Job Placements and Job Shifts in China

The Effects of Education, Family Background and Gender

The book investigates the impact of the market-oriented economic reform in China on a unique aspect of the labor market outcomes — individuals' access to different employment sectors, that is, the state and collective sector, the private sector, and the sector of family contract farming in the 1990s. Using the longitudinal data of China Health and Nutrition Survey, the author finds that the access to different employment sectors is not equally distributed among Chinese workers during the market transition. And the hierarchy of employment sectors is reproduced through the procedure that assorts individual workers to different employment sectors. In addition to achieved characteristics such as human capital, ascribed characteristics such as family background and gender are important factors in understanding the procedure of social stratification in the reform era. The book will be of value to social scientists interested in the market transition of socialist societies in general and the social transformation of contemporary China in particular.

Contents:

• Introduction
• The Structure of Employment Sectors in China
• Literature Review and Research Hypotheses
• Data and Methods
• Where to Start? Job Placement Across Employment Sectors Among Young Workers
• To Change or Not to Change? Job Shifts Across Employment Sectors Among Older Workers
• Conclusion and Discussion

Readership: Graduates, academics and professionals who are interested in Chinese economic reform, social stratification and mobility, social transformation, and labor market.
Key Features:

• Offers a study of the market transition in China critical in the 1990s
• Discloses the mechanisms of social stratification through detailed analysis of the factors contributing to the patterns of job placement and job shift across employment sectors
• Provides one of the few large-scale empirical work on this topic