Governing Market Common Sense: Affect and Time among China’s Laid-Off Workers

• In Event: Political Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Political Institutions (Table 20)

Abstract

This paper asks how and why working-class groups harmed by neoliberal reform come to naturalize market reorganization. I argue that neoliberal governmentality’s apparent naturalness is neither spontaneous nor class neutral, but a procedural achievement produced through the state’s noncoercive strategies of governance. Existing scholarship has illuminated labor protests and state repression, but says less about the more common outcomes of silence, acceptance, and everyday accommodation among most affected workers. I bridge a Foucauldian lens on governmentality with a Gramscian account of hegemony, consent, and class politics to show how acceptance of market dependency is actively assembled rather than simply assumed. Drawing on oral history interviews with laid-off state-owned enterprise workers, managers, union staff, and local bureaucrats in China’s northeastern rust belt, I identify two linked affective logics, affective activation and affective infrastructure, through which market dependency becomes livable and eventually taken for granted. Affective activation refers to an early, episodic repertoire of mobilizational meetings, cadre affective work, and role-model campaigns that targeted workers’ feelings, producing short-term acquiescence and fragile, forward-looking hope under uncertainty. Affective infrastructure names the later, routinized assemblage of policies such as leave without pay, staggered layoffs, and stopgap support programs that reorganized the temporal and material conditions through which workers interpreted their situation, stabilizing expectations, narrowing perceived alternatives, and projecting market rationalities forward in time. Together, these concepts show why episodic affective alignment can dampen immediate contention but cannot on its own produce durable conviction. The paper concludes that the state’s shift from provisional emotional tactics to a durable institutional toolkit secures not wholehearted endorsement of reform, but conditional and often ambivalent accommodation by disciplining anticipation and normalizing survival-oriented market dependence within constrained horizons of choice.

Author

• Zhehang Zhang, University of California-Berkeley