| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Wednesday, February 3, 2010 | 2:00PM - 4:00PM | External Event, Sociology Department, room 240 725 Spadina Road |
How do we understand the increasing significance of guanxi (social connections) in China’s transitional economy? Sociologist Yanjie Bian presents a theoretical model in which the fate of guanxi is considered as a function of institutional uncertainty and market competition. His Chinese data show that social networking is increasingly active when labor market competition increases, personal connections become extremely important when entrepreneurs start up their business or when they try to minimize negative consequences of economic crisis, and relational dependence decreases when business organizations gain a stable market position.
Yanjie Bian is Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota, and the Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Science and the Director
of the Institute for Empirical Social Science Research, Xi’an Jiaotong University. He formerly taught at the Hong Kong University of Science and
Technology, where he was the Funding Director of the Survey Research Center, Chair Professor, and Head of the Division of Social Science. An
author of several books and numerous articles on social stratification and social networks, Dr. Bian is an internationally recognized authority on the sociology of China. He is currently leading a large research project to examine the changing roles of social networks in employment processes in urban China. Dr. Bian is a past president of the North American Chinese Sociologists Association (2002-2003), a co-PI of the Chinese General Social Survey (since 2003), and chair of the Section for Asia and Asian America of the American Sociological Association.
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