Erving Goffman is one of the representatives of the vast field of symbolic interactionism. By integrating the structural role theory of Manford Kuhn and the process role theory of Herbert Blumer, Goffman drew from the strengths of various sources in both theory and methodology, creating the Dramaturgical Theory, which had profound impacts later on. The earliest elaboration of this theory can be found in his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Goffman used rich theatrical concepts such as individual“performance”and team“collusion”to describe how people maintain the normal order of the interactive world by presenting themselves in daily life. Later, in his book Stigma, Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity,he discussed the two interrelated alternative groups of stigmatized and potentially stigmatized individuals, and how they maintain their unique way of self-presentation through the modification of stigma in situations of discredited or discreditable. By interpretating Goffman’s unique life history, we can see that his works are more like encrypted versions of personal biographies, or his sociological imagination stems from his exceptionally rich and alternative experiences.

This paper discusses how sociology accepts“culture”. Through reviewing the literature, this paper finds that sociology has never really forgotten culture.However, the acceptance of culture has undergone a disciplinary development from “unconscious”to“conscious”and then to“consciously constructing.”In the “unconscious”stage, culture is merely an adjunct to a grand structured narrative; In the“conscious”stage, sociologists had earlier made their voices heard through scattered participation in cultural studies emerging from Europe, which was accompanied by the collective“cultural turn”of European academia; Then the cultural turn of sociology itself gave birth to the conflict between“cultural sociology”and “cultural studies.”In the“consciously constructing”stage, the emergence of several schools of cultural theory provided excellent theoretical tools for the academic prosperity of cultural sociology and the promotion of the importance of culture.Finally, the paper believes that“cultural sociology”and“cultural studies”are related, but there are obvious differences in the research objects, disciplines, and methods.

Since the 1970s, Western industrialized societies have been transitioning to post-industrial societies, with economies gradually shifting from manufacturing to being dominated by service industries and the knowledge economy. During this
transition, the working class has gradually declined, while the number of professional and service industry workers has rapidly increased, resulting in a noticeable polarization in the labor market structure. However, the EGP class schema, constructed based on industrial society, has failed to capture the changes in the employment structure of post-industrial societies. Increasing numbers of women and non-manual routine workers cannot find appropriate class positions within the traditional class framework. To address this issue, Oesch proposed a concept of social stratification based on the work logic, categorizing classes according to whether daily work involves the use of professional skills, the exercise of organizational power, or the service of personal needs. This accurately reflects the diversity and complexity of employment structures in post-industrial societies. For China, which is transitioning to a post-industrial society, Oesch’s concept of social stratification can help us predict the future development trends of social stratification in China and provide strong support for the formulation of more scientific and reasonable social policies.

 The structure of traditional Chinese politics originates from ethical relationships. Ethics emanating from human nature, which serve as guidance and regulation for specific political practices, constitute the internal basis of traditional political order. The relationship between father and son is the essence of kinship ethics, and the relationship between monarch and subject is the core of political ethics. According to the Confucian understanding of human nature, filial piety (xiao) is the fundamental display of benevolence (ren), while loyalty (zhong) is, to a large extent, the requirement of filial piety. However, loyalty has its own emotional basis independent of filial piety. The way a son treats his father differs from the way a subject treats his monarch, so there might be tension between filial piety and loyalty in certain circumstances. Confucian rites dissolve the tension by properly dealing with inner emotions such as affection for kin(qinqin), respect for the honorable (zunzun), love, and piety. However, in history, when a monarch or a senior official is obsessed with power, the political operation will degenerate into a game of interests that is against human nature, thus often leading to the spoiling and even the collapse of political order.

The discovery of Xunzi Qunxue is the product of the sociology of the history of Chinese social thought. This sociological inquiry is primarily concerned with how individuals with a propensity for evil are systematically integrated into society. For this question, it is necessary to identify not only social control mechanisms but also the social mechanism that Xunzi Qunxue designed to implement social order. In the text of Xunzi, the concept of“division (fen)”is broader than “grouping (qun)”. Based on this, the perspective can be shifted from“group”to“division”, and the internal social order mechanism of Xunzi Qunxue science can be constructed. Mingfen Shiqun (dividing people by etiquette and socially grouping them) is an indigenous analytical tool based on Xunzi’s social taxonomy, and the equal structure of Xunzi’s ideal society, referred to as“group living and one”, is generated in part by the actions of this social mechanism.

Distinct from traditional explanations based on self-interest and system justification theories, this paper explores the formation logic of meritocracy identification from a social context perspective, focusing on the roles of inequality and
the information media. By analyzing data from the China Family Panel Survey, we find that the higher the inequality in regions where individuals live, the more they identify with meritocracy. In addition, information media relying on Internet technology can significantly weaken the positive effect of inequality on meritocracy identification. Hence, this paper proposes the proposition“social contextuality of meritocracy identification”. On the one hand, inequality makes it difficult for individuals to perceive socio-economic status gaps with others by creating social contextual segregation, which leads to greater identification with meritocracy. On the other hand, using the Internet to access information can expand the social context
of individuals, thus updating their perceptions of meritocracy.

Facing the flagging rural development that is coming up with the hollowing and aging problems, a new issue would have its urgency for the research of rural governance, namely, how rural vitality could be activated. Focusing on the CunBA, a rural basketball game in Guizhou Province, we thought that in order to inspire the villages, except for the cooperation among governing agents, it was crucial for rural governance to activate the governing agents’subjectivity. As an outcome of cooperation between modern Western sport and Chinese traditional folk culture,the CunBA has both modernity and locality. It has scaled developing and periodic holding, continuing the collective effervescence of the village, and self-organizes by the amateurish locals, which presents multiple contrasts intertwined with different sounds and a new competitive order built on the competition among multiple actors within these traditional but modern rural sports. The capacity and scale expansion of local community activation and the massive reconstruction of social order by CunBA allows the rural sports event as the mirror of the order for rural society indeed, providing us with a new vision to think of rural revitalization that activates the governing agents’subjectivity by digging heterogeneity of rural culture.

This paper reviews three theoretical research paths on how culture influences action in American cultural sociology: the value, toolbox, and cognitive paths. The values path attempts to explain how culture as a whole value system influences action through personality. Based on criticizing the values path, the toolbox path regards culture as a tool that can be readily accessed. It emphasizes the importance of action strategies between culture and action. The cognitive path is the criticism and transcendence of the first two paths. By absorbing the theoretical resources of cognitive psychology, this approach focuses on the“schema explanation”that combines both the superindividuality and the stereotypical representation of culture, and divides the process of how culture influences action into cultural acquisition, cultural sharing, and cultural activation. The discussion of the above three approaches is helpful for us to re-understand the concept of“view of knowledge and action”in Chinese cultural tradition and promote the construction of cultural sociology with Chinese characteristics.

Affect theory has attracted much attention and discussion in the humanities and social sciences. In anthropological research, the contribution of affect theory lies in its breakthrough of the mind‐body and individual/collective dichotomies in existing studies, its focus on the affect‐emotion gap, and its rejection of over‐rationalist and structuralist analyses. Taking as a case study on the emotional practices of contemporary Chinese youth, this paper attempts to explore the application of affect theory into ethnographic research and how it can open up various possibilities in addressing new, untraditional experiences and better grasp the multiplied, complicated and emerging realities.

Taking the agentic activity of the workers into consideration,we contend that despite operating under digital and organizational control, service platform couriers (SPCs) can still rely on their status as independent contractors and the
station system to spontaneously form team cooperation and strong ties during the labor process.These bonds, facilitated by the high integration of work settings and living environments under the station system, further extend into the economic and emotional aspects of the couriers’lives. The“situational strong ties”formed by SPCs are crucial for on-demand food delivery platforms to mobilize riders to meet their needs, and they are essential for maintaining the labor order in the platformbased food-delivery industry. Moreover, the“situational strong ties”forged by the couriers not only helped them to resist the atomization trend of digital workers, but also became a survival strategy for SPCs to protect themselves.

Stamping consumption, as an emerging consumption phenomenon, reflects that consumers attach importance to both consumer objects and possession experience and want to personalize the experience as well as prove the authenticity
through institutionalization. In this paper, we take the practice paradigm as a perspective and introduce Beck’s theory of“institutional individualization”as an analytical framework, arguing that stamping consumption is a consumption practice
based on the occurrence of personal movement. It occurs through the control of the consumption process by institutionalized consumption tools and finally materialized travel experience by collecting movement markers. Stamping consumption reflects the consumer’s search for certainty in a differentiated tourism context. Further behind the demand for institutionalization is the“self-posed”response to the risks of modernity, and the balance between institutionalization and individualization is a process of debugging the tensions of a new order.

This paper reflects on the research of anthropology of sports in China and puts forward some prospects for the future. On the one hand, by introducing discipline, the“anthropology of sports mainly by sports scholars”section has carried out extensive research in traditional ethnic minority sports, laying an empirical foundation for the formation of this discipline. However, this section has some limitations, such as over-reliance on the framework of cultural evolution and lack of theoretical insight. From the perspective of cross-ethnic relationships, ethnic minority sports activities are the product of exchanges among various ethnic groups,and that the popularity of the hot sports events shows the complementary relationship among the diverse-integrated Chinese ethnic groups. On the other hand, starting from the contemporary sports phenomenon, referring to the relevant experience from overseas studies of the anthropology of sports regarding China, this paper points out that the“anthropology of sports mainly by cultural anthropologists”section should have a cross-cultural perspective, carry out solid ethnographic field accumulation,and explain or interpret the social changes behind the sports phenomenon from an accurate theoretical perspective. The significance of the nation-state is being re-emphasized as a style, but the nationalism of the new style is open to foreignness and internationalism. The two sections, should based on cultural anthropology be combined into an inherently unified anthropology of sports.

While classical theories of“reference groups”can, to some extent,explain the factors shaping class identity, they fail to establish an overarching theoretical framework that elucidates the formation mechanism in its entirety. The “mixed reference theory”, integrating concepts from “reference groups”and “dominance relations”, constructs a theoretical model encompassing both structural and relational aspects. This theory is comprised of five reference operations: relative deprivation, relative gratification, dominance gratification, dominance deprivation, and familiarity effects. Individuals continuously engage in these five referencing operations and compare themselves with others, thereby shaping their class identity. Empirical analysis based on seven times of data from the China General Social Survey (CGSS) 2011-2021 confirms the explanatory power of the five reference operations of the“mixed reference theory”in measuring the“class perception gap”, which gauges discrepancies between objective and subjective class positions. The study also uncovers variations in reference operations among individuals with different genders and dominance statuses, thereby validating the efficacy of the“mixed reference theory”in explaining the formation mechanisms of class identity. By broadening the scope of applicable and referenced subjects, this theory furnishes a more comprehensive reference model and processual explanation, enriching our understanding of how class identity is constructed within complex societal structures.

 This paper describes in-depth the social process of the transformation of a governance mini program developed by a digital platform enterprise from“zero users”to“high activity”in a village, and attempts to reveal the logic and mechanism of the diffusion of external technologies in local societies without large-scale external mobilization from the perspective of the village. First, the social network and social concepts formed by offline governance have laid a social foundation for online
governance applets. Secondly, the design of products that are compatible with villages is the technical foundation for the smooth“entry”of digital platforms. Finally,these two foundations need to be activated through two key mechanisms:“government platformization”and“platform agility.”This paper not only conceptualizes the empirical phenomenon of the bottom-up diffusion of external“digital governance platforms”in villages but also breaks through the paradigms of state-centrism and social determinism in the explanation of the mechanism, and brings the independent characteristics of technology and the inter-construction of technology and society back to the center of the analysis, which provides insights on the village governance strategy and the development of platforms and products.

With the advent of the digital-intelligence era, humanity has transitioned into a nascent digital existence paradigm characterized by human-computer interaction, communication, and even socialization. The data-mediated mode of interaction has catalyzed the formation of unprecedented social linkages between individuals and society; the Internet of Everything (IoE) is progressively manifesting an algorithmically driven characteristic known as ubiquitous solidarity. This“ubiquitous solidarity”, fueled by digital interactions and advanced computational capacities, fosters extensive connections within the digital society,manifesting in multifaceted and integrated transformations: from real humans
evolving into digital-intelligence entities, physical communities transitioning to virtual realms, industrial labor divisions giving way to digital-intelligence-driven labor configurations, and the real economy merging with the burgeoning digital economy. The information-processing actors, functioning as a bridge between the physical and digital environments, provide a pivotal linkage mechanism for integrating the real and virtual societal spheres. Ubiquitous solidarity thus represents a novel form of social cohesion, mirroring the algorithmically governed social structures and orders of our contemporary era.

 In scale expansion, digital platforms have jumped out of the constraints of production and transaction costs to a certain extent, but they have encountered surging social costs. Unlike previous enterprises, the digital platform is the organizational form of the online trading market, the maker of market rules, and the defender of market order. Based on the theory of social operating finds that, due to the organizational attributes and structural advantages of digital platforms, the digital platform is related to the vital interests of the general public, which is prone to large-scale conflicts of interest and social stability if poorlyhandled. At the same time, it needs to respond to all parties’doubts about their market rules. Moreover, as an integrator of data and technology, it relates to the security of national data and the core competitiveness of the country. It is necessary to highlight the public nature,coordination, fairness, and security of the platform and to assume more responsibilities for maintaining social order. The social cost of digital platform expansion mainly includes social security, benefit coordination, market management, and national security costs. The concept of social cost is the key to understanding the expansion process, strategy, and scale boundary of digital platforms, and it is the sociological concept that helps to understand the formation mechanism of platform market structure in the digital age.

The continuous transformation of digital technology has profoundly impacted on labor employment. Will this bring about changes in public attitudes towards welfare? This article is based on CSS data to test the impact and mechanism of digital occupational substitution risk on welfare attitudes. This research has found that, firstly, as the probability of digital occupational substitution increases, it increases workers’preference for government welfare responsibilities, increases their expectations for social security levels, and reduces their satisfaction with social security. Secondly, the risk of digital occupational substitution has an impact on welfare attitudes by increasing workers’expectations of unemployment risk and reducing their expectations of economic status. Thirdly, the impact of digital occupational substitution risk on welfare attitudes is heterogeneous among different economic and social status groups and employment types. Research suggests that social policy reform should focus on the welfare attitudes of workers in the digital age, and the government should strengthen risk management of social security, and increase investment in human capital.

In recent years, the rise of the college entrance examination (gaokao) application fee-based counseling has brought a huge market potential, and the increasing number of participants has caused a social impact that can not be ig⁃nored.This paper probes into the contracting process of the College entrance ex⁃amination application consulting market and analyzes the purpose, nature, and method of the transaction from the perspective of embeddedness and relationship operation. It is found that the paid consulting market of gaokao is embedded in the institutional environment, and with the institutional changes, it has formed unique trading conditions and information advantages. Thus, it can provide economic optimal strategies. In the process of contracting, the conclusion of the transaction is highly dependent on the shaping of the relational position and the cultural concept by the two parties to the contract. By constructing the role of“teacher”,the consulting agencies blur the “principal-agent ”relation and obtain the legitimacy of institutional interpretation, in which trust maintenance and risk avoidance can be realized. However, the marketization strategy further weakens the agency of individuals in the application, leading to systematic preference change and structural misallocation of educational resources. It is of far-reaching significance to examine unintended consequences and mechanisms of gaokao with the market and provide an instructive understanding of the way free markets work in non-economic fields such as education.

 Based on the method of explanation building and the concept of translation from actor-network theory（ANT）, this study develops a perspective of “translating needs”and uses it to analyze how social workers successfully resolved a petition case spanning 25 years. In response to the systematic and dynamic nature, hierarchical and practical aspects, and the constructive features of action inherent in needs, social workers implement“translating needs”through three steps: clarifying needs, identifying needs, and affirming needs. Through this process, petitioners’ goals gradually shift from seeking economic compensation to rebuilding their lives.Ultimately, the petitioner abandons ineffective petitions through the“reconciliation”ceremony of a multi-party joint meeting.“Translating needs”emerges as a key technique in professional intervention for petition cases, requiring social workers to differentiate between appeals and needs and pay particular attention to the fact that the petition process itself may generate new needs for petitioners.“Translating needs”underscores the experimental action intervention, thereby constructing the expected outcomes of successful actions by all parties and reinforcing the translation. In conclusion, this paper expands the concept of“translating needs”as an extension of ANT’s translation, detailing its development in four aspects.

Current research on Granet’s kinship theory often attempts to place him within the lineage centered on Lévi-Strauss, emphasizing his contributions to the universal theory of kinship systems. However, Granet’s work is not confined to a
“structuralist”interpretation alone. His contributions to kinship theory originate from diverse sources, traditions, and dialogues. Firstly, Granet inherits and surpasses the research tradition established by Durkheim. He continues to investigate the origins of exogamy and the transition of organizations. Secondly，Granet’s examination of kinship should not be divorced from his overarching theoretical framework and research objectives, which involve exploring the transition from kinship organizations based on reciprocity to those based on prestige in feudal societies. Lastly, from a sociological perspective, Granet’s study of kinship is grounded in his reinterpretation and explication of the Book of Etiquette and Ceremonial. This interpretation challenges orthodox Confucian theories, particularly regarding father and son relations,
and entails a theoretical reconstruction of ancient Chinese kinship relations.

The transformation of digital technology has driven institutional transformation centered on risk governance, in which the European Union（Eu）is a pioneer in digital regulation innovation. Based on data including the“International Digital Ecology Index”, this article characterizes similarities of regulations in the field of digital risk governance among 28 European countries and explores the factors and mechanisms that affect similarities of regulations. The study found that security and development have become two aspects of digital risk governance, and the digital risk control regulations of 28 European countries still exhibit a complex pattern of “similarities but differences”under the constraints of the EU’s upper⁃level laws.Governance practices centered on technology application have driven the formation of digital risk control regulations, while the influence of normative factors is not significant.The accelerated development of digital technology has resulted in an “asynchronous dilemma”between regulation formation and governance practices. Which has led to the disenchantment of governance paradigms and the decline of normative power in the industrial era. The development of digital regulation in various countries is more manifested as a pragmatic trial⁃and⁃error practice.

The separation of officials and mandarins is an important personnel management system in ancient China. This system not only involves the division of labor between officials and mandarins in the administrative field but also affects the stratification of the two in the social and moral spheres. The existing functionalist sociology framework is insufficient to explain the uniqueness of the division of officials and mandarins. The study starts from the basic Confucian view that “emphasizes principles over tools (zhongqi qingdao)”and understands the political and moral exclusion of officials in traditional societies, explaining the increasing division between officials and mandarins. However, scholar-bureaucrats who believed that“a gentleman is not an implement (junzi buqi)”in their administrative routine highly relied on officials with professional skills and local knowledge. Hence, such separation of discourse and practice reflects the tension between Confucian moral concepts and rational administration. Based on this, the article proposes the proposition of“the Confucianization of bureaucracy”, emphasizing that Confucianism shaped the moral characteristics of the traditional bureaucracy that were different from the rational bureaucracy and ultimately influenced the direction of traditional state governance.

 This paper focuses on the labor processes of the workers on the food delivery and ridehailing platforms, and explores the formation mechanism of the platform labor time paradox. The findings reveal that platforms primarily extend workers’labor time through three mechanisms: performance evaluation, the unpaid and leisure-time utilization for management and training activities, and embedded incentive systems. On the one hand, platforms directly evaluate workers through platform rules and delegate monitoring and management tasks to third-party agencies. To meet these evaluations and regulatory requirements, platform workers are compelled to extend their online working hours and use their rest time for additional labor. On the other hand, platforms integrate incentive systems into the evaluation and reward-punishment frameworks, as well as order-dispatching algorithms, thereby stretching the flexible boundaries of workers’ ability to adjust their work schedules. Although the mechanisms for control⁃ ling labor time vary across different types of platforms, a commonality is that under platform control, workers cannot truly achieve flexibility during working hours or freedom after clocking out. Logging off does not equate to ending work.

Much of the research literature under the established labor process theory paradigm views platforms as upgraded production organizations. Based on a comparative study of two designated driving platforms, this paper finds that platforms enhance the governance efficacy of the labor process by manipulating the uncertainty of workers’market livelihoods, effectively resolving the uncertainty of labor output faced by capital. On the one hand, the platform tilts the orders based on the workers' daily performance, so that the workers continuously internalize the rules of the platform in the process of obtaining orders over and over again; on the other hand, the platform develops a more stringent management style by virtue of the monopoly of the market livelihood, and the workers are forced to give up the space of autonomy and submit to the management in order to obtain a more secured livelihood. This paper argues that we should return to Marx’s holistic account of the capital cycle and revise the existing analytical framework of labor process theory based on the characteristics of platforms, which straddle the stages of production and circulation and integrate different forms of capital.

In the past decade, China’s private economy has entered a peak period of intergenerational inheritance, with a large number of private entrepreneurs facing the challenge of passing on their businesses to their children. Drawing upon national survey data of Chinese Private Enterprise Survey in 2016, this article examines the impact of intergenerational inheritance on private enterprises’charitable donations. It finds that the inter-generational inheritance of private enterprises is a complex multi-factor transmission process, and the lack of social legitimacy of the second-generation heirs is crucial to the success of the inheritance. Through charitable donations, private entrepreneurs aim to improve the social image of their heirs and enhance the social recognition of inter-generational inheritance. Compared with their counterparts, larger private enterprises have more political ties, and are located in a more market-oriented environment, always having a greater demand for social legitimacy. Thus intergenerational transmission will have a greater impact on corporate philanthropy. The charitable effect of intergenerational inheritance not only deepens our understanding of the intergenerational inheritance of private enterprises, but also enriches the literature on corporate social responsibility in the Chinese context. Moreover, the findings of this article have some implications for the government to better stimulate private enterprises’charitable potential in the future.

This study investigates the impact of the basic pension security system on the subjective class identification of laborers from the institutionalism theory perspective. The study finds that (1)The basic pension security system has a positive promoting effect on the subjective class identification of laborers; (2)The basic pension security system has a“bottom promoting”effect on the subjective class identification of the laborers in a relatively disadvantaged position; (3)The subjective social stratification effect of the basic pension security system works through reducing laborers’sense of relative deprivation. This study reveals the subjective social stratification effect and latent function of the basic pension security system, and at the same time proves the explanatory power of the institutionalism theory on subjective social stratification.

This article aims to examine the influence of elite networks on the formation of subjective social status within the generational models. Drawing on data from the 2018 Chinese Private Enterprises Survey, the statistical results highlight
the gap between theoretical explanation and empirical evidence. This article employs agent-based modeling（ABM）. The ABM reveals that the disregard for elite connections during interactions significantly reduces the status recognition of private business owners and intensifies the polarization of their status identification, leading to a divergence between perceived status and objective economic position. Only when these owners maintain relatively high instrumental rationality does it have some mitigating effect. These findings highlight the interaction effect of social networks, contribute to the social network theory, and have important implications for understanding the subjective social status of private enterprises in contemporary China.

Due to the specificity of the time window for the formation of basketball skills and the institutional arrangement of the whole national system, professional basketball players usually enter sports training schools to acquire sports skills during their adolescence. The“triply-centralized”training system implies a high degree of overlap between living space and training space. Long-term, repetitive basketball training and high-intensity physical confrontation promotes the formation and enhancement of the basketball skills of professional basketball players, brings them into a stable and highly competitive level and formats basketball skills with personal style. The individual identity, group identity and national identity of professional basketball players are constructed during their formation of basketball skills. This process not only promotes the recovery of the basketball players’physical function,stimulates the individual and collective confrontation ability, but also significantly impacts the improvement of the individual basketball skills and the achievement of the team’s basketball performance, leading to the spiral enhancement of the skill formation and identity construction for professional basketball players.

The course of theoretical construction of Chinese modernization explored by Chinese sociologists represented by Zheng Hangsheng not only means a gradual process in which Chinese sociology is integrating itself into the global intellectual
community as well as making dialogues with it but also a process that Chinese sociology constructively reflects and criticizes Western theories, thus continuously strengthening theoretical consciousness and constructing an autonomous intellectual system of the sociology with Chinese characteristics. The fundamental approach of Zheng’s intellectual thoughts is based on two aspects: constructing of sociological theories with Chinese characteristics as his key concern and illuminating the modernization of China and the world through the lens of social transformation. Zheng’s intellectual thoughts crystallize the integration of Marxist dialectical materialism and historical materialism with the inclusive way of thinking about Chinese civilization. His crucial contributions to modernization theory mainly lie in the following aspects: breaking through the Western centrism myth of modernization theory, criticizing the premise assumptions and dualism thinking embedded within the Western modernization theory, replacing the teleological transition path with the transformation theory, and distilling specialized empirical theories into general ones.The diversities of modernization practices and social transformations in new emerging countries pose a fundamental challenge to Western modernization theory,which is also the crucial prerequisite for realizing the paradigm shift of modernization theory and promoting the theoretical construction of Chinese modernization.

Theoretical self-consciousness is the core academic pursuit of Dr. Zheng Hangsheng, which presents his eager expectation for Chinese sociology construction and serves as the purpose of Sociological Review of China. Theoretical self-consciousness requires not only in-depth reflection on Chinese and foreign sociological theories but also effective theoretical support for the empirical study. With the latest trends of rapidly and largely becoming networking and digitization of social lives, network representation has become an essential part of network practice and network experiences. We should theoretically analyze and review the network representation and achieve a precise and broad representation self-consciousness.

算法管理研究认为劳动过程会通过数字技术呈现出极强的程序化和标准化特征，由此制造了千千万万被“困在系统里”的不稳定劳工。然而，对网络货运平台的个案研究发现，货运劳动的特性在一定程度上影响了算法对劳动分解、量化、监视和评估的范围、程度与有效性，这导致难以标准化的劳动过程与寻求标准化的算法管理之间始终存有较大的张力，从而形塑出网络货运司机束缚与能动并存的平台工作体验。通过对这一类平台劳动秩序的实证分析，本研究挑战了当下过度理性化的算法管理研究预设，加深了对于算法技术和工作平台化问题的理解。

This paper explores the significance of“methodological discomfort”in social science research and its potential to foster academic innovation. It begins by analyzing the evolution of the concept of discomfort, arguing that it is not merely an emotional response to academic challenges but also serves as a methodology that facilitates research breakthroughs. By examining the conflicts between the humanities and sciences, the paper emphasizes the necessity of using discomfort to return to the“social”aspect of social sciences. It argues that researchers should confront the complexity of research realities, reintroduce value⁃related attitudes and adopt a macro⁃level perspective in their studies. Finally, drawing on the theory of “creative destruction”, the paper suggests that researchers should exploit discomfort by identifying anomalies, embracing technological innovation and exploring the possibilities of paradigm integration. This approach aims to push social science research beyond its“comfort zone”, thereby fostering dynamic growth and progress.

 Combined with the analysis of contract governance from sociology and economics, this paper constructs a theoretical framework of multiple contracts and uses it to interpret the institutional logic of capital going to the countryside. The research demonstrates that the stable development of returning countryside capital has gone through the exploratory stage of“adaptation-trans⁃formation.”In the initial stage of entering the countryside, the returning capital is faced with the problem of adaptability brought about by the instability of the internal and external environment, and there is an obvious tension between market contracts and multiple social contracts. Through the acquisition and integration of economic, political, and social capital, the returning countryside capital can“transform”the governance framework of composite contracts. That is, to expand the scope of influence of multiple social contracts and further introduce market-based contracts, to promote the matching and integration of the two types of contracts within a specific“space-time”range, and to clarify and simplify the vague and complex interaction between them and multiple subjects, to provide a guarantee for large-scale operational development.

The current discussion of “bullshit jobs” highlights the importance of research on“calling”.Calling aims to realize self-worth and altruism through work. From the perspective of structuration theory, based on a sample survey of Chinese urban residents, this paper explores how individuals change their calling through resource crafting and rule crafting under structural constraints. The results show that: On the one hand, there are significant differences in calling between occupational categories. Unskilled workers have a lower sense of calling, and the inherent work style of a occupation influences the sense of calling. People with low job income have a lower sense of calling. On the other hand, overeducated individuals have the characteristics of high efficiency and prosocial tendency, so they are more likely to actively craft jobs so as to enhance the sense of calling, The positive social impact of high-calling groups also helps to enhance the sense of calling of others. This article concludes that even if they encounter meaningless mundane work, they can still deeply cultivate their occupation to improve their chances, actively craft their jobs, and enhance their calling.

As a pioneer in the reconstruction of sociology in post-reform China,Zheng Hangsheng’s early studies in philosophy laid a dialectical and rational cognitive foundation for his later academic development. After the reform and opening-up, he closely integrated his academic research interests with the realities of society, transitioning from earlier philosophical research to sociology, which was being revived and rebuilt. From a historical and dialectical perspective, Zheng Hangsheng proposed two forms of sociological knowledge and constructed the representative theories of social operation and social transformation. At the same time, when reflecting on the relationship between the individual and society in the context of Western and Chinese modernities, he successively proposed locally distinctive theories of mutual construction and the theory of practical structure. Most importantly, in his later years, Zheng Hangsheng also devoted himself to planning the development of Chinese sociology as a discipline. He not only called on the academic community to cultivate theoretical self-awareness but also emphasized the importance of Chinese sociology’s academic discourse, aiming to provide a clear development path for Chinese sociology to step onto the world stage. Zheng Hangsheng’s academic journey can be seen as a dynamic process of continual creation, guided by his evolving methodological principles of knowledge production.

 The basic research topic of rural revitalization is how the external intervention force, through social mobilization, generates governance energy in rural society and gradually converges into a rural governance community. This article proposes an analytical framework of“differential mobilization”,which intends to characterize the theoretical and practical logic of the transformation of state intervention forces from external to internal and the reproduction of rural endogenous forces from internal to external in China’s social mobilization. Its core meaning is that external intervention forces promote the transformation of governance logic from one based on the generation of rural social community emotion by capable individuals to one by institutions in local contexts. The former is the local embedding by external intervention forces, which injects mobilization will into key persons and pushes outward through critical mass and gradually extends to radiating groups and then expanding groups, that is, from emotion, interest, reason to meaning (primary stage). The latter is the re-engineering of rural social community emotion by external intervention forces in the construction of institutional contexts, relying on mechanisms of interest expression and incentives, meaning perception, and emotional reproduction, that is, from reason, interest, emotion to meaning (advanced stage), to activate the endogenous driving force of rural social development.

This study, based on archival materials, takes a close look at the case of the“subdistrict-level joint management team”in Shanghai during the 1960s. It elaborates on the significant role of subdistrict authorities in mobilizing production and daily management, as well as on the enduring tension between tiao and kuai.The research demonstrates that the initial objective of establishing subdistrict-level joint management teams in Shanghai was to incorporate social groups beyond the scope of the planned system into the formal organizational structure. This was done to align the“sociality”of the grassroots with the political rationality of the country. Nevertheless, in practice, subdistrict-level joint management teams encountered constraints due to the influence of tiao-kuai relationships in the administrative context. This led to a divergence between the desired outcomes of economic production and the actual outcomes of social management functions.The heterogeneous incentive structure of various subjects has impeded the efficacy of subdistrict-level joint management teams in organizing and managing non-institutionalized social groups. The study presents the intricate nuances of urban governance in a planned economy. To gain insight into the evolving“state-society”dynamic post-1949, it is essential to examine the intricate interplay between formal hierarchical institutions and social groups. Additionally, it is crucial to recognize how seemingly marginalized groups have constrained and restructured formal institutions and power.

The study examines local governments’cultural competition, focusing on strategies and motivation to capture, integrate, and maintain attention. It finds that through“government-enterprise alliances”for external packaging and “government-citizen collaboration”for internal management, local governments continuously capture attention from higher authorities and society. This attention is coordinated and redistributed to sustain a competitive cultural edge. The dual attention management of the local governments yields multiple benefits, forming a “cultural creation-attention acquisition-multiple benefits”model. This study enhances the understanding of local government cultural competition and broadens the scope of tournament theory.

Social order and social progress are the ultimate pursuits of sociology, as well as the value concern within the theory of practical structure. In modernization and globalization, how to understand the particularity and complexity of contemporary Chinese social practice has become a significant issue. The theory of practical structure proposed by Zheng Hangsheng and his academic team is precisely based on the process of globalization and localization, and it is a new perspective to understand the operation and development of contemporary society through the dual torsion of the long-wave process of modernity and the special pulsation of China’s social transformation. As a new development of sociology with Chinese characteristcs, the theory of practical structure systematically discusses the trends, characteristics, and dynamic changes of social transformation and social relations resulting from current changes in social structure through theoretical connotation, realistic foundation, and value concern. The analysis provides a potential research paradigm for understanding the driving force of the social structural transformation.

Neo-institutionalists argue that the extent to which nation-states are integrated into the‘world society’through institutional diffusion plays a crucial role in explaining cross-national variation in scientific achievements. However, existing studies fail to distinguish between scientific institutional isomorphism and actual scientific outcomes. This conflation has hindered the development of theoretical frameworks, overlooking factors that might confound or moderate the impact of institutional diffusion on actual scientific progress. This paper introduces state capacity as a key variable to refine the existing explanatory models. Using cross-national data, the study applies a mixed-effects model for empirical analysis. The findings suggest that state capacity acts as a confounding variable, leading to an overestimation of the effect of institutional diffusion when it is not properly ac⁃ counted for. The explanatory power of state capacity far exceeds that of institutional diffusion. While stronger state capacity may enhance the positive effects of integration into the world society, this interaction effect does not reach statistical significance. This study revisits prior research and provides a fresh perspective on the neo-institutional framework for scientific progress. It also addresses the shortage of macro-level quantitative cross-national studies in recent literature of neo-in⁃ stitutionalism and the sociology of science.