Cheris Shun‐ching Chan
Biographic Data
| ID | 259101 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Cheris Shun‐ching Chan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Cheris Shun‐ching |
| FAMILY NAME | Chan |
| SIGNATURE | CHAN C S C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Hong Kong |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1709-6646 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 89 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Anti-Activism and Its Impact on Civil Society in Hong Kong: A Case Study of the Anti–Falun Gong Campaign
In this article, we introduce the concept of “anti-activism” and explore the possible impact of anti-activist action in Hong Kong. We define anti-activism as a form of countermovement intended to discredit, distract, and even harass activists in voluntary social movements. Our data and analyses are based on field observations, interviews, and primary documents collected in Hong Kong during 2012–2018. We focus on the case of the protest campaign a…
Mistrust of physicians in China: Society, institution, and interaction as root causes
Based on two years’ ethnographic research on doctor‐patient relations in urban China, this paper examines the causes of patients’ mistrust of physicians. I identify the major factors at the societal, institutional, and interpersonal levels that lead to patients’ mistrust of physicians. First, I set the context by describing the extent of mistrust at the societal level. Then, I investigate the institutional sources of mistrust. I argue that the fi…
A market of distrust: Toward a cultural sociology of unofficial exchanges between patients and doctors in China
Social Media in Rural China
for inviting me to present and receive feedback on
Paid to Party: Working Time and Emotion in Direct Home Sales
Doing Ideology Amid a Crisis: Collective Actions and Discourses of the Chinese Falun Gong Movement
Based on an interactionist framework, this article examines how followers of a contemporary Chinese religious movement, Falun Gong, deal with a crisis situation and sustain their conviction in the absence of their charismatic leader. Data were collected during a yearlong ethnography of the Falun Gong in Chicago and Hong Kong. The findings reveal that followers experienced cognitive dissonance as a result of the Chinese authorities’ suppression an…
Marketing DeathCulture and the Making of a Life Insurance Market in China
Based on an extensive ethnography of the emergence of commercial life insurance in China, this book examines how culture impacts economic practice. It details how a Chinese life insurance market is created in the presence of an ingrained Chinese cultural taboo on the topic of death. It documents how transnational insurance firms, led by AIG’s subsidiary AIA, introduced commercial life insurance to Chinese urbanites, and how they were confronted w…
Defining Life Insurance and Product DevelopmentDivergent Institutional Logics
Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the organizational strategies of insurance firms. Chapter 2 analyzes the disparity between transnational and domestic life insurance firms’ strategies. Insurance firms from both camps faced a conflict between local preferences and profits when designing their products. However, they handled this conflict very differently. While transnational firms defined life insurance as modern risk management, and offered products for…
Culture, state and varieties of capitalism: A comparative study of life insurance markets in Hong Kong and Taiwan1
This article examines the interplay between local culture, the state, and economic actors' agency in producing variation across markets. I adopt a political-cultural approach to examining why life insurance has been far more popular in Taiwan than Hong Kong, despite the presence of a cultural taboo on the topic of premature death in both societies. Based on interview data and documentary references, the findings reveal that as an independent stat…
Divorcing localization from the divergence paradigm: Localization of Chinese life insurance practice and its implications
This article challenges conventional assumptions associating localization with cultural divergence. Based on ethnographic research of the life insurance business in China, it explores how localization may intertwine with homogenization, and why it may not subvert cultural hegemony. The data illustrate how transnational life insurers disseminated new practices and new ideas to the Chinese population; how they localized their practices according to…
Invigorating the Content in Social Embeddedness: An Ethnography of Life Insurance Transactions in China
Based on more than 14 months' ethnographic research in China, this article brings in culture and symbolic interactionism to understand the social embeddedness of economic transactions. First, an analytic frame linking tie strengths to defining principles, relational properties, and interactions is constructed and applied to changes in life insurance transactions in China. The data suggest that strong tie transactions were common until the economi…
Creating a market in the presence of cultural resistance: The case of life insurance in China
Research in Urban Policy, Vol. 9: The City As an Entertainment Machine
The Falun Gong in China: A Sociological Perspective
This article offers a sociological perspective on the rise of and crackdown on the falun gong in relation to the social, cultural and political context of China. I specify from a sociological perspective that the falun gong is categorically not a sect but a cult-like new religious movement. Its popularity, I suggest, is related to the unresolved secular problems, normative breakdown and ideological vacuum in China in the 1980s and 1990s. Before t…
The Sacred-Secular Dialectics of the Reenchanted Religious Order - The Lingsu Exo-Esoterics in Hong Kong
This paper aims to locate the essence of new religions which manifest themselves as part and parcel of the elusive reenchanted phenomena. It is based on an ethnographic case study of a new religious group, the Lingsu Exo-Esoterics, in Hong Kong. The study unravels how this new religious group reconciles the fundamental disparity between sacred and secular cosmologies. Instead of being pulled apart by the polar opposites between the sacred and the…
Creating a market in the presence of cultural resistance: The case of life insurance in China
Invigorating the Content in Social Embeddedness: An Ethnography of Life Insurance Transactions in China
Based on more than 14 months' ethnographic research in China, this article brings in culture and symbolic interactionism to understand the social embeddedness of economic transactions. First, an analytic frame linking tie strengths to defining principles, relational properties, and interactions is constructed and applied to changes in life insurance transactions in China. The data suggest that strong tie transactions were common until the economi…
A market of distrust: Toward a cultural sociology of unofficial exchanges between patients and doctors in China
Culture, state and varieties of capitalism: A comparative study of life insurance markets in Hong Kong and Taiwan1
This article examines the interplay between local culture, the state, and economic actors' agency in producing variation across markets. I adopt a political-cultural approach to examining why life insurance has been far more popular in Taiwan than Hong Kong, despite the presence of a cultural taboo on the topic of premature death in both societies. Based on interview data and documentary references, the findings reveal that as an independent stat…
Social Media in Rural China
for inviting me to present and receive feedback on
Doing Ideology Amid a Crisis: Collective Actions and Discourses of the Chinese Falun Gong Movement
Based on an interactionist framework, this article examines how followers of a contemporary Chinese religious movement, Falun Gong, deal with a crisis situation and sustain their conviction in the absence of their charismatic leader. Data were collected during a yearlong ethnography of the Falun Gong in Chicago and Hong Kong. The findings reveal that followers experienced cognitive dissonance as a result of the Chinese authorities’ suppression an…
The Sacred-Secular Dialectics of the Reenchanted Religious Order - The Lingsu Exo-Esoterics in Hong Kong
This paper aims to locate the essence of new religions which manifest themselves as part and parcel of the elusive reenchanted phenomena. It is based on an ethnographic case study of a new religious group, the Lingsu Exo-Esoterics, in Hong Kong. The study unravels how this new religious group reconciles the fundamental disparity between sacred and secular cosmologies. Instead of being pulled apart by the polar opposites between the sacred and the…
Anti-Activism and Its Impact on Civil Society in Hong Kong: A Case Study of the Anti–Falun Gong Campaign
In this article, we introduce the concept of “anti-activism” and explore the possible impact of anti-activist action in Hong Kong. We define anti-activism as a form of countermovement intended to discredit, distract, and even harass activists in voluntary social movements. Our data and analyses are based on field observations, interviews, and primary documents collected in Hong Kong during 2012–2018. We focus on the case of the protest campaign a…
The Sacred-Secular Dialectics of the Reenchanted Religious Order - The Lingsu Exo-Esoterics in Hong Kong
This paper aims to locate the essence of new religions which manifest themselves as part and parcel of the elusive reenchanted phenomena. It is based on an ethnographic case study of a new religious group, the Lingsu Exo-Esoterics, in Hong Kong. The study unravels how this new religious group reconciles the fundamental disparity between sacred and secular cosmologies. Instead of being pulled apart by the polar opposites between the sacred and the…
The Falun Gong in China: A Sociological Perspective
This article offers a sociological perspective on the rise of and crackdown on the falun gong in relation to the social, cultural and political context of China. I specify from a sociological perspective that the falun gong is categorically not a sect but a cult-like new religious movement. Its popularity, I suggest, is related to the unresolved secular problems, normative breakdown and ideological vacuum in China in the 1980s and 1990s. Before t…
Research in Urban Policy, Vol. 9: The City As an Entertainment Machine
Invigorating the Content in Social Embeddedness: An Ethnography of Life Insurance Transactions in China
Based on more than 14 months' ethnographic research in China, this article brings in culture and symbolic interactionism to understand the social embeddedness of economic transactions. First, an analytic frame linking tie strengths to defining principles, relational properties, and interactions is constructed and applied to changes in life insurance transactions in China. The data suggest that strong tie transactions were common until the economi…
Creating a market in the presence of cultural resistance: The case of life insurance in China
Divorcing localization from the divergence paradigm: Localization of Chinese life insurance practice and its implications
This article challenges conventional assumptions associating localization with cultural divergence. Based on ethnographic research of the life insurance business in China, it explores how localization may intertwine with homogenization, and why it may not subvert cultural hegemony. The data illustrate how transnational life insurers disseminated new practices and new ideas to the Chinese population; how they localized their practices according to…
Marketing DeathCulture and the Making of a Life Insurance Market in China
Based on an extensive ethnography of the emergence of commercial life insurance in China, this book examines how culture impacts economic practice. It details how a Chinese life insurance market is created in the presence of an ingrained Chinese cultural taboo on the topic of death. It documents how transnational insurance firms, led by AIG’s subsidiary AIA, introduced commercial life insurance to Chinese urbanites, and how they were confronted w…
Defining Life Insurance and Product DevelopmentDivergent Institutional Logics
Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the organizational strategies of insurance firms. Chapter 2 analyzes the disparity between transnational and domestic life insurance firms’ strategies. Insurance firms from both camps faced a conflict between local preferences and profits when designing their products. However, they handled this conflict very differently. While transnational firms defined life insurance as modern risk management, and offered products for…
Culture, state and varieties of capitalism: A comparative study of life insurance markets in Hong Kong and Taiwan1
This article examines the interplay between local culture, the state, and economic actors' agency in producing variation across markets. I adopt a political-cultural approach to examining why life insurance has been far more popular in Taiwan than Hong Kong, despite the presence of a cultural taboo on the topic of premature death in both societies. Based on interview data and documentary references, the findings reveal that as an independent stat…
Doing Ideology Amid a Crisis: Collective Actions and Discourses of the Chinese Falun Gong Movement
Based on an interactionist framework, this article examines how followers of a contemporary Chinese religious movement, Falun Gong, deal with a crisis situation and sustain their conviction in the absence of their charismatic leader. Data were collected during a yearlong ethnography of the Falun Gong in Chicago and Hong Kong. The findings reveal that followers experienced cognitive dissonance as a result of the Chinese authorities’ suppression an…
Paid to Party: Working Time and Emotion in Direct Home Sales
Social Media in Rural China
for inviting me to present and receive feedback on
Mistrust of physicians in China: Society, institution, and interaction as root causes
Based on two years’ ethnographic research on doctor‐patient relations in urban China, this paper examines the causes of patients’ mistrust of physicians. I identify the major factors at the societal, institutional, and interpersonal levels that lead to patients’ mistrust of physicians. First, I set the context by describing the extent of mistrust at the societal level. Then, I investigate the institutional sources of mistrust. I argue that the fi…
A market of distrust: Toward a cultural sociology of unofficial exchanges between patients and doctors in China
Anti-Activism and Its Impact on Civil Society in Hong Kong: A Case Study of the Anti–Falun Gong Campaign
In this article, we introduce the concept of “anti-activism” and explore the possible impact of anti-activist action in Hong Kong. We define anti-activism as a form of countermovement intended to discredit, distract, and even harass activists in voluntary social movements. Our data and analyses are based on field observations, interviews, and primary documents collected in Hong Kong during 2012–2018. We focus on the case of the protest campaign a…
Political science (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · China (7 works) · Business (6 works) · Economics (6 works) · Life insurance (5 works) · Actuarial science (4 works) · Ethnography (4 works) · Law (4 works)