construction and hierarchical organisation of the various intermediate spaces. In the contemporary societies of today – subjected to processes of increasing precariousness in salaried employment, the multiplication of inequalities, ethnic discrimination, urban segregation and the political distantiation of certain population categories – there is a diversification of intermediate spaces with their forms varying according to local and societal configurations. They are constructed in accumulations of graded disparities with spaces of legitimacy and are positioned between social, urban economic and political institutions which produce liminal socialisations based on social practices perceived as minor and specific to populations – subjected to vulnerability, precariousness and exclusion – facing both collective and individual social, economic and spatial ordeals. Populations conceived or represented as being invisible – with neither competences nor capabilities for reflexivity, engaged in the struggle to gain access to a position – are rendered visible by the use of the concept of intermediate spaces. 4

Diffused Religiousness in China

If intermediate space is a concept used by European sociologists, the concept of diffused religiousness is only used in China but related to Western sociological theory. Beyond the variation in rituals and the diversity of individuals and localities, religious practices in today’s China seem to enable the finding of the fundamental states revealed by Durkheim: At the foundation of all systems of beliefs and of all cults there ought necessarily to be a certain number of representations or conceptions and of ritual attitudes which, in spite of the diversity of forms which they have taken, have the same objective significance and perform the same functions everywhere. Zhuo Xinping (2008) examines the importance of moral life in religious traditions, explaining that the decline of Maoist institutions has created a symbolic void leading to political places giving way to religious beliefs. Yang Meijian (2004), for example, shows that the thinking of Durkheim is highly pertinent to

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the study of the religious faith of the Hui minority. Other researchers also recognise the current relevance of Durkheim’s Les Formes Elementaires de la Vie Religieuse (Cui Jianming, 1996; Jin Ze, 2008). The Chinese sociologist Fenggang Yang (2006) has advanced the hypothesis of a fragmented religious market constituted by three sub-markets: red, grey and black. The red market contains the religious institutions under State control; the black market contains those practices deemed illegal by the Chinese state; and the grey market contains religious activities which oscillate between legal and illegal but which have practically always existed in China. This leads to the issue of the production of moral economies constructed out of the relationships between religious practices and civil society. Fan Lizhu (2003) shows how – in a context of thirty years of major social and economic transformation – civic associations are formed upon the basis of the founding links of rural and family communities engaged in lives regularly punctuated by ritual activities. Religious practices provide individuals with moral resources in a new consumer society in which the force of socialist values has weakened. Wu Chun (2004) deals with religions as places of symbolic production favouring access to the culture of the self. In this context, religion recovers all its value as a moral resource, which is as valid as other social, economic and cultural resources. In fully recognising this resource, authors such as Pan Yue (2002) have revisited the notions of Durkheim, such as the moral community, which used to be considered nontransferable, in order to focus on the production of meaning and moral values. This theoretical work is inspired by the more general reflection concerning the production of meaning which individuals give to what they do in a context of major transformation. Here, sociologists re-examine the religious issue linked to the political issue employing ideas taken form other researchers such as Charles Taylor and his notion of “post-Durkheimism”. The theory developed by Durkheim in his Les Formes Elementaires de la Vie Religieuse was overlooked between 1949 and 1979 before being re-employed in its entirety after 1980. Today it has a plurality of complex and partial epistemological uses which reveal continuous discontinuities between Chinese sociology and European sociology (Roulleau-Berger, Liu Zhenghai, 2012). According to Gao Shining (1992, 2004) the sociology of religion in China was constructed in three stages: 1.

In the early 1980s, religion was still thought of as “the opium of the people”. Sociologists were asked to provide the answer to the question of whether China was distinguished from other countries by a specific cosmology.

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2.

In the mid 1980s, religious practices provided the material of an autonomous area of knowledge within a context of opening up to Western theories. The works of Max Weber such as L’éthique protestante et l’esprit du capitalisme (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) and Confucianisme et taoïsme (The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism) were translated. Works were published concerning the relationship between religion and socialism. After 1992, sociologists contributed to the debate on the place of beliefs in the Maoist era and later to the debate on the relationship between religion and economic development in the context of the socialist market economy (Zhuo Xinping, 2008, 2012). Given the blossoming of the various traditions in China (Confucianism, Catholicism and Protestantism…), more and more researchers have taken an interest in their development. The conditions for the expansion of the sociology of religion remain highly dependent upon the political context.

3.

Yang Qingqun (1961) considers that instituted religion is based upon theological cultures, rituals, values and autonomous organisations independent from any lay organisation; from this point of view, Buddhism, Islam and Catholicism in China can be considered to be religious institutions. Durkheim explained how so-called primitive Australian societies and modern societies can be differentiated or not from each other according to the form taken by this division of the world into sacred and profane; moreover, religion can only be apprehended by means of the moral authority which it constitutes (“A society has everything it needs to awaken the spirits, by the sole means of the action it exerts upon them, the feeling of the divine: for it is to its members what god is to the faithful”). But certain Chinese sociologists, however, do not consider that the opposition between sacred and profane is meaningful in the apprehending of the religious issue in China. There are next to no places in China without temples, altars and sacred spaces which are highly integrated within frameworks of action and collective memory… This reality is the manifestation of a diffuse but permanent presence of what is represented, experienced and perceived as religion in Chinese society. The boundaries between sacred and profane seem blurred and the distinction between saints and men seems meaningless (Liu Zhengai, 2009). The sociologist Yang Qingkun (1961) developed the concept of Diffused Religion in opposition to instituted religion in order to account for religious forms which might appear blurred to Western sociologists. At an early stage he posed the question of the existence of religion in China and concluded that no strongly instituted religion – except Buddhism – was visible during the

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various historical periods while asserting that beliefs and religious practices were alive in Chinese society, past and present (Fan Lizhu, Whitehead, J.D., Whitehead, E.E., 2010). He also challenged the Western point of view in which the absence of a single and transcendental god in China is deemed equivalent to the absence of religion. He sees religion as a continuum between systems of profane beliefs and theist beliefs linked to divinities subtending religious organisations. The concept of diffused religion is characterised by its highly contextualised form which defines a local order to which individuals conform through the practice of circumstantiated rites; a concept which reveals continuous discontinuities in sociological knowledge. From this perspective, religions in China multiply according to the places which produce local orders constructed upon cults which differ according to spaces and temporalities. Chinese society is conceived upon the basis of a plurality of local orders and a diversity of ritual practices; and the question of a global order constructed by and constructing this set of local orders is not situated where Durkheim would have placed the social order within a holistic perspective. To state that popular religions in China are diffused religions means that, both now and then, they refer to the family, the clan and village life organised around cults located within the daily activities of everyday life rather than alongside these activities within specifically religious temporalities. This therefore involves the values of Chinese civilisation, such as the respect for elders and ancestors, in order to understand the interlocking of religious life and ordinary life. When examining traditional Chinese society, Chinese sociologists represent and conceive religious, family and civic lives together in their inter-relationships rather than as disjointed entities. The practices of popular religions in China thus signify the non exclusive membership of an identified religious group whereas, in monotheist traditions it is difficult to simultaneously be Christian, Jew and Muslim, for example. Here popular religious practices are conceived in terms of multi-affiliation to diversified systems of beliefs. However, this conception of religion as a moving, labile, social form in traditional society still appears to have current relevance. More fundamentally, Chinese sociologists think first of all in terms of processes, dynamics, combinations and inter-relationships before thinking in terms of statuses, divisions and rankings. Wu Chun (2004) shows how Chinese religions do not really produce collective consciousness. Li Fangying (2006) considers that Durkheim pushes the relationship between socialisation and religion or between social solidarity and religion too far while insufficiently conceptualising the relationship between religion and social conflict. Religious rituals and symbols are here

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included in the Durkheimian analysis in order to understand what produces moral community and social linking in the normative sense but, at no point, are they employed as elements which might contribute to processes of disintegration or social fragmentation. For Chen Changwen and Chen Juan (2010) the religious ideal and the social movement act upon each other and can produce as much social concord as social discord. We are thus invited to apprehend these organised yet weakly instituted religious forms “at rest” without referring them to orders of weak or strong legitimacy. Here religion is conceived as being in a malleable, dynamic and ever-moving space in which deeds and gestures, which are always localised, always deployed. But above all, if diffused religion can appear to be a structured social form, it is conceived as intertwined, linked and combined with other social forms whereas, in his definition of religion, Durkheim saw physical and symbolic boundaries between the worlds of the sacred and the profane no mater how contiguous and contagious they might be for each other. In this chapter we have drawn lines of theoretical discontinuities around the following important topics so as to understand the characteristics and transformations in European and Chinese societies. Public space refers to a different social construction in European and Chinese sociologies. The fight for recognition is related to subjectivation in different ways in the two contexts. The production of intermediate spaces in contemporary societies seems to be a European singularity, and the concept of diffracted religiousness seems to be a Chinese singularity.

Conclusion Conclusion

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Conclusion At the end of this work we have seen the appearance of spaces of transnational knowledge organised around the conjunctions and disjunctions between universes of situated knowledge localised in various places in the European and Chinese worlds. The use of the concept of Post-Western Sociologies can be seen as a proposition for the transformation of a global scientific hierarchy elaborated upon the basis of scientific normativities constructed upon a foundation of Western hegemonies. Post-Western Sociology is constructed through the shaping of transnational – but not universal – epistemological spaces. Although the exact or natural sciences may exist in the universal domain, the social sciences are defined by diversified theories and shared methods as well as singularities given particular specific histories and local political and intellectual traditions. These transnational spaces appear at an intermediate level between the global and local levels. Sociologies adopt different tones according to regional, national and civilisational contexts (Sztompka, 2010). We have seen, for example, how historical trajectories differently influence the analysis of urban hierarchies and internal boundaries in Chinese and European cities. This is also the case for the approaches adopted in the study of social conflicts and non-equivalent forms of collective action. We have understood that European and Chinese sociologists can develop similar sociological analyses for contrasted realities as well as divergent analyses for realities which appear to be similar. We have also seen how European, especially French, intellectual traditions tend to establish a certain type of analysis framework in areas in which Chinese sociologists adopt an approach given the processes of discipline re-creation and development at work in China. The production of reciprocal socialisations in a Post-Western space requires that the co-present sociologists are able to recognise national styles and local research practices. In this work we have instituted an exchange between European and Chinese sociologies which has enabled us to define Post-Western Sociologies as being multi-situated and shaped by: contexts, regions and their histories; spaces and their geographies; States and their political regimes. The fundamental concepts of domination, inequalities, resistances, social norms, social networks, institutions, individuation, subjectivation, etc seem to multiply assuming differentiated and situated forms while they also seem to simultaneously reconfigure in a trans-societal and transnational space. Multi-situated sociologies challenge binary reasoning, particularly the idea of an I (the West) and

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the other (the rest of the world). Syed Farid Alatas (2010) has already purposed universalising sociology in a non-Eurocentric orientation in which the subject (the West) and the object (the East) disappear. In this conception of breaking with colonial thinking, the boundaries between Chinese and European sociologies become blurred erasing the dividing line between we and the others, a line which has produced binary reasoning concerning how contemporary societies are conceived (Bancel, Bernault, Blanchard, Boubeker, Mbembe, Vergès, 2010). Here, the point has been the construction of relationships of equivalence between places of meaning and the meanings produced in Chinese sociology and European sociology and the elaboration of new assemblages of thinking situated in near and distant spaces. Where splits, divisions and breaks between European and Chinese so­ciolo­ gies could be expected discontinuous continuities and continuous dis­con­tinui­ties have indeed appeared between these sociologies; these result from a history of social production of knowledge based upon practical knowledge apparatuses. In the course of this book, we have investigated the modes of producing sociological knowledge and the places where epistemological blanks form between these sociologies in context. However, these intersecting ex­changes between Chinese and European sociologies have left an issue in a latent state, namely the enigma, to use Kuhn’s term, that is the issue of the status of failure in the construction of knowledge in the human sciences which signifies examining how dissonances between phenomena and explanatory frameworks are formed, understood and translated. If transnational theoretical spaces are constructed from circulations of concepts and theories, from diasporic dynamics and from hybridisation and crossbreeding (Abélès, 2008; Laplantine, 2009), they are given order and hierarchy according to local and global normative orders which make certain spaces appear more legitimate than others. They challenge the division into geographic and cultural areas which has oriented research in the social sciences and contributed to the expression of Western intellectuals to the detriment of Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Arab and other non-Western intellectuals on the international scene. While avoiding the pitfalls of relativist thinking, this approach contributes to the deconstruction of the oppositions between the self and the Other and the here and elsewhere, as well as to the construction of transcultural social sciences comprising contextualised heterogeneous knowledge which is made, unmade and re-created in the assemblages of dispersed knowledge. We have witnessed the appearance of points of bifurcation, encounter and rupture between plural sociologies which force us to re-examine: normativity and scientific cumulativity in a globalised space; the relationships between local knowledge and global knowledge; and the relationships between Western knowledge and non-Western knowledge.

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Post-Western Sociology has become a simultaneously local and global critical conception challenging the established boundaries of certain scientific territories while also taking into consideration new forms of competition and domination of certain conceptions and ways of thinking over others. The geography of non-hegemonic conceptions and ways of thinking is built upon critical sociologies. Intellectual figures, especially critical intellectuals, who used to have little visibility, have come to occupy the international sociological scene leading us to envisage that the former centres and “margins of knowledge” have changed status and upset the established boundaries. If, in the AngloSaxon world, the centre of gravity of critical theories shifted in the 1980s, other centres of critical sociology have multiplied and aggregated in regional arenas, notably within the frameworks of the scientific forums of Chinese, Japanese and Korean sociology associations... This should be set against the knowledge that one of the major characteristics of the new critical theories in this geography of Post-Western Sociologies is Marxism’s loss of hegemony (Keucheyan, 2010) and the appearance of other critical conceptions. If sociologies appear connected (Bhambra, 2014), at certain moments they can also appear to be disconnected or to connect only to disconnect and reconnect to the rhythm of local or world events and according to the effects of the circulations of ideas, norms and knowledge which may be diffused more rapidly during certain periods and more slowly during others.. Even if the mosaic metaphor allows the assertion of the equal value of all cultures, their right to exist and flourish and the existence of multiple paths to knowledge, it does not necessarily mean reciprocal exchanges of knowledge, concepts, methods and practices (Connell, 2010). The use of the concept of connection-disconnection-reconnection enables us to escape from the vision of a global mosaic of co-present sociologies organised around fixed stable indigenous knowledge without any real points of contact between them. In this process of the internationalisation of sociology, specific spaces and shared common spaces are formed from situated intellectual traditions, exchanges, borrowings and appropriations of produced and inherited knowledge, as well as from rejections, omissions and re-exportations of sociological knowledge which sometimes seems universal and sometimes singular. If some scientific traditions appear to be visible, the places of controversy appear to be more or less visible in the Post-Western space. Cultural variations in interpretative flexibility in the production of sociological knowledge require reflection. Within the relativist perspective, the analysis of a controversy sheds light upon the flexibility of interpretations and closure processes, whereas within the Latour perspective it reveals processes of stabilisation of knowledge through an accumulation of asymmetries (Vinck, 2007). We posit the hypothesis of the cohabitation of this double process in Post-Western Sociologies.

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Sociologists no longer work in near or distant terrains, they work on one or more multi-situated terrains. They also accept to conceive movements, circulations, displacements and mobilities at he same time as stable social structures, institutions, social groups and individuals. The diversity of multisituated field-practices enables an understanding of how concepts are manufactured anf why certain concepts elaborated in non-hegemonic places can appear less legitimate than those elaborated in the West. Empirical research is anchored in multiple spatial locations. Sociologists are acutely faced with the issue of the adjustment of methods to research terrains and the regular challenging of knowledge linked to terrain-related science. The difficulties of the sociologist’s profession assume their maximum intensity in the fields of inequalities and social injustices, terrains in which disagreements, conflicts and social, economic and political tensions are produced. These situations force the sociologist to develop new methodological knowledge in order to develop a scientific procedure and produce new research postures. Different local and global scenes of production, explanation, diffusion, and reception of this knowledge constitute the venues for the interventions of researchers who manufacture, implement and transform terrain-related sciences within the framework of contrasted institutional, symbolic, material and political configurations. Theories perceived as dominant in how the world is conceived can no longer appear to be dominant. The concepts and analyses advanced by Chinese sociologists underlie sociological practices which – literally – are strongly anchored in the terrain; this situation reminds us how much the sociologist’s profession signifies testing social, economic, political and moral situations. This testing of research terrains produces new insights, perspectives and theories of things social from China but which could also come from India, Japan, Korea, Taïwan, Indonesia … and other countries which have been subjected to Western hegemonies. Finally, the boundaries of the spaces of sociologists still remain controlled and under the close or distant surveillance of the Nation-State. Indeed, political contexts act upon the degrees of permeability of these boundaries; for example, the democratic states favour their porosity whereas authoritarian states block the processes of the circulation of ideas which nevertheless pursue their route. According to political temporalities items of social science knowledge produced in varied contexts can meet and fertilise each other or be assigned to a given place. Here, we can see how democratic regimes and authoritarian regimes produce organisations of work and research based on scientific normativities which are less immediate in an authoritarian context than in a democratic context. However, if we use the theses of democratic authoritarianism and authoritarian democracies (Dabène, Geisser, Massardier,

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2008) we can no longer conceive the issue of scientific normativities according to a disjunctive mode which would signify “open normativities” in democratic contexts and “closed normativities” in authoritarian contexts. The manufacture of sociological knowledge implies an institutional research landscape (governmental research organisations, academies of science, universities, research institutes, research teams, etc), systems for allocating material and financial resources via national and international programs, structures for the communication and diffusion of research outcomes, publication formats, journals, and scientific publishers... Sociological knowledge is produced within the framework of institutions and organisations in which a division of scientific work is implemented, in which roles, statuses and functions are defined, with which individual and collective actors engage according to various modes, actors who are engaged in variable degrees in the process of producing sociological knowledge. In these normed spaces of scientific work, research issues and programs are defined, scientific choices in cooperation processes are made, personal social networks and scientific social networks at national and international levels are formed, and institutional, material and symbolic resources are distributed. Chinese and European sociologists are positioned according to various modes in these forms of material, social and political research organisation, which act upon the modes of definition of enquiry protocols, the conditions of access to terrains of investigation, the unfurling of empirical research and the choice of methods. This leads to the posing of the question of new epistemological constraints in varied contexts of justification in which the question of “normal science” is incessantly asked and repeated. The issue of the definition and redefinition of the boundaries of science and disciplines appears to be the object of real scientific stakes. Sociologies appear to be sciences translating local societies and we are invited to consider both the local and transnational dimensions of the sociologist’s work taking local research situations as a starting point. Here the norms of the sociologist’s practices appear to be transnational and their association and combination redefine what makes scientific communities. These relevant scientific communities facilitate and encourage the circulation of knowledge and open transversal work spaces which no longer respect the symbolic boundaries linked to the history of Western hegemonies.

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222

Index

Index

Index Bifurcations 106–109, 155, 182 Capitalism 5, 7, 23, 73, 75, 77, 80, 82, 108, 110, 114, 117, 124, 149, 178 Chicago School 20, 27, 30–31, 33, 41, 99, 156 Chinese sociology 12–13, 19–21, 22–24, 25–27, 28–29, 31, 33, 36, 41, 43, 111–113, 125, 143, 146, 151, 154, 160, 162–163, 165, 176–177, 182 Citizenship 23, 77, 103, 111, 114, 123, 125, 127–128, 134–135, 140, 169 Civil society 32, 70, 112, 118, 177 Class consciousness 117 Collective action 9, 27, 32–33, 36, 44, 72, 85, 101, 107, 111–113, 115, 117- 119, 119–121, 121–129, 131, 148, 161, 181 Democracy 61, 75, 111, 113, 133, 166, 191, 198, 199, 207, 215 Discrimination 3, 47, 59, 70–72, 74, 76–77, 79, 82–83, 85–86, 101–104, 113–114, 120, 122–125, 144, 152–153, 166, 174, 176, 195, 203, 209, 213 Domination 2–5, 10, 15, 19, 35–36, 39, 43, 71, 77, 83–85, 98, 101, 110, 114–115, 118, 124, 129, 136, 143–150, 153, 165, 169, 172, 181, 183 Employment 20, 23, 50, 60–61, 73, 75–77, 79, 81–86, 86–91, 93, 94–95, 95–96, 100–104, 109–112, 114–115, 122–124, 126, 144, 146, 149, 152, 157–158, 166–167, 176 Environmental injustice 130, 131, 133–134 Epistemology 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9;13;14, 15, 16; 17, 25, 26, 29, 32, 33, 43, 81, 181, 182, 185 European sociology 4, 9, 12, 28, 33, 41, 43, 125, 132, 144, 155, 156, 160, 165, 167, 170, 177, 182 Flexibility 12, 73–75, 77, 80–82, 84–87, 98, 101–102, 110, 116, 149, 183 Gender inequality 82–83, 97–98, 102, 105, 108, 152–153, 172 Global studies 3, 4

Guanxi 32, 84, 84n, 85, 147, 158, 158n, 162–163 Hukou 59, 65, 76, 84, 86–88, 94–95 Individuation 9, 35, 50, 93, 95, 97, 99, 101–103, 105–109, 159–162, 165, 170–171, 181 Inequalities 9, 10, 22, 23, 54, 58, 61, 63, 66, 68, 70, 72, 73, 75–76, 82–83, 86, 93, 95–97, 99–101;103, 105–108, 111–112, 116–117, 123–125, 127–129, 130–134, 136, 139, 143, 144, 146, 148, 149–153, 158, 160, 165, 166, 167, 171, 172, 173, 176, 181, 184  Informal economy 60, 70, 71, 75, 76, 77, 85, 87, 98, 105, 107, 109, 127, 148, 159 Injustice 3, 8, 9, 13, 14, 16, 47, 58, 91, 99, 115, 116, 117, 123, 124, 125, 130, 131, 133, 134, 136, 148, 171, 172, 174, 184 Insecure jobs 61, 70, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 82, 86, 98, 101, 123, 149 Insecurity 58, 73, 99, 101, 102, 107, 110, 111, 119, 125, 147 Institutions 8, 9, 14, 30, 31, 35, 58, 70, 71, 73, 77, 78, 80, 82, 83, 87, 88, 93, 99, 102, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 121, 124, 126, 131, 132, 134, 137, 138, 139, 149, 150; 155, 161, 172, 173, 176, 177, 178, 181, 184, 185 Internal migrations 23, 93, 94, 95, 98, 100, 109, 110, 154 International migrations 69, 93, 97, 98, 100 Intersectionality 83, 133, 153, 154; Knowledge 1–7, 9–10, 12–19, 21, 23, 25–26, 31, 33–34, 37–42, 48, 50, 54, 72, 97, 103, 112, 120, 131, 132, 134, 137, 138, 140–143, 163, 166, 178–179, 181–185 Labour markets 23, 59, 61, 65, 70, 74–77, 80, 82–87, 89–91, 93–94, 98–102, 104, 106, 109, 122, 150, 153 Market economy 58, 75, 78, 80, 83, 90, 111, 115, 127, 150, 151, 155, 157, 160, 178 Methodological cosmopolitanism 15, 43, 44 Middle-classes 58, 109–110, 118

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/9789004309982_015

Index Migrant workers 23, 45, 47, 53, 57–58, 61, 71, 77, 84, 94, 99–102, 109, 115, 117–118, 147, 150 Mobility 10, 23, 31, 57–58, 61–63, 65, 70, 77, 83, 86–87, 89, 99–100, 102, 106–110, 139, 143, 150, 154–155, 158, 163 Moral economies 48–51, 72, 114–116, 126, 128, 135–137, 147–148, 177 Multi-situated inequalities 108, 144 Post-colonial studies 2–3, 7, 10, 13, 16–17, 28, 153 Poverty 20, 22–23, 49, 58, 60, 66, 68, 74–75, 88, 96, 99, 105, 124, 127–128, 139–140, 146, 166 Public space 10, 23, 64, 66, 67–68, 84, 101, 111–112, 117–119, 121, 123–125, 128, 130, 140, 145, 166–169, 180 Racial violence 19, 23, 48, 85, 113, 114, 125, 129, 152 Recognition 2–3, 5–6, 9–10, 13, 17, 19, 28, 32–34, 36–37, 48–49, 52, 54, 65–66, 70/73, 75, 89–90, 100, 108, 110, 113–118, 122–128, 135, 137, 140, 145, 148, 153, 166–175, 180 Resistances 6, 10, 28, 32, 69–70, 72, 76, 104, 107, 117–118, 120–121, 143–148, 154, 162, 165, 173, 181 Reticular dominations 144 Risk society 86, 120, 130, 166, 168 Segmentation 17, 59, 70, 77, 83, 84, 86–87, 93, 99 Social capital 10, 58, 80, 94–96, 100, 103, 108, 140, 143, 156–158, 165 Global individuation 108.

223 Social conflict 9, 33, 49, 72, 111, 116, 118, 122, 123, 125, 126, 128, 148–149, 160, 166, 167, 179, 181 Social networks 10, 79–80, 96, 103, 143, 156–157, 165, 181, 185 Social protests 71, 101, 117, 119, 120, 122, 129, 132, 148 Social rights 23, 58–59, 65, 74–75, 77–78, 82–85, 99, 102, 111–115, 117–119, 121–122, 125, 135, 147–148, 167–168, 172 Social stratification 10, 23, 33, 57, 77, 89, 93, 109, 143, 149, 150–152, 154–155, 157 Solidarity 76, 100, 103–105, 111–112, 120, 125, 127–128, 169, 179 Spatial capital 96–97, 103–104, 110 State 2, 7, 9, 14–16, 19–21, 23, 29–32, 38, 41–42, 45, 57, 67–69, 75–78, 87–88, 90, 93–95, 106, 111–119, 121, 126, 128, 132, 134–135, 146–148, 150, 153, 155, 159, 168, 172, 176–177, 179, 181–182, 184 Structural processes 10, 28–30, 35, 44, 50–51, 88, 93, 106–107, 121, 143, 155, 158, 161 Survival strategies 71, 95 Symbolic violence 39, 48, 85, 113, 125, 128 Trust 45, 53, 84, 84n, 85, 94, 103–105, 111, 125, 131–132, 139, 157, 158, 162, 163 Uncertainty 9, 18, 23, 67, 72–73, 75, 79, 96, 105–106, 134, 169 Underclass 23, 59, 60, 63, 110, 117, 150 Unemployment 20, 23, 50, 73, 75–77, 86–88, 90–91, 95, 101, 112, 122–124, 144, 146, 149, 166 Upper-classes 57, 58, 61, 62, 88, 110, 150,   Urban integration 58, 99.