Great Expectations? Discourse, Control, and Occupational Identity in Chinese Architectural Work

• In Event: Labor and Labor Movements Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Roundtable 4: Devotion, Discipline, and Inequality in Contemporary Labor Regimes

Abstract

Research on creative labor commonly holds that workers who more deeply internalize occupational discourse are better equipped to sustain professional identity under conditions of precarity. This proposition rests on an underexamined premise: that professional discourse and actual creative control tend to co-occur. This paper tests that premise through a study of China's architectural design sector. Chinese architects share broadly similar professional training across organizational settings, yet design authority is distributed very unequally between state-owned design institutes and boutique private firms. Drawing on fifty semi-structured interviews, this paper finds that occupational identity crisis is concentrated not among those with the weakest or most durably validated by practice, but among design institute architects who have long been immersed in such discourse while lacking meaningful authority over design outcomes. The paper argues that the stability of occupational meaning depends not on discourse alone, but on a continuous process of practice validation — the ongoing capacity to participate in design decisions, embed professional judgment in real projects, and attribute built outcomes to one's own authorship. When design control is structurally absent, occupational discourse becomes progressively decoupled from lived work experience, and identity stability proves highly vulnerable to external shocks. China's design institute system, which institutionally separates discourse from control, reveals the conditions under which the standard creative labor proposition fails to hold.

Author

• Xinyu Huang, Zhejiang University