Archive for March 2023

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[Commlist] New Book: The Labor of Reinvention

Tue Mar 28 09:37:46 GMT 2023



lin zhang is delighted to announce the publication of /The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the Chinese New Digital Economy <http://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-labor-of-reinvention/9780231551298> /(Columbia University Press, 2023). Please consider reading the book if you are interested in digital labor, entrepreneurship, innovation, non-Western tech and science, China & Asia.

BOOK DESCRIPTION

From start-up founders in the Chinese equivalent of Silicon Valley to rural villages experiencing an e-commerce boom to middle-class women reselling luxury goods, the rise of internet-based entrepreneurship has affected every part of China. For many, reinventing oneself as an entrepreneur has appeared to be an appealing way to adapt to a changing economy and society. Yet in practice, digital entrepreneurship has also reinforced traditional Chinese ideas about state power, labor, gender, and identity.

Lin Zhang explores how the everyday labor of entrepreneurial reinvention is remaking China amid changing geopolitical currents. She tells the stories of people from diverse class, gender, and age backgrounds across rural, urban, and transnational settings in rich detail, providing a multifaceted and ground-level view of the twenty-first-century Chinese economy. Zhang explores the surge in digital entrepreneurialism against the backdrop of global financial crises, the U.S.-China trade war, and the COVID-19 pandemic. She argues that the rise of internet-based industries and practices has simultaneously empowered and exploited digital entrepreneurs and laborers. Despite embracing high-tech innovation, state-led entrepreneurialization does not represent a radical break with the past. It has provided a means for implementing developmental goals while retaining the importance of the traditional family and generating new inequalities.

Shedding new light on global capitalism and the digital economy by centering a non-Western perspective, /The Labor of Reinvention/ vividly conveys how the contradictions of entrepreneurialism have played out in China.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface: The Cult of Entrepreneurialism
1. The Labor of Entrepreneurial Reinvention
Part I. City in Transition
2. Navigating the Investor State: Elite and Grassroots Entrepreneurs in Zhongguancun
3. From Science Park to Coworking: ZGC’s Contested Spaces of Innovation
Part II. Back to the Countryside
4. The Platformization of Family Production: Reinventing Rural Familism and Governance for the E-Commerce Era 5. Moving Beyond /Shanzhai/? The Contradictions of Entrepreneurial Reinvention in Rural China
Part III. Transnational Encounters
6. Between Individualization and Retraditionalization: Reinventing Self and Work Through Platform-Based /Daigou/
Epilogue: Toward a China Paradigm
Notes
Index
Some initial reviews:
_Blurb:_
http://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-labor-of-reinvention/9780231551298 <http://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-labor-of-reinvention/9780231551298>


_China-Britain Business Focus:_
https://focus.cbbc.org/how-the-digital-economy-transformed-entrepreneurship-in-china/#.ZCH3gezML0o <https://focus.cbbc.org/how-the-digital-economy-transformed-entrepreneurship-in-china/#.ZCH3gezML0o>
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_MIT Technology Review:_
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/01/1067505/china-tech-entrepreneur-book-zhang/ <https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/01/1067505/china-tech-entrepreneur-book-zhang/>


Dr. Lin Zhang's research centers on critical innovation studies, information/platform capitalism, and intersectionality, focusing on China and ethnic Asian people in a global, comparative context and in spaces of transnational encounters. A communication scholar by training, her interdisciplinary research engages Asian/Asian American Studies, Science and Technology Studies (STS), Economic Geography, and Anthropology. By conceptualizing technologies in terms of global capitalism, she emphasizes the mutual imbrication of economy, culture, and politics in digital technologies, and also highlights the historical continuities and ruptures of information capitalism as an uneven world system.

More information about the author
https://linzhangweb.org/ <https://linzhangweb.org/>



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