A Hanser
Biographic Data
| ID | 71156 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Hanser |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Hanser |
| SIGNATURE | HANSER A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of British Columbia |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0188-7083 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 99 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Mothers and grandmothers: Rethinking motherhood in the context of intergenerational caregiving
ObjectiveThis study examines how the intergenerational caregiving exchanges from grandmother (maternal and paternal) to mother influence early motherhood experiences and childcare practices.BackgroundMotherhood scholarship often neglects the influence of grandmothers on how women mother, or when acknowledging caregivers like grandmothers often fails to consider the potentially ambivalent ways grandmother caregiving affects mothers. Research on in…
Manufacturing Freedom: Sex Work, Anti-Trafficking Rehab, and the Racial Wages of Rescue
Le bol de riz du genre: Politique sexuelle du travail de service dans la Chine urbaine
Cet article examine de nouvelles conceptions du genre et de la sexualité observables en Chine, en cherchant à comprendre pourquoi et comment ces éléments ont pu prendre une telle importance dans l'organisation du travail de service. En s'appuyant sur des données ethnographiques collectées dans trois établissements de vente au détail situés en zone urbaine, cet article démontre avec quelle puissance des conceptions essentialisées du genre et de la…
Be the mother, not the daughter: Immigrant Chinese women, postpartum care knowledge, and mothering autonomy
Scholars have documented the transformation of modern motherhood, as mothering practices have been a target of medical knowledge that comes to define correct modes of conduct for women caring for their pregnant bodies, undergoing childbirth and childrearing. Such accounts usually set scientific knowledge and medical authority in opposition to women's autonomy. Drawing on the interviews with immigrant Chinese mothers in Canada, we offer a differen…
Pregnant under quarantine: Women's agency and access to medical care under Wuhan's Covid-19 lockdown
How did Wuhan residents cope with a 76-day lockdown
Wuhan, the original epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak, was under strict lockdown for 76 days. The authors conducted 30 in-depth interviews to understand Wuhan residents’ lived experiences of lockdown life. This chapter showed that despite strong emotions initially, Wuhan residents quickly adapted to life under unprecedented lockdown. Three pre-existing structures facilitated the effective implementation of the massive lockdown: ready-made contai…
Good Food in the City: How Cultural Ideas About Food Shape Street Vending Regulation
Why, after years of restrictive regulation of street vending, and food vending in particular, have cities across North America welcomed new food carts and trucks? In this article I draw on a case study of Vancouver, Canada, to demonstrate the important effect of ideas about food on the regulatory and policy changes that have allowed food carts and trucks to proliferate. In particular, new cultural discourses have imbued food with a multivalent go…
The hard work of feeding the baby: Breastfeeding and intensive mothering in contemporary urban China
Drawing upon the concept of culture as a “tool kit” from which social actors draw pragmatically, this paper explores the relationship between cultural definitions of good mothering and breastfeeding among middle-class, urban Chinese women. We argue that an emerging culture of “intensive mothering” that focuses on infant feeding is taking shape among privileged urban women. Based upon interviews with new mothers in urban Shanghai, we describe the …
Looking behind the Label: Global Industries and the Conscientious Consumer
Opting Out? Gated Consumption, Infant Formula and China’s Affluent Urban Consumers
Affluent Chinese consumers are increasingly “opting out” of the Chinese marketplace, drawing upon their social networks and superior economic resources to purchase foreign infant formula that they believe to be untainted by contact with China’s suspect markets and untrustworthy distribution channels. Based on interview and media sources, we document these consumer practices and characterize them as highly privatized forms of “gated consumption” w…
Yellow peril consumerism: China, North America, and an era of global trade
This paper explores a parallel between the 'yellow peril' imagery of pollution and danger used to characterize China historically and that found in contemporary media accounts representing Chinese-made consumer goods in the USA. A survey of newspaper reporting on two key events involving Chinese imports (pet food and toys) reveals that in both eras, cases of 'yellow peril' involve narratives of domesticity threatened by potentially contaminating …
Class and the Service Encounter: New Approaches to Inequality in the Service Work‐place
In recent decades, scholars of service work have generated many new insights about the organization of work, but in the process one of the traditional concerns of industrial sociology – class – became relatively marginal. However, recent studies of interactive service work have begun to reconceptualize the service encounter as an important site where class‐based entitlements and interactive expectations are created. These analyses attempt to make…
Uncertainty and the problem of value: Consumers, culture and inequality in urban China
This article examines the divergent shopping patterns for consumers located in different positions within urban China’s social hierarchy. Drawing upon detailed ethnographic data, the article argues that differentiated class positions in urban China are expressed through the practicalities of daily shopping and consumer practices that involve fundamentally different ‘problems’ of uncertainty and value in the marketplace. It is shown that questions…
Carolyn L. Hsu, Creating Market Socialism: How Ordinary People are Shaping Class and Status in China
Les autorités et les élites politiques ne sont pas les seuls acteurs à façonner le nouvel ordre institutionnel et moral en construction en Chine. Même si c’est le Parti-État qui, de sa propre initiative, a engagé le démantèlement des institutions socialistes, il n’est pas un démiurge tout puissant ; la société, dans sa diversité, participe à l’élaboration des institutions et du nouveau système de valeurs. Tels sont les postulats qui fondent le tr…
Is the customer always right? Class, service and the production of distinction in Chinese department stores
Sales floor trajectories: Distinction and service in postsocialist China
This article considers experiences of social change and downward social mobility in contemporary China by applying theoretical tools from Bourdieu to understand service interactions at a large, state-owned department store serving the urban working class. It demonstrates how sales clerks sought to maintain an imagined space of working-class security by emphasizing a set of fading social distinctions. Sales clerks did so by calling forth the wanin…
Made in the P.R.C.: China's Consumer Revolution
Although the market and opportunities for consumption seem to offer a counterbalance to the government's authoritarian powers, many Chinese are ambivalent about the forces of Westernization and marketization and the rapidly growing gap between rich and poor.
The Gendered Rice Bowl: The Sexual Politics of Service Work in Urban China
This article examines new conceptions of gender and sexuality in China, asking how and why they have become so integral to the organization of service work regimes there. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in three urban Chinese retail settings, this article demonstrates how essentialized conceptions of gender and sexuality powerfully communicate class distinctions in service settings through associations with the imagery of China's shift fro…
Social Connections in China: Institutions, Culture, and the Changing Nature of Guanxi
Guanxi, translated as 'social connections,' or 'social networks,' is among the most important studied phenomena in China today. Guanxi lies at the heart of China's social order, its economic structure, and its changing institutional landscape. It is considered important in every realm of life, from politics to business, and officialdom to street life. This 2002 volume offers scholarly thinking on the subject by top China sociologists whose work o…
The Gendered Rice Bowl: The Sexual Politics of Service Work in Urban China
This article examines new conceptions of gender and sexuality in China, asking how and why they have become so integral to the organization of service work regimes there. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in three urban Chinese retail settings, this article demonstrates how essentialized conceptions of gender and sexuality powerfully communicate class distinctions in service settings through associations with the imagery of China's shift fro…
Opting Out? Gated Consumption, Infant Formula and China’s Affluent Urban Consumers
Affluent Chinese consumers are increasingly “opting out” of the Chinese marketplace, drawing upon their social networks and superior economic resources to purchase foreign infant formula that they believe to be untainted by contact with China’s suspect markets and untrustworthy distribution channels. Based on interview and media sources, we document these consumer practices and characterize them as highly privatized forms of “gated consumption” w…
Uncertainty and the problem of value: Consumers, culture and inequality in urban China
This article examines the divergent shopping patterns for consumers located in different positions within urban China’s social hierarchy. Drawing upon detailed ethnographic data, the article argues that differentiated class positions in urban China are expressed through the practicalities of daily shopping and consumer practices that involve fundamentally different ‘problems’ of uncertainty and value in the marketplace. It is shown that questions…
Is the customer always right? Class, service and the production of distinction in Chinese department stores
Yellow peril consumerism: China, North America, and an era of global trade
This paper explores a parallel between the 'yellow peril' imagery of pollution and danger used to characterize China historically and that found in contemporary media accounts representing Chinese-made consumer goods in the USA. A survey of newspaper reporting on two key events involving Chinese imports (pet food and toys) reveals that in both eras, cases of 'yellow peril' involve narratives of domesticity threatened by potentially contaminating …
Class and the Service Encounter: New Approaches to Inequality in the Service Work‐place
In recent decades, scholars of service work have generated many new insights about the organization of work, but in the process one of the traditional concerns of industrial sociology – class – became relatively marginal. However, recent studies of interactive service work have begun to reconceptualize the service encounter as an important site where class‐based entitlements and interactive expectations are created. These analyses attempt to make…
Sales floor trajectories: Distinction and service in postsocialist China
This article considers experiences of social change and downward social mobility in contemporary China by applying theoretical tools from Bourdieu to understand service interactions at a large, state-owned department store serving the urban working class. It demonstrates how sales clerks sought to maintain an imagined space of working-class security by emphasizing a set of fading social distinctions. Sales clerks did so by calling forth the wanin…
Be the mother, not the daughter: Immigrant Chinese women, postpartum care knowledge, and mothering autonomy
Scholars have documented the transformation of modern motherhood, as mothering practices have been a target of medical knowledge that comes to define correct modes of conduct for women caring for their pregnant bodies, undergoing childbirth and childrearing. Such accounts usually set scientific knowledge and medical authority in opposition to women's autonomy. Drawing on the interviews with immigrant Chinese mothers in Canada, we offer a differen…
The hard work of feeding the baby: Breastfeeding and intensive mothering in contemporary urban China
Drawing upon the concept of culture as a “tool kit” from which social actors draw pragmatically, this paper explores the relationship between cultural definitions of good mothering and breastfeeding among middle-class, urban Chinese women. We argue that an emerging culture of “intensive mothering” that focuses on infant feeding is taking shape among privileged urban women. Based upon interviews with new mothers in urban Shanghai, we describe the …
Looking behind the Label: Global Industries and the Conscientious Consumer
Good Food in the City: How Cultural Ideas About Food Shape Street Vending Regulation
Why, after years of restrictive regulation of street vending, and food vending in particular, have cities across North America welcomed new food carts and trucks? In this article I draw on a case study of Vancouver, Canada, to demonstrate the important effect of ideas about food on the regulatory and policy changes that have allowed food carts and trucks to proliferate. In particular, new cultural discourses have imbued food with a multivalent go…
Social Connections in China: Institutions, Culture, and the Changing Nature of Guanxi
Guanxi, translated as 'social connections,' or 'social networks,' is among the most important studied phenomena in China today. Guanxi lies at the heart of China's social order, its economic structure, and its changing institutional landscape. It is considered important in every realm of life, from politics to business, and officialdom to street life. This 2002 volume offers scholarly thinking on the subject by top China sociologists whose work o…
Made in the P.R.C.: China's Consumer Revolution
Although the market and opportunities for consumption seem to offer a counterbalance to the government's authoritarian powers, many Chinese are ambivalent about the forces of Westernization and marketization and the rapidly growing gap between rich and poor.
The Gendered Rice Bowl: The Sexual Politics of Service Work in Urban China
This article examines new conceptions of gender and sexuality in China, asking how and why they have become so integral to the organization of service work regimes there. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in three urban Chinese retail settings, this article demonstrates how essentialized conceptions of gender and sexuality powerfully communicate class distinctions in service settings through associations with the imagery of China's shift fro…
Sales floor trajectories: Distinction and service in postsocialist China
This article considers experiences of social change and downward social mobility in contemporary China by applying theoretical tools from Bourdieu to understand service interactions at a large, state-owned department store serving the urban working class. It demonstrates how sales clerks sought to maintain an imagined space of working-class security by emphasizing a set of fading social distinctions. Sales clerks did so by calling forth the wanin…
Is the customer always right? Class, service and the production of distinction in Chinese department stores
Carolyn L. Hsu, Creating Market Socialism: How Ordinary People are Shaping Class and Status in China
Les autorités et les élites politiques ne sont pas les seuls acteurs à façonner le nouvel ordre institutionnel et moral en construction en Chine. Même si c’est le Parti-État qui, de sa propre initiative, a engagé le démantèlement des institutions socialistes, il n’est pas un démiurge tout puissant ; la société, dans sa diversité, participe à l’élaboration des institutions et du nouveau système de valeurs. Tels sont les postulats qui fondent le tr…
Uncertainty and the problem of value: Consumers, culture and inequality in urban China
This article examines the divergent shopping patterns for consumers located in different positions within urban China’s social hierarchy. Drawing upon detailed ethnographic data, the article argues that differentiated class positions in urban China are expressed through the practicalities of daily shopping and consumer practices that involve fundamentally different ‘problems’ of uncertainty and value in the marketplace. It is shown that questions…
Class and the Service Encounter: New Approaches to Inequality in the Service Work‐place
In recent decades, scholars of service work have generated many new insights about the organization of work, but in the process one of the traditional concerns of industrial sociology – class – became relatively marginal. However, recent studies of interactive service work have begun to reconceptualize the service encounter as an important site where class‐based entitlements and interactive expectations are created. These analyses attempt to make…
Yellow peril consumerism: China, North America, and an era of global trade
This paper explores a parallel between the 'yellow peril' imagery of pollution and danger used to characterize China historically and that found in contemporary media accounts representing Chinese-made consumer goods in the USA. A survey of newspaper reporting on two key events involving Chinese imports (pet food and toys) reveals that in both eras, cases of 'yellow peril' involve narratives of domesticity threatened by potentially contaminating …
Opting Out? Gated Consumption, Infant Formula and China’s Affluent Urban Consumers
Affluent Chinese consumers are increasingly “opting out” of the Chinese marketplace, drawing upon their social networks and superior economic resources to purchase foreign infant formula that they believe to be untainted by contact with China’s suspect markets and untrustworthy distribution channels. Based on interview and media sources, we document these consumer practices and characterize them as highly privatized forms of “gated consumption” w…
Looking behind the Label: Global Industries and the Conscientious Consumer
The hard work of feeding the baby: Breastfeeding and intensive mothering in contemporary urban China
Drawing upon the concept of culture as a “tool kit” from which social actors draw pragmatically, this paper explores the relationship between cultural definitions of good mothering and breastfeeding among middle-class, urban Chinese women. We argue that an emerging culture of “intensive mothering” that focuses on infant feeding is taking shape among privileged urban women. Based upon interviews with new mothers in urban Shanghai, we describe the …
Good Food in the City: How Cultural Ideas About Food Shape Street Vending Regulation
Why, after years of restrictive regulation of street vending, and food vending in particular, have cities across North America welcomed new food carts and trucks? In this article I draw on a case study of Vancouver, Canada, to demonstrate the important effect of ideas about food on the regulatory and policy changes that have allowed food carts and trucks to proliferate. In particular, new cultural discourses have imbued food with a multivalent go…
How did Wuhan residents cope with a 76-day lockdown
Wuhan, the original epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak, was under strict lockdown for 76 days. The authors conducted 30 in-depth interviews to understand Wuhan residents’ lived experiences of lockdown life. This chapter showed that despite strong emotions initially, Wuhan residents quickly adapted to life under unprecedented lockdown. Three pre-existing structures facilitated the effective implementation of the massive lockdown: ready-made contai…
Pregnant under quarantine: Women's agency and access to medical care under Wuhan's Covid-19 lockdown
Le bol de riz du genre: Politique sexuelle du travail de service dans la Chine urbaine
Cet article examine de nouvelles conceptions du genre et de la sexualité observables en Chine, en cherchant à comprendre pourquoi et comment ces éléments ont pu prendre une telle importance dans l'organisation du travail de service. En s'appuyant sur des données ethnographiques collectées dans trois établissements de vente au détail situés en zone urbaine, cet article démontre avec quelle puissance des conceptions essentialisées du genre et de la…
Be the mother, not the daughter: Immigrant Chinese women, postpartum care knowledge, and mothering autonomy
Scholars have documented the transformation of modern motherhood, as mothering practices have been a target of medical knowledge that comes to define correct modes of conduct for women caring for their pregnant bodies, undergoing childbirth and childrearing. Such accounts usually set scientific knowledge and medical authority in opposition to women's autonomy. Drawing on the interviews with immigrant Chinese mothers in Canada, we offer a differen…
Mothers and grandmothers: Rethinking motherhood in the context of intergenerational caregiving
ObjectiveThis study examines how the intergenerational caregiving exchanges from grandmother (maternal and paternal) to mother influence early motherhood experiences and childcare practices.BackgroundMotherhood scholarship often neglects the influence of grandmothers on how women mother, or when acknowledging caregivers like grandmothers often fails to consider the potentially ambivalent ways grandmother caregiving affects mothers. Research on in…
Manufacturing Freedom: Sex Work, Anti-Trafficking Rehab, and the Racial Wages of Rescue
Sociology (15 works) · Political science (13 works) · China (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Business (7 works) · Economics (7 works) · Social science (7 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · Law (6 works) · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance (5 works)