Working hours and pay: Its discourse and justification

Dong, Mengyi (2025) Working hours and pay: Its discourse and justification. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

The Chinese society has experienced great changes after the establishment of PRC in 1949, and especially after the economic reform in 1978. Its achievement has been an amazing success and quite unanticipated in many respects. However, inequality problems, such as the income gap between the rich and poor, rural and urban areas, eastern and western regions, are also coming up and becoming significant in the society.

Most sociological analysis of the different ways of justification, in the meanwhile, is rooted in the western values, and needs to be developed into the Chinese context.

Based on newspaper articles collected from seven Chinese newspapers over 12 years, the justification framework was studied in a Chinese context. The analysis of justification of Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) was explored through the dispute of working hours and pay in China. In this study, it was found that justifications in the Chinese society was influenced by its own culture and socialist attributes, and variations are recognised in the Chinese mode of justification compared with the Boltanski and Thévenot original work. A new logic of justification also emerged from the unique Chinese context. In the dispute, it also found that the justifications are changing over the years, and the preference of the logics varies between different actors. Moreover, this study also found a dialectical relationship between the discourse and practice of justification in the Chinese society.

The study contributes to the work of Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) by expanding it to a new context, and by identifying a new logic of justification of significance in the Chinese context.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Subjects: H Social Sciences > HF Commerce > HF5601 Accounting
• Colleges/Schools: College of Social Sciences > Adam Smith Business School > Accounting and Finance
• Supervisor's Name: McKernan, Professor John, Favotto, Dr. Alvise and Li, Dr. Yingru
• Date of Award: 2025
• Depositing User: Theses Team
• Unique ID: glathesis:2025-84877
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 10 Feb 2025 09:58
• Last Modified: 10 Feb 2025 09:59
• Thesis DOI: 10.5525/gla.thesis.84877
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/84877