Title | Pursuing and then Wasting a Cadre Identity: Career Development of a China’s SOE Worker Under the Reform |
| Author(s) | - Xu Kang, Department of Sociology, Lund University, Sweden
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| Publication Name | Asia Pacific Career Development Journal, Vol 4, No 1 |
| Publication Date | March, 2021 |
| Download | Full text (PDF) |
| Abstract | This article depicts the career development of China’s state-owned enterprise (SOE) workers. Following the life story approach, this article examines the changing meaning of “cadre identity,” a political identity recorded in Chinese SOE workers’ personnel files, on the career development under the context of China’s market reform. It shows that the importance of cadre identity on the SOE worker’s career development has gradually weakened, as the reform progresses. It is mainly due to the loss of cadre identity’s scarcity caused by the new institutions brought by various reform policies over time. An institutional culture with “guanxi” at its core is revealed through the analysis of a Chinese SOE worker’s career experience in Daqing Oilfield. The career development of workers in SOEs highly depends on the institutional culture, which encourages building guanxi network with the leaders in power in the condition that formal and informal institutions are always in unstable states under the reform. |
