Work and Authority in Chinese Industry: State Socialism and the Institutional Culture of Dependency.

Abstract

Contemporary studies of work organizations have been preoccupied with the distribution of authority among functional roles, and have therefore emphasized formal structures of administration and participation in the means of administration by people occupying different positions. But authority is not merely a social attribute which is distributed among positional roles; it is also a socially structured phenomenon which varies qualitatively across types of work organizations and through historical time. The social basis of compliance with authority in organizations--specifically, how compliance grows out of patterns of stratification and mobility in the larger social structure--is a dimension of authority which must be understood before its distribution among roles can be accurately interpreted. This is a message implicit in the work of Weber, Etzioni, and Stinchcombe, but which has exerted relatively little influence on the study of organizations. This is a study of the social basis of compliance in authority systems organized in China's primary sector of large, state-owned industrial enterprises. Variation in the degree of employee dependency on the organization for the satisfaction of needs, and superiors' ability to manipulate the extent to which these needs will be satisfied for individuals, is the central determinant of qualitative differences in organized authority systems. Employees in China's large socialist enterprises are unusually dependent on them for the satisfaction of a broad array of social needs, and exceedingly low rates of inter-firm labor mobility attach employees to their enterprises almost permanently. Within enterprises, reward systems are organized informally as patronage systems which make employees highly dependent on their superiors, and these reward systems are used both to cement the Party's political power and to maintain work discipline. Mass mobilization is a style of leadership predicated on such patterns of organized dependency, and continual mass participation in meetings is a ritual where the domination of employees is reinforced, not where employee dependency on superiors is alleviated. As a result, radical egalitarian reforms of the Cultural Revolution era altered reward systems and weakened the social basis of compliance and discipline, but since they simply intensified the degree of mobilization and participation, they did not redistribute authority to ordinary employees.