Spinners or sitters? Regimes of social reproduction and urban Chinese workers’ employment choices
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite China being the world’s factory, its labor market is now primarily service-based with a high level of informality. When formal manufacturing and informal service sectors co-exist, how do workers make their choices? While existing literature focuses on rural migrant workers’ experience in the Chinese labor system, this study extends the analytical scope to low-skill urban workers. Drawing on archival, interview, and ethnographic data in a large industrial city in central China, I compare urban women’s different trajectories in textile manufacturing and informal domestic service. Building on labor regime studies and Social Reproduction Theory, I develop a framework called “regimes of social reproduction” to explain workers’ job choices. I argue that China’s post-socialist industrial restructuring has given rise to a public–private hybrid regime of social reproduction, which keeps workers’ pension and healthcare schemes in the public domain and pushes childcare, elderly care, and domestic work to the private sphere and then marketizes them. For urban workers, when choosing between formal manufacturing and informal service, it is their position within the regime of social reproduction that plays a decisive role. Their position is assessed along the following two dimensions: (1) the degree of a worker’s dependency on the employment-based welfare provisions and (2) the degree of demand for reproductive labor in a worker’s family. Challenging the conventional view that formal manufacturing jobs are more desirable than informal service jobs, I conclude that under the current regime of social reproduction, the booming informal service market may provide some best earning opportunities for low-skilled urban workers. However, the same regime has also set significant limits on such opportunities as these urbanites’ availability to work is highly contingent on (lack of) demand for reproductive labor from their own family.
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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".