Show, Don’t Tell and Try Me if You Dare! The Body’s Authoritative Force in Traditional Chinese Martial Arts Organizations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What role do body practices play in the communicative accomplishment of authority in traditional Chinese martial arts organizations (TCMAOs)? This article develops the concept of differential authority, building on Fei Xiaotong’s theory of chaxugeju (differential mode of association), to extend communicative constitution of organizations (CCO) research on authority. Differential authority highlights how instructors demonstrate affiliation with authoritative figures through embodied instruction—especially master demo and testing touch—thereby establishing legitimacy as lineage vectors. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at a TCMAO in Zhengzhou, China, this study shows how authority is performed, transmitted, and recognized through corporeal, relational practices. Findings reveal the co-constitutive relationship between individual and organizational authority, and the role of embodied instruction in knowledge transfer and continuity. This research situates authority within a culturally specific framework and expands CCO theorizing beyond Western, credential-based models. It opens new directions for examining body-based authority across sociocultural contexts, especially amid globalization and digital mediation.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".