Misreading" of the Law and the "Imagined Home" in Z Factory

This article is based on data obtained from field research and provides a cultural explanation for the function of the staff and workers' representative councils (SWRCs) and their significance among collective activities during the period of reform in state-owned enterprises (SOEs). The article suggests that as part of this process, those engaged in this activity and the local government using local standards "collectively misinterpreted" the norms set forth by national law. The anthropological concepts of juxtaposing experience-near and experience-far are employed in a discussion that explains the "self-typification of motives" in collective activity in establishing local norms. The article points out that the interactive process, which superficially appears as misreading of the law, reflects values and beliefs that lie deep in people's minds and determines how they interpret and selectively use the norms set forth in law. This kind of "misreading" leads to diversity in the structures of corporate governance and facilitates the maintenance of social order during a time of socioeconomic transition

Corporate governance · Diversity (politics) · Economics · Factory (object-oriented programming) · Field (mathematics) · Function (biology) · Government (linguistics) · Law and economics · Management · Order (exchange) · Organizational field · Political science · Process (computing) · Set (abstract data type) · Social science · Sociology · State (computer science) · Anthropology · Computer Science · Global trade, sustainability, and social impact · Law

• Generations at the crossroads

  Wen Xie•Labor History•2024

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