Marius Meinhof

This article is a summary of the book Shopping in China, by Marius Meinhof, which won the dissertation award of the German Association for Sociology in 2018. It highlights three of the key arguments of the book: firstly, that consumerist subjectivation occurs in everyday practices of shopping which utilize the non-verbal practices of gazing at and touching oneself as well as the objects consumed. This can and should therefore be analyzed using videographic approaches. Secondly, in China, these everyday practices of subjectivation do not add up to a whole dispositive; rather, they build a fragmented assemblage of microdispositives which are diverse in a way not considered in conventional concepts of “pluralization,” therefore requiring new concepts to describe them. Thirdly, discourses produced by state institutions as well as by people in interviews do not recognize these multiplicities, rather purifying them into clear-cut types of “modern” and “backward” practices based on a normative discourse of “colonial temporality” – a discourse of a backward China in need of modernization – an inheritance from the colonial era in China.

This article discusses debates found on Chinese university discussion boards, and considers why narratives about ‘modernisation’ and Chinese ‘deficiency’ and ‘backwardness’ constitute such powerful discourses at the grassroots level in China. This is notable because these discourses adapt a hierarchy of modernity from colonial discourses and they refer to colonial experiences in order to prove that a backward China has to change urgently. The article argues that discourses about modernisation and Chinese deficiency can become immensely pervasive because they are reproduced by authors on the internet in their attempts to produce a counter-discourse against either Western or Chinese institutional discourses. These counter-discourses are, however, caught within a dual power structure: on the one hand, the dominance of Chinese state discourse within China itself, and, on the other hand, the global dominance of Western discourses, often set in opposition to the Chinese government. In order to articulate a critique of either of these discourses authors appropriate concepts from the oppositional institutional discourse. Yet both of these seemingly ‘contradictory’ institutional discourses reproduce a hierarchy of modernity in which China is portrayed as backwards and therefore inferior. Thus while apparent counter-discourses are trapped between seemingly alternative positions they nevertheless both reproduce the same discourse of modernity and backwardness.

If possible, please download the text from the journal website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13688790.2018.1507620

This article (in German) analyzes the discourse of Chinese social scientists promoting pluralization as an instrument for the modernization of economy and population. It deals with Chinese theories of consumer pluralization and with new classifications for population groups in Chinese sociology.

Der Beitrag stellt Deleuzes Begriff des Mikrodispositives als Konzept vor, das eth-nomethodologische Videoanalyse mit der Analyse von Subjektivationsprozessen, die durch Dispositive gerahmt werden, verbinden kann. Mikrodispositive stehen nicht in Konflikt mit den Annahmen des methodologischen Situationalismus und erlauben es, die empirische Frage nach dem situierten Hervorbringen von Dispositiven zu stellen. Auf diese Weise soll einerseits die theoretische Voreingenommenheit der Dispositiv-analyse überwunden werden, andererseits die Möglichkeit einer kritischen Thematisie-rung der Gesellschaft, die auf Videoanalyse basiert, eröffnet werden.

This essay introduces the concept of colonial temporality to make sense of Chinese modernization discourses. Although institutional discourses on modernization and development in China are largely nationalist and tightly entangled with state authority, they nevertheless draw on conceptions of temporality that are colonial in character and origin. I will introduce three features of this temporality that make it colonial and highly ambivalent for the Chinese state: Firstly, it was created by colonial encounters in history in which it was used and co-produced by various groups that used it for various power projects. Secondly, it provides China with a »story« of future progress by placing it in the middle of history. And thirdly, it revolves around discourses of deficiency that compel Chinese institutional discourses to constantly compare China to the West. In consequence, the »quest« for a Chinese modernity also includes a search for narratives of a better future that can imagine improvement but are not based on colonial temporality. Paying more attention to this problem would permit scholars to better understand the positions of the Chinese state and of Chinese intellectuals within modernization discourses, and to better conceptualize the historic and transnational character of these discourses.

This paper draws on an in-depth case study of narrative identity work to explore heuristically the role of host country nationals in the reproduction of orientalist discourses in multinational corporations (MNCs). Based on this analysis, it presents an identity strategy termed the other Chinese. The other Chinese claims to be in-between the West, that is constructed as superior modern and rational, and China, that is constructed as backwards and chaotic. This in-betweenness allows the other Chinese to take the role of a mediator between locals and expatriates, and at the same time claim superiority towards normal Chinese. Thus, this identity construction is a creative act of hybridization and localization, but it is not subversive to existing power structures in the MNCs. However, as we show, the construction of the other Chinese is not inextricably bound to the field of the MNCs, but is based on a hybrid and creative entanglement of various sources such as class positions and public discourse in China, in which the MNCs only occupy an insignificant role. It is, therefore, to be understood as an aspect of identity construction in China relevant for MNC identity, rather than an aspect of the transnational field of the MNCs.

The article puts forward the ethnomethodological concept of procedural consequentiality as a proposed methodology for the study of objects. Instead of determining a universal relationship between discourses, practices and objects through a logically deduced social
theory, this concept asks what effects discourses, practices or objects have on the course of observable, situated events. This takes into account the possibility that seemingly identical objects can give rise to very different consequences in different situations, or even that their material properties can be rendered completely irrelevant. In order to elucidate this approach, the article sketches out the procedural consequentiality of imitation products in three different situations in China. What purports to be the ‘same’ object has a completely different relevance in the different situations. Therefore, instead of developing an overarching phenomenology of imitation, the more productive approach appears to be a study of the situation-specific procedural consequentiality of things. (Paper in german language).

This are content and introduction of my book "Shopping in China", as well as a subchapter that will give an impression of the general style of argumentation. The book employs video data in order to elaborate how different shopping environments persuade young consumers in China to enact themselves as modern consumer subjects. It is written in german and it attempts to connect ethnomethodological videography to recent theoretical debates on poststructuralist sociology in germany.

[Informal summary in english]:

This book is a case study on a non-profit, network-shaped organization operating in a country foreign to its management staff. Drawing its data from interviews with staff members of the organization, the book uses Luhmans system theory approach to ask, how this organization can accomplish the following three operations: (1) draw distinctions between organization and environment, (2) selectively construct knowledge about certain aspects of it's environment and (3) successfully act upon this knowledge. [Book is written in german language]