Double Rejections of the State and Market: Chinese State-owned Publishing Houses in Institutional Transition

• In Event: 355 - Section on Economic Sociology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 10. State and Markets in China

Abstract

Publishing houses in China have shaken off the status of cultural institutions and transformed into state-owned enterprises between 2003 and 2010. This plausibly nominal organizational change renewed intervention from the state and continued the old ban on private publishing. Yet, shifting to the status of state-owned enterprises further complexed the organizational goals of state-owned publishing houses. A publishing house must achieve political, economic, and regulatory goals at the same time. Blurred boundaries not only exist between state-owned and private sectors, but also between the state and the state-owned publishing houses. Based on interviews with 47 editors and managers from 9 state-owned publishing houses on different positions in the publishing field, this study adopted the analytical framework of strategic action fields (Fligstein and McAdams 2011) and found that: 1) contrary to previous studies on paths of transitional economy, blurred boundaries became the deepest crisis for state-owned publishing houses, which had to perform double rejections of the state and market (namely the ‘illegal’ private publishing) to maintain their very possibility; 2) further polarization of decentralized state-owned publishing houses offered field dynamics to accommodate the incompatible state and private sector, where lacking of formal institutions to recognize private publishing is seen as the state-owned sector’s disadvantage; and 3) instead of local government’s administrative capacity, cultural capital has become the most crucial resources for state-owned publishing houses to battle in this field of cultural production.

Author

• Dan Xu, State University of New York-Albany