Building on research that analyzes how social relations and networks shape the Chinese market, this article asks a less-studied question: How is the market changing guanxi? The authors trace the transformation of guanxi from communal, kin-based ties to a cultural metaphor with which diverse individuals build flexible social relationships in late-socialist China. As a “generalized particularism,” this cultural metaphor provides something analogous to the culture of civility in Western societies. The authors discuss the political potential of guanxi in terms of (...) its dual tendency toward the “publicization” and “privatization” of power. The development of guanxi civility suggests the diverse cultural origins of civility and serves as a reminder of the particularistic roots in the universalistic assumption of Western civility. (shrink)

Scholars have yet to understand the gendered performance of aesthetic and emotional labor that maintains routine global power asymmetries. An ethnographic case study of service labor in a global luxury hotel in Beijing, China, reveals how women workers learn to span cultural divides as gendered capacities. These workers must not only “look good and sound right,” they must look familiar and sound understandable. Adopting the term “bridgework,” the research tracks the institutionalization of labor requiring acquisition of the body and the (...) feeling rules of western customers, which reflect the global cultural hegemony of the United States. Managers conceive of these rules as universal, natural feminine orientations, even as they systematically deconstruct and teach them to women workers. Workers bear responsibility for putting rules that bridge divides into practice. When misunderstandings occur, managers attribute them to a failure of the worker’s femininity, rather than the customer’s lack of facility with local practice. Bridgework creates cosmopolitan capital, a form of status accruing to a white, western male business class through ease of movement and preservation of a sense of competence while traveling across borders. (shrink)