From macro-state to meso-organizing: A sociological review of the transition of Chinese local governments in the past 30 years
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Studying the transition of Chinese local governments has continuously been the main theme for sociologists since the fiscal, administrative, and market reforms launched in the 1980s. In reference to other countries’ experience, sociological studies about this transition are generally from three macro-theoretical perspectives: Weberian modernity, local transitional state, and local developmental state. However, they have two common problems: first, perceiving the transition as a paradigm shift, not a process; and, second, perceiving local governments as static entities, without internal dynamics. As an alternative, the paper argues that a meso-theoretical perspective should be adopted to inductively study the organization of Chinese local governments in the transitional process. Through exploring the two schools of the meso-organizing perspective—‘structuralism’ and ‘agency with plural institutions’—the paper proposes that sociologists should explore the transition as a dynamic process, an open system, an interaction of ‘structuralism’ and ‘agency with plural institutions’, and with an internal perspective.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".