Beyond consumption? Sociability and the mall as social infrastructure in Beijing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article engages and adds to the literature on social infrastructure (SI) and malls with an ethnographic account of an inner-city, large-scale mall in Beijing, China. While recent SI research has explored various public, commercial, recreational, religious, and digital spaces, malls remain largely overlooked in this evolving scholarship. Taking a sociability-focused, user-centered infrastructural approach and drawing on my fieldwork, I analyze how the mall actualizes its potential as SI across four registers of sociability, namely pleasurable co-presence of strangers, cross-difference encounters, social care, and personal relationship work. This article highlights the dynamic interplay among people, the social, and infrastructure by tracing the micro-level processes through which urban inhabitants navigate everyday life in the mall while simultaneously animating it as SI. I argue that excavating the potential of malls as SI provides an alternative perspective for understanding the relationship between consumption spaces and inclusive urban milieux.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".