Participatory Paternalism

2019 ◽  
pp. 53-81
Author(s):  
Joel Andreas
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Technical Innovation ◽  
Shop Floor ◽  
Job Tenure ◽  
Work Unit ◽  
Unit System ◽  
Participatory Institutions ◽  
Industrial Governance ◽  
Institutional Foundations

Chapter 3 describes the institutional foundations of the Chinese work unit system and the practices of worker participation in the early 1960s, after the system was fully established and before the onset of the Cultural Revolution. Participatory institutions included self-managing teams on the shop floor, technical innovation groups, factory elections, representative congresses, and other mechanisms designed to solicit suggestions from below, learn about and defuse employees’ grievances and concerns, and mobilize workers to monitor and criticize factory leaders. Despite high levels of participation, predicated on lifetime job tenure and relatively egalitarian distribution, industrial governance was democratic only in a very limited sense. The party insisted on maintaining a political monopoly and harshly suppressed any hint of independent political activity. Not only was the scope of workers’ influence restricted largely to the shop floor, but they also had little autonomy. Although participation was extensive, the system was more paternalistic than democratic.

Disenfranchised

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel Andreas
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Industrial Restructuring ◽  
Shop Floor ◽  
Job Tenure ◽  
Factory Workers ◽  
Unit System ◽  
Participatory Institutions ◽  
Work Units

Disenfranchised recounts the tumultuous events that have shaped and reshaped factory politics in China since the 1949 Revolution. The book develops a theoretical framework consisting of two dimensions—industrial citizenship and autonomy—to explain changing authority relations in workplaces and uses interviews with workers and managers to provide a shop-floor perspective. Under the work unit system, in place from the 1950s to the 1980s, lifetime job tenure and participatory institutions gave workers a strong form of industrial citizenship, but constraints on autonomous collective action made the system more paternalistic than democratic. Called “masters of the factory,” workers were pressed to participate actively in self-managing teams and employee congresses but only under the all-encompassing control of the factory party committee. Concerned that party cadres were becoming a “bureaucratic class,” Mao experimented with means to mobilize criticism from below, even inciting—during the Cultural Revolution—a worker insurgency that overthrew factory party committees. Unwilling to allow workers to establish permanent autonomous organizations, however, Mao never came up with institutionalized means of making factory leaders accountable to their subordinates. The final chapters recount the process of industrial restructuring, which has transformed work units into profit-oriented enterprises, eliminating industrial citizenship and reducing workers to hired hands dependent on precarious employment and subject to highly coercive discipline. The book closes with an overview of parallel developments around the globe, chronicling the rise and fall of an era of industrial citizenship.

Reforming the Work Unit System

2019 ◽  
pp. 166-191
Author(s):  
Joel Andreas
Keyword(s):  
Temporary Employment ◽  
Substantial Influence ◽  
Job Tenure ◽  
Work Unit ◽  
Unit System ◽  
System P ◽  
Original Class ◽  
The Impact ◽  
New Distribution ◽  
Egalitarian Ethos

Chapter 7 looks at the impact on factory governance of the initial reforms carried out during the first decade and a half after Mao’s death in 1976. These reforms left the fundamental features of the work unit system—public ownership and permanent job tenure—in place, and institutional forms of participation, including staff and workers congresses, were revived and enhanced. During the “long 1980s” workers enjoyed substantial influence, especially with regard to the distribution of wages and bonuses, housing, and other welfare entitlements. Although the Chinese Communist Party had by then renounced its original class-leveling mission, workers effectively resisted new distribution policies that violated the egalitarian ethos that had long prevailed under the work unit system. The latter years of this period, however, also marked the beginning of the erosion of industrial citizenship as temporary employment was expanded and the power of the factory director was reinforced in the second half of the decade.

Disenfranchised

2019 ◽  
pp. 192-219
Author(s):  
Joel Andreas
Keyword(s):  
Great Majority ◽  
The State ◽  
Industrial Restructuring ◽  
Self Management ◽  
Shop Floor ◽  
Employment Relations ◽  
Job Tenure ◽  
Work Unit ◽  
Precarious Employment ◽  
Hired Labor

Chapter 8 examines the consequences of industrial restructuring, which began in the early 1990s and continues to the present day. The great majority of state-run and collective enterprises have been privatized, and all firms—including those in which the state has retained a stake—have been turned into shareholding companies. Tens of millions of workers have lost their jobs, and permanent job tenure has been replaced by much more precarious employment relations. As work unit communities have been transformed into profit-oriented enterprises, workers have been reduced to hired labor, losing their status as legitimate stakeholders and eroding the foundations for workplace participation. Shop-floor self-management has been replaced by harsh disciplinary regimes enforced by bonuses, fines, and the threat of dismissal, and staff and workers congresses have been sidelined. Workers, whose influence is now explicitly seen as compromising efforts to maximize profits, have been disenfranchised.

Cultural Revolution Conflict in the Villages

1998 ◽  
Vol 153 ◽  
pp. 82-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Unger
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
High Tide ◽  
Urban School ◽  
Work Unit ◽  
Basic Level ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

During the “high tide” of the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1968, almost every urban school and work unit erupted in dissension and factionalism, very often spiralling into violence. Amidst exaggerated charges, a great many basic-level leaders were toppled from below and humiliated – or worse. In every city, so-called Rebel and Conservative factions emerged from the mêlée and fought each other in the streets.

Civil Strife and the Growth of Trade Union Unity: The Case of Ireland

1973 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 407-431
Author(s):  
Charles McCarthy
Keyword(s):  
Trade Union ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Shop Floor ◽  
Annual Conference ◽  
Trade Union Movement ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Political Role ◽  
Union Movement ◽  
Difficult Time

A MAJOR CLAIM OF THE TRADE UNION MOVEMENT IN THIS DIFFICULT time in Northern Ireland is that they have ‘prevented the spread of riot and disturbance into the workplace’. The claim has been consistently made and with growing emphasis since the troubles began, and Norman Kennedy at last year's annual conference of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions called it the one beacon of hope, this ‘maintaining unity of the workers, Catholic and Protestant, on the shop floor’ in what he described as largely a conflict of worker against worker, of a working-class community divided along sectarian lines. This is associated with a related claim that trade union recommendations on social and political change have a special legitimacy because the leadership is close to the people who are involved in the conflict. This political role, essentially non-party, is seen to be more significant and extensive than the traditional political activity of the trade union movement.

scholarly journals ¿Revolución cultural en Colombia?: Impresos y representaciones, 1968-1972

2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (10) ◽  
pp. 92-128
Author(s):  
Álvaro Acevedo Tarazona
Keyword(s):  
University Students ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Ideological Struggle ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Cultural Magazines ◽  
Main Ideas ◽  
The University ◽  
Discursive Representations

El artículo analiza las incidencias de la revolución cultural planetaria de finales de los años sesenta y principios de los años setenta en Colombia. En esos años los universitarios experimentaron una intensa actividad intelectual y política por intermedio de la lectura de revistas culturales y libros de izquierda, sin descontar nuevas modalidades de comunicación que desempeñaron el papel de difusoras de contenidos abiertamente revolucionarios, contestatarios y contraculturales. La justificación de la guerra revolucionaria comunista, la lucha ideológica en contra de la cultura capitalista o la defensa de los nuevos paradigmas del mundo artístico y ético, fueron algunas de las ideas que con más fuerza circularon en la juventud da aquel periodo. Así, el autor analiza las principales ideas, nociones, conceptos y representaciones que modificaron o motivaron las prácticas juveniles, y que esos jóvenes conocieron principalmente por intermedio de las revistas culturales y los libros más importantes del mercado editorial.Palabras clave: representaciones discursivas, revistas, libros, revolución cultural, estudiantes universitarios.  Cultural Revolution in Colombia?: Forms and Representations, 1968-1972Abstract            The article analyses the incidents of the planetary Cultural Revolution at the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies in Colombia. In those years, the university students experienced an intense intellectual and political activity regarding the cultural magazines and leftist books, undiscounted new modalities of media, which played the role of broadcasters for open revolutionary content, protesters and countercultural. The Communist Revolutionary War justification, the ideological struggle against capitalist culture, or the artistic and ethical new paradigms defense, were some of the ideas that more circulated on youth people of this period. For this, the author analyzes the main ideas, notions, concepts and representations that could modify or motivate youth practices, and that these young people met mainly through cultural magazines and the most important books of the publishing market.Keywords: discursive representations, magazines, books, Cultural Revolution, university students.

Leninist Reforms, Workplace Cleavages, and Teachers in the Chinese Cultural Revolution

2005 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eddy U
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Market Reform ◽  
Shop Floor ◽  
General Interest ◽  
Communist State ◽  
Stable Pattern ◽  
Collective Resistance ◽  
Personal Welfare ◽  
Traditional Image

Andrew Walder's “neo-traditional” image of Chinese socialism has profoundly shaped understanding of China before market reform. It has also influenced the broader debate on the nature of ‘actually existing socialisms.’ Walder argues that the Communist state dominated the industrial workforce through the institutionalization of organized dependence and clientelism in the workplace. State-appointed management tightly controlled access to goods, services, and positions and used these resources to reward cooperative workers and activists. Their actions created webs of clientelist relations but also a chasm on the shop floor, as ordinary workers resented the activists for acting against workers' general interest. But since ordinary workers could rarely obtain what they wanted beyond the factory, they, too, curried favors from factory officials. Walder observes that the growth of clientelist relations and personal ties within the industrial enterprise dampened workers' capacity for collective resistance and their pursuit of their personal welfare further depoliticized the working class. As a result, workers exhibited “a stable pattern of tacit acceptance and active cooperation” toward Communist political rule.

scholarly journals Paper Affairs: Discipline by the Dossier in a Mao-Era Work Unit

Administory ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-140
Author(s):  
J. M. Chris Chang
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Work Unit ◽  
Case File ◽  
Work Units ◽  
Love Letters ◽  
Extramarital Relationship ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Investigative Process

AbstractThis article examines how dossier files informed the handling of personnel misconduct in Chinese work units using an investigation of adultery as a case study. By the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), the disciplinary functions of the dossier system were an embedded feature of social control in the work unit, partially shifting responsibility for policing petty crime to local administrators. In this case, the revelation of an extramarital relationship in 1974 set off a bureaucratic operation to produce documentary proof of the alleged wrongdoing. The thick case file prepared by the work unit investigators grew to include a tranche of seized love letters, a series of dubious confessions, and detailed bureaucratic reports. The preparation of evidence bound for the dossier demonstrates the extent to which the demands of documentation formed a distinct end of the investigative process, while revealing how people and paper were mobilized to deal with a minor administrative affair.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document