Anson Au
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 808605 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Anson Au |
| NOMBRES | Anson |
| APELLIDO | Au |
| FIRMA | AU A |
| AFILIACIONES | Hong Kong Polytechnic University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8180-5104 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 43 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 60 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 43 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2016 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Are Women Accepted at Work? Gender Discrimination in Chinese Firms
To what extent is women's employment accepted in modern Chinese firms? Drawing on pooled 2017 and 2021 nationally representative Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) data, this article estimates the socioeconomic predictors and prevalence of the belief that women should be stay-at-home wives instead of working in Chinese firms. The results illustrate that women in Chinese firms have socioeconomic resources commensurate with men, but they remain t…
Regional Varieties of Regulatory Capitalism and Predatory Lending
Alternative financial institutions have grown as a source of credit for low-income borrowers deemed credit risks by banks. This article examines how predatory lending flourishes despite regulatory tightening. I theorize three varieties of regulatory capitalism in North America, the Asia-Pacific, and Europe, each shaped by its developmental history and each of which influences different forms of collateralization, regulatory evasion, and risk laun…
Evolutions in the European Central Bank's Regulatory Stance Toward Cryptocurrencies
The article argues that the European Central Bank's (ECB) regulatory stance toward cryptocurrencies was underpinned by efforts to preserve legitimacy and monetary sovereignty. Triangulating a content analysis on the ECB's policy statements on cryptocurrencies, examination of European macroeconomic data, and price dynamic analysis of Bitcoin from 2014 to 2025, this article traces an evolution in the ECB's regulatory stance toward cryptocurrencies …
The Great Transformation
The Promises and Perils of AI for Sociology
This article argues that in an age of artificial intelligence (AI), sociologists have not adequately thought about the challenges posed to their work and pedagogy. Drawing on examples from Hong Kong, we foreground the challenges that AI poses to sociological education, student success and working conditions, amid the marketization of higher education and broad shifts in funding toward STEM disciplines. We then suggest four tactical strategies for…
Neobanks in emerging markets
Neobanks have risen as popular digital challengers to incumbent banks, especially in emerging markets (EMs) where the banking sector is often characterized by oligopolies. This article first estimates the value of Nubank and StoneCo in Brazil, two of the fastest-growing neobanks in Brazil. Normalizing revenue growth assumptions from their financial data, valuation models uncover that Nubank could be overvalued by about two times, whereas StoneCo …
Digitalization in China
In an age of digitalization, who still refuses to use digital technology? Drawing on nationally-representative Chinese General Social Survey data, this article finds that about half of Chinese households do not actively use the Internet or e-payment systems, despite their ubiquity. This article estimates the effects of socioeconomic resources on these technologies’ (non-)use across urban, resident but previously urban, resident but previously rur…
Attitudes toward Women’s Layoffs during Recessions
Sociological research has identified persistent disadvantages that face women in hiring and promotion opportunities in firms. This article extends this research on gender inequality to examining firm preferences for women’s layoffs when faced with the prospect of an economic recession. Drawing on nationally representative microdata on workers in China, this article reveals that these preferences differ by firm type. Men in state firms report sign…
How Elites Invigorate Emotionality and Extremity in Digital Networks
The October 2017 Las Vegas shooting was the deadliest shooting in modern American history, but little scholarship has examined the public uproar in its wake, particularly in digital networks. Drawing on a corpus of 100,000 public Tweets and 1,119,638 unique words written in reaction to the shooting, this article addresses this lacuna by investigating the topics of reactions and their linkages with elites. This article theorizes that elites invigo…
Refashioning Race
Crisis as opportunity
This article investigates the career trajectories of Hong Kong solicitors during two historical turning points, specifically 1994-1997 and 2018-2021, when hundreds of lawyers left private practice to pursue alternative career options such as business and finance, government and politics, or relocation to other countries. Data are sourced from the career mobility records of law firm partners reported in 336 monthly issues of the Hong Kong Lawyer j…
How Professionals Cooperate through Conflicts
Conflicts are everyday sources of professional disagreement in the workplace. This article advances the study of professional conflicts by examining the symbolic interactionist processes through which professionals in South Korea cooperatively work through conflicts. Through ethnographic fieldwork conducted at a large hospital in Seoul in 2018, it is demonstrated that clinical professionals retain their poise and cooperate their way through confl…
Bourdieusian Boundary-Making, Social Networks, and Capital Conversion
Sociological research richly documents the many ways through which education becomes a form of convertible capital, but focuses less on the cultural schemas that graduates possess and use to respond to disruptions of capital conversion processes. Using the case of international degree holders in Hong Kong, this article draws upon Bourdieu's theory of practice to interrogate the cultural schemas that valorize international degrees when their conve…
A Black feminist approach to antiracist qualitative research methods
This article commemorates the legacy of bell hooks by bringing core themes in her oeuvre to bear on several debates on the conceptualization and use of qualitative research methods in sociology. Despite the uptake of qualitative research methods in sociology as a launching point for critical inquiry with analytical and political overtones, they have been fragmented threefold by debates about their politics (whether to humanize research subjects),…
Reassessing the econometric measurement of inequality and poverty
The econometric measurement of inequality and poverty in advanced capitalist economies has been preoccupied with aggregate measures of relative deprivation, namely, the Gini Index and a relative poverty rate, both of which are based on economic distances from the population median. Using the case of Hong Kong, this article demonstrates the limitations of relative measures: the Gini Index masks social mobility and the relative poverty line underst…
China's Internet sector reforms and the rise of ESG in the state techno‐nationalist agenda
From 2020 onward, sweeping reforms were implemented in China's domestic Internet sector that stirred debate about its future. Analyzing all Chinese government policies and penalties issued on domestic Internet enterprises from 2020 to 2022, this article provides the first systematic account of the authoritative themes that guided the design of the policy reforms. Latent Dirichlet Association topic modeling and qualitative content analyses reveal …
Decolonization and qualitative epistemology
The subject of (de)colonization in the academy has witnessed an upsurge in attention over the past two decades across the social sciences and the Global North-South divide. This article critically examines central themes that have guided the conceptualization of decolonization thus far and foregrounds the convergences that decolonization shares with the epistemology of qualitative research methodology and pedagogy. In so doing, this article artic…
A Theoretical Examination of Homophily Beyond Focus Theory
Scott Feld’s focus theory stimulated one of the most important traditions in the study of the concept of homophily in connection to individual action and network behavior across sociology and organizational studies. This article uses Feld’s focus theory as a starting point of reference to examine the major theoretical developments and empirical applications of homophily since his pioneering work. First, this article interrogates the causes of hom…
The massifying consumption of embodied goods in an advanced capitalist state
Embodied goods like cosmetic surgery comprise a unique and growing consumer industry, most of all in the Asia‐Pacific, yet the rationalisation processes motivating their purchase are less understood. Addressing this lacuna, this article builds upon open‐ended surveys and semi‐structured interviews of consumers in Seoul, South Korea to articulate a relational approach to examine the rationalisation of purchases of cosmetic surgery as an embodied g…
Consumer logics and the relational performance of selling high-risk goods
Purpose This article investigates how medical specialists as professionals and elective cosmetic surgery tourists as consumers relationally negotiate decisions within the cosmetic surgery clinic. Drawing on a Goffmanian approach, this article explores the processual social structures that shape consumer logics in the clinic as a social space and as a type of professional institution. Design/methodology/approach This article is based on ethnograph…
Pricing the Priceless Surgery
Through ethnographic fieldwork in cosmetic surgery clinics in Seoul, South Korea in 2018, in this article I investigate how professional clinicians persuade consumers to purchase surgery during consultations. Enamored by the ascendancy of the Korean cultural industry, many non-Koreans are drawn to Korea for the storied, domestic brand of surgery believed to be inextricable from the aesthetic appeal of their idols. Clinical professionals capitaliz…
Cryptocurrencies and the promise of individual economic sovereignty in an age of digitalization
Cryptocurrencies have fuelled an ideological bifurcation between utopian imaginaries of borderless individual economic sovereignty and egalitarianism among libertarian sympathizers since Hayek and more recent dystopian admonitions against financial disruption and inequality by state actors. Providing a state-of-the-art sociological account of this debate, this article conducts the first empirical study on the links between cryptocurrency adoption…
Framing the Purchase of Human Goods
Sociological and cultural research on market participation has been preoccupied with creative markets and traditional labor markets, overlooking alternate types of markets, particularly those of human goods which have proliferated in Asia. This article analyzes South Korea's cosmetic surgery market to examine how and why consumers participate in markets of human goods on the microlevel vis-à-vis macrolevel social structures in an advanced capital…
Guanxi in an age of digitalization
How do people form personal ties? A consensus holds in sociological and social network scholarship that in-person networks are dominated by status homophily and that guanxi networks rely extensively on balance. This article argues that social networking sites (SNSs) reconceptualize the character of homophily and tie-formation altogether in guanxi networks. Drawing on 50 semi-structured interviews with Hong Kong youth from 2017 to 2020, this artic…
Social capital exchanges in voluntary associations and work organizations
Organizations have been an important setting in which social capital exchanges (SCEs) occur, but little work has been done to distinguish two predominant species of organizations in the social network literature: voluntary associations and formal work organizations. Addressing this lacuna, this article comparatively examines how the two organizational species differ in (1) how two prominent types of SCEs operate (restricted and generalized exchan…
Sociology and Science
Criticism against quantitative methods has grown in the context of “big-data”, charging an empirical, quantitative agenda with expanding to displace qualitative and theoretical approaches indispensable to the future of sociological research. Underscoring the strong convergences between the historical development of empiricism in the scientific method and the apparent turn to quantitative empiricism in sociology, this article uses content and hier…
The embodiment of social capital at individual and communal levels
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review the study of social capital focused on the level at which it is embodied, cross-comparing two prominent camps that have emerged in the social capital literature: a communal level and an individual level. Design/methodology/approach This paper reviews the intersections and departures between communal level and individual level conceptualizations of social capital according to the social dynamics of ac…
Collective Identity, Organization, and Public Reaction in Protests
Mainstream structuralist and new social movement theoretical approaches to studying social movements in Western sociological traditions fail to explain why the Sunflower movement fostered solidarity among the Taiwanese while Occupy Central caused public division in Hong Kong. In response, I argue that the successes and failures of both were a function of the consolidation and division of collective identity. Using a qualitative case study, this a…
Framing the Purchase of Human Goods
Sociological and cultural research on market participation has been preoccupied with creative markets and traditional labor markets, overlooking alternate types of markets, particularly those of human goods which have proliferated in Asia. This article analyzes South Korea's cosmetic surgery market to examine how and why consumers participate in markets of human goods on the microlevel vis-à-vis macrolevel social structures in an advanced capital…
Reconceptualizing Social Movements and Power
Existing social movement theories subsume protests into abstract conceptualizations of society, and current ethnographic studies of protests overburden description. Through a case study of London protests, this article transcends these limitations by articulating a social ecological approach consisting of critical ethnography and autoethnography that unearth the organizational strategies and symbolic representations exchanged among police, protes…
Reconceptualizing the generation in a digital(izing) modernity
As digitalization binds society to an apparently perpetual acceleration, questions about the nature of time and speed have gained new urgency in the social sciences. Yet, theorizations of these issues have neglected their implications for social life and generations. Linking these lacunae, this article articulates how digital media and social networking sites (SNS) shape social life through cultural transformations in the generation. This article…
Abandon canon in American sociology
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to challenge the practice of having, using and constructing any canon in sociological theory. This paper argues that the elitism of American sociology and the forms of inequality it engenders are sustained by the construction of a canon itself. Design/methodology/approach This paper adopts a conceptual approach to examine the problems of research practice, academic writing, inequality and empirical translation…
The Promises and Perils of AI for Sociology
This article argues that in an age of artificial intelligence (AI), sociologists have not adequately thought about the challenges posed to their work and pedagogy. Drawing on examples from Hong Kong, we foreground the challenges that AI poses to sociological education, student success and working conditions, amid the marketization of higher education and broad shifts in funding toward STEM disciplines. We then suggest four tactical strategies for…
Cryptocurrencies and the promise of individual economic sovereignty in an age of digitalization
Cryptocurrencies have fuelled an ideological bifurcation between utopian imaginaries of borderless individual economic sovereignty and egalitarianism among libertarian sympathizers since Hayek and more recent dystopian admonitions against financial disruption and inequality by state actors. Providing a state-of-the-art sociological account of this debate, this article conducts the first empirical study on the links between cryptocurrency adoption…
Guanxi in an age of digitalization
How do people form personal ties? A consensus holds in sociological and social network scholarship that in-person networks are dominated by status homophily and that guanxi networks rely extensively on balance. This article argues that social networking sites (SNSs) reconceptualize the character of homophily and tie-formation altogether in guanxi networks. Drawing on 50 semi-structured interviews with Hong Kong youth from 2017 to 2020, this artic…
Feminist methods in a 'post-truth' political climate
The legitimacy of feminist ways of knowing and the well-being of marginalized identities they attend to are endangered by a “post-truth,” North American political climate. There thus arises an urgent need to examine and vindicate the significance of feminist methods (FM) for women and people of color (WPC). This article contributes to this goal by critically examining the themes that have hitherto organized FM as a category of efforts to reverse …
Thinking about Cross-Cultural Differences in Qualitative Interviewing
Existing methodological efforts subsume the interview into broad epistemological abstractions, neglecting actual mechanics of the interview as practice, and dismiss linguistic and cultural asymmetry in the interview as a matter of (in)adequate resources. Reflecting on 24 semi-structured interviews exploring social media use among Hong Kong youth, this article develops a culturally sensitive approach that democratically exposes the way cultural no…
Reconceptualizing Online Free Spaces
Using the Sunflower movement as a case study, this article seeks to articulate a theoretical framework to evaluate online “free spaces” as tools for political mobilization. To this end, this article conducts a thematic and content analysis of 151 posts on the official Facebook page of the Sunflower movement. Key results uncover four thematic functions among posts – expressive, informative, informative-support, and promotional – that overlap, in w…
Refashioning Race
How Professionals Cooperate through Conflicts
Conflicts are everyday sources of professional disagreement in the workplace. This article advances the study of professional conflicts by examining the symbolic interactionist processes through which professionals in South Korea cooperatively work through conflicts. Through ethnographic fieldwork conducted at a large hospital in Seoul in 2018, it is demonstrated that clinical professionals retain their poise and cooperate their way through confl…
Bourdieusian Boundary-Making, Social Networks, and Capital Conversion
Sociological research richly documents the many ways through which education becomes a form of convertible capital, but focuses less on the cultural schemas that graduates possess and use to respond to disruptions of capital conversion processes. Using the case of international degree holders in Hong Kong, this article draws upon Bourdieu's theory of practice to interrogate the cultural schemas that valorize international degrees when their conve…
A Black feminist approach to antiracist qualitative research methods
This article commemorates the legacy of bell hooks by bringing core themes in her oeuvre to bear on several debates on the conceptualization and use of qualitative research methods in sociology. Despite the uptake of qualitative research methods in sociology as a launching point for critical inquiry with analytical and political overtones, they have been fragmented threefold by debates about their politics (whether to humanize research subjects),…
The massifying consumption of embodied goods in an advanced capitalist state
Embodied goods like cosmetic surgery comprise a unique and growing consumer industry, most of all in the Asia‐Pacific, yet the rationalisation processes motivating their purchase are less understood. Addressing this lacuna, this article builds upon open‐ended surveys and semi‐structured interviews of consumers in Seoul, South Korea to articulate a relational approach to examine the rationalisation of purchases of cosmetic surgery as an embodied g…
Narrative Metaphors as a Qualitative Analytical Tool
Reflecting on an (auto)ethnographic study from the standpoint of a person of colour, this article uses the narrative myth of Gaia to analyze and structure the recollection of over 5 years of teaching people of colour at a large Canadian university and distill from them the character of pedagogical care. This article demonstrates how narrative metaphors offered the qualitative researcher an analytical tool to examine the networked webs of oppressi…
An Ethnographic Toolkit for Studying the Networking Pathways of Hard-to-Reach Populations
This article develops a novel ethnographic toolkit for examining the networking pathways that hard-to-reach populations use to socially survive. The toolkit consists of two sampling strategies (snowball and purposive sampling) and three data collection practices (role shuttling, site shuttling, and autoethnography). This article illustrates the applications of the toolkit in an ethnography of South Korean cosmetic surgery clinics and digital foru…
What a highly controversial ethnography says about tensions, problematizations and inequality in contemporary ethnographic practice and regulation
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to illuminate how inequality – in the way ethnography as a research tool itself is used – underwrites many of the methodological tensions in the recently published and widely-debated On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City by Alice Goffman. Design/methodology/approach The author conducts an in-depth, critical analysis of On the Run as an epistemological case to visualize methodological and moral challeng…
Reconceptualizing Online Free Spaces
Using the Sunflower movement as a case study, this article seeks to articulate a theoretical framework to evaluate online “free spaces” as tools for political mobilization. To this end, this article conducts a thematic and content analysis of 151 posts on the official Facebook page of the Sunflower movement. Key results uncover four thematic functions among posts – expressive, informative, informative-support, and promotional – that overlap, in w…
How Do You Feel? Managing Emotional Reaction, Conveyance, and Detachment on Facebook and Instagram
Studies of social media and its uses have focused on how it shapes behavior but less so with emotion. Overcoming this limitation, this article investigates the role of emotion in understanding and shaping actions online, and how, conversely, different uses of social media are leveraged to manage and express emotions, focusing on Facebook and Instagram. To this end, this article draws on 24 in-depth interviews with youth users in Hong Kong to exca…
Collective Identity, Organization, and Public Reaction in Protests
Mainstream structuralist and new social movement theoretical approaches to studying social movements in Western sociological traditions fail to explain why the Sunflower movement fostered solidarity among the Taiwanese while Occupy Central caused public division in Hong Kong. In response, I argue that the successes and failures of both were a function of the consolidation and division of collective identity. Using a qualitative case study, this a…
Reconceptualizing Social Movements and Power
Existing social movement theories subsume protests into abstract conceptualizations of society, and current ethnographic studies of protests overburden description. Through a case study of London protests, this article transcends these limitations by articulating a social ecological approach consisting of critical ethnography and autoethnography that unearth the organizational strategies and symbolic representations exchanged among police, protes…
Online physicians, offline patients
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the nature, gravity, and consequences of physician use of social media use surpass professional identity, by bringing to attention the nuanced, potential conflicts between patient-physician interests in current educational policies. Design/methodology/approach Analyzing a case study of a physician publicly posting and commenting on many of his patients’ information, conversations, and medica…
Sociology and Science
Criticism against quantitative methods has grown in the context of “big-data”, charging an empirical, quantitative agenda with expanding to displace qualitative and theoretical approaches indispensable to the future of sociological research. Underscoring the strong convergences between the historical development of empiricism in the scientific method and the apparent turn to quantitative empiricism in sociology, this article uses content and hier…
What a highly controversial ethnography says about tensions, problematizations and inequality in contemporary ethnographic practice and regulation
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to illuminate how inequality – in the way ethnography as a research tool itself is used – underwrites many of the methodological tensions in the recently published and widely-debated On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City by Alice Goffman. Design/methodology/approach The author conducts an in-depth, critical analysis of On the Run as an epistemological case to visualize methodological and moral challeng…
Re-examining Adorno on the Regression of Consciousness and Democracy
Throughout, I negatively reflect upon the nature of this democracy and criticize it towards the goal of fleshing out the paths of social transformation possible and available for its realization -through the things it could not be. Adopting this coupling as a point of departure, I analyze the regression of consciousness in Adorno's thought, as the root of egoweakness -the destroyer of maturity and that which underpins every shackle he sees as sub…
Thinking about Cross-Cultural Differences in Qualitative Interviewing
Existing methodological efforts subsume the interview into broad epistemological abstractions, neglecting actual mechanics of the interview as practice, and dismiss linguistic and cultural asymmetry in the interview as a matter of (in)adequate resources. Reflecting on 24 semi-structured interviews exploring social media use among Hong Kong youth, this article develops a culturally sensitive approach that democratically exposes the way cultural no…
The embodiment of social capital at individual and communal levels
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review the study of social capital focused on the level at which it is embodied, cross-comparing two prominent camps that have emerged in the social capital literature: a communal level and an individual level. Design/methodology/approach This paper reviews the intersections and departures between communal level and individual level conceptualizations of social capital according to the social dynamics of ac…
Abandon canon in American sociology
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to challenge the practice of having, using and constructing any canon in sociological theory. This paper argues that the elitism of American sociology and the forms of inequality it engenders are sustained by the construction of a canon itself. Design/methodology/approach This paper adopts a conceptual approach to examine the problems of research practice, academic writing, inequality and empirical translation…
Japanese Sociology in a Global Network. Internationalization, Disciplinary Development, and Minority Integration in the Road Ahead
The dual trajectories of Japanese sociology and Japan itself are poised at a watershed moment in their shared history. In recent years, Japanese sociology has enlarged its international presence in unprecedented fashion and the Tokyo Olympics have positioned the global spotlight on the entire nation of Japan, making it an opportune moment to reflect on the future of Japanese sociology in connection to Japanese society by way of internationalizati…
Networks, Politics, and the Literary Public Sphere
This article examines how literature is a networked social space of political repression and resistance, refracting broader contestations over national sovereignty, self-determination, and identity. Politicizing the traditionally apolitical “world of letters” in Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, this article employs a novel analysis of the influence that the literary public sphere wields over political consciousness. Usin…
Reconceptualizing the generation in a digital(izing) modernity
As digitalization binds society to an apparently perpetual acceleration, questions about the nature of time and speed have gained new urgency in the social sciences. Yet, theorizations of these issues have neglected their implications for social life and generations. Linking these lacunae, this article articulates how digital media and social networking sites (SNS) shape social life through cultural transformations in the generation. This article…
Feminist methods in a 'post-truth' political climate
The legitimacy of feminist ways of knowing and the well-being of marginalized identities they attend to are endangered by a “post-truth,” North American political climate. There thus arises an urgent need to examine and vindicate the significance of feminist methods (FM) for women and people of color (WPC). This article contributes to this goal by critically examining the themes that have hitherto organized FM as a category of efforts to reverse …
Over-Complexifying Social Reality
Qualitative methodological development has produced canonical tendencies that over-complexify and fix a fluid and lived social world. Meanwhile, critical theory has produced critiques on methodology but without enough attention to the qualitative tradition. I bridge these gaps by using an Adornoian position to interrogate the concepts of systematicity, rigidification, complexification, and their problems in ethnographic research and qualitative m…
Guanxi in an age of digitalization
How do people form personal ties? A consensus holds in sociological and social network scholarship that in-person networks are dominated by status homophily and that guanxi networks rely extensively on balance. This article argues that social networking sites (SNSs) reconceptualize the character of homophily and tie-formation altogether in guanxi networks. Drawing on 50 semi-structured interviews with Hong Kong youth from 2017 to 2020, this artic…
Social capital exchanges in voluntary associations and work organizations
Organizations have been an important setting in which social capital exchanges (SCEs) occur, but little work has been done to distinguish two predominant species of organizations in the social network literature: voluntary associations and formal work organizations. Addressing this lacuna, this article comparatively examines how the two organizational species differ in (1) how two prominent types of SCEs operate (restricted and generalized exchan…
Narrative Metaphors as a Qualitative Analytical Tool
Reflecting on an (auto)ethnographic study from the standpoint of a person of colour, this article uses the narrative myth of Gaia to analyze and structure the recollection of over 5 years of teaching people of colour at a large Canadian university and distill from them the character of pedagogical care. This article demonstrates how narrative metaphors offered the qualitative researcher an analytical tool to examine the networked webs of oppressi…
An Ethnographic Toolkit for Studying the Networking Pathways of Hard-to-Reach Populations
This article develops a novel ethnographic toolkit for examining the networking pathways that hard-to-reach populations use to socially survive. The toolkit consists of two sampling strategies (snowball and purposive sampling) and three data collection practices (role shuttling, site shuttling, and autoethnography). This article illustrates the applications of the toolkit in an ethnography of South Korean cosmetic surgery clinics and digital foru…
Reassessing the econometric measurement of inequality and poverty
The econometric measurement of inequality and poverty in advanced capitalist economies has been preoccupied with aggregate measures of relative deprivation, namely, the Gini Index and a relative poverty rate, both of which are based on economic distances from the population median. Using the case of Hong Kong, this article demonstrates the limitations of relative measures: the Gini Index masks social mobility and the relative poverty line underst…
China's Internet sector reforms and the rise of ESG in the state techno‐nationalist agenda
From 2020 onward, sweeping reforms were implemented in China's domestic Internet sector that stirred debate about its future. Analyzing all Chinese government policies and penalties issued on domestic Internet enterprises from 2020 to 2022, this article provides the first systematic account of the authoritative themes that guided the design of the policy reforms. Latent Dirichlet Association topic modeling and qualitative content analyses reveal …
Decolonization and qualitative epistemology
The subject of (de)colonization in the academy has witnessed an upsurge in attention over the past two decades across the social sciences and the Global North-South divide. This article critically examines central themes that have guided the conceptualization of decolonization thus far and foregrounds the convergences that decolonization shares with the epistemology of qualitative research methodology and pedagogy. In so doing, this article artic…
A Theoretical Examination of Homophily Beyond Focus Theory
Scott Feld’s focus theory stimulated one of the most important traditions in the study of the concept of homophily in connection to individual action and network behavior across sociology and organizational studies. This article uses Feld’s focus theory as a starting point of reference to examine the major theoretical developments and empirical applications of homophily since his pioneering work. First, this article interrogates the causes of hom…
The massifying consumption of embodied goods in an advanced capitalist state
Embodied goods like cosmetic surgery comprise a unique and growing consumer industry, most of all in the Asia‐Pacific, yet the rationalisation processes motivating their purchase are less understood. Addressing this lacuna, this article builds upon open‐ended surveys and semi‐structured interviews of consumers in Seoul, South Korea to articulate a relational approach to examine the rationalisation of purchases of cosmetic surgery as an embodied g…
Sociology (36 obras) · Political science (25 obras) · Law (22 obras) · Social science (22 obras) · Psychology (15 obras) · Epistemology (14 obras) · Economics (13 obras) · Law (13 obras) · Politics (12 obras) · Qualitative research (10 obras)